Culture — The Thing That Matters Most, Yet Is Hardest to Shift

Ask most leadership teams to describe their organisational culture, and you’ll hear a familiar set of words:

Collaborative. High-performing. Innovative. Values-driven.

These descriptions are rarely wrong, but they often describe aspiration rather than reality.

If only creating culture were as simple as describing it in a strategy document, presenting it at a town hall, or displaying it on posters.

As we all know, your real culture is what people experience and are exposed to every day. It is what is intentionally, or often unintentionally, shaped by leader behaviours, what you reward, the decisions you make, and so much more.

The Gap Between Stated Culture and Real Culture

One of the best starting points to really shape culture is not simply to define the destination – the culture you need to deliver your strategy and help your workforce thrive.

And it isn’t simply to measure and analyse your current, real culture.

The starting point is understanding the gap between the 2 and then planning to reduce this gap with a series of planned changes and experiments.

For example, an organisation may say it values collaboration, but rewards individual performance over team outcomes, promotes leaders who deliver results at the expense of others, or tolerates siloed decision-making.

Over time, people know what really matters most.

They follow the signals.

And those signals are shaped by what gets rewarded, ignored, and tolerated.

What Organisational Psychology Tells Us About Culture

From an organisational psychology perspective, culture is not a “soft” concept. It is a system of shared norms and reinforced behaviours.

Edgar Schein, one of the most influential thinkers in this field, described culture as:

“A pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems.”

More contemporary research reinforces this idea; culture is shaped in many ways such as leadership behaviour, organisational systems, and team norms.

Leaders play a substantial role in shaping culture, some research indicating up to 70% of the impact on culture is the behaviours and actions of leaders. What they prioritise, model, and even don’t talk about sends powerful, often unintended signals. And even the greatest leaders, particularly when acting under pressure, shape culture in unintended ways.

Coaching conversations we have with senior leaders reinforce this insight when we explore the micro behaviours – ways of responding, fixing, solving, acting – that shape the norms and behaviours around them.

At the same time, the tools ápplied by leaders such as systems for performance management, reward, or decision-making processes continue to impact ‘the way things are done around here.

Whilst this may feel like an overwhelming responsibility, in fact heightened awareness can be a powerful first step to more intentional, positive shaping of culture.

Why Culture Change Efforts Often Stall

Many organisations invest significant time and energy into culture initiatives; refreshing values, launching leadership frameworks, or running engagement programs.

Yet six or twelve months later, the reflection is often the same:

“We’ve done a lot… but not much has really changed.”

This is typically not a failure of intent. There can be many hidden causes but what we often find is effort has been on tackling what appears to be the blocker or opportunity but missing the mark.

Many years ago a client came to use with exactly that problem. Survey data had kept suggesting that a negative influence on their culture was their induction processes. They had tried everything but the same pattern was there year after year.

We suggested a narrative process to really understand what was shaping their culture. The stories we gathered did confirm it was the experience of new hires. But what emerged was their very family like culture made it very hard for new team members. They described feeling lonely and on the outer for their first few months.

Some changes to how break rooms were set up, introducing welcome buddies and simply talking about it had an immediate and positive impact.

The lesson in this?

Take the time to really understand what is shaping your culture and don’t assume the data is the whole picture.

Where Measurement Creates Clarity

So we start to understand that one of the most common barriers to meaningful culture change is a lack of visibility. The inability to truly understand what is shaping your culture whether you like it or not.

In the absence of robust data, organisations tend to rely on incomplete signals; focus groups, individual leader perceptions, or engagement scores that measure the impact of culture not the factors that impact culture. While these inputs can be useful, they rarely provide a coherent picture of culture as it is truly experienced.

This is where measurement becomes critical, not just as a diagnostic tool, but as a mechanism for sensemaking. Capturing the right data through surveys and story capture gives rich and motivating insight. And then from insight to well designed action for positive change.

At Steople, we work with organisations to make culture visible and to support leaders connect with and drive positive change.

Well designed tools provide a clear and compelling view of not just your current culture but the many, often unexpected, factors that are shaping it most. Who knows what they are in your organisation – leadership behaviour, lack of consistency, systems frustrations or perhaps mis-alignment to strategy.

Anecdote Circles
Human Synergistics OCI Assessment
Steople Leading for Performance & Wellbeing Survey™
Steople High Performance Teams Survey™

But data alone is not enough.

The real value emerges through facilitated sensemaking, helping leadership teams step back, interpret patterns, challenge assumptions, and connect the data to their lived organisational context. This process enables leaders to move beyond surface-level insights and develop a shared understanding of what is actually driving behaviour across the system.

From here, clarity begins to emerge.

Leaders are able to see not only what is working, but where behavioural gaps exist and, importantly, what is currently being reinforced, often unintentionally. And when you have folded real uneditted stories using narrative techniques into this mix – leaders feel deeply engaged and committed to positive change.

In this way, measurement becomes more than reporting.

It becomes a catalyst for alignment, insight, and deliberate action.

A Practical Reflection for Leaders

If culture is shaped in intentional and unintentional ways, a useful question for any leadership team is:

“In what ways are we positively shaping our culture to deliver our strategy and live our values? And if we are really honest with ourselves what behaviours are we modelling, rewarding, tolerating, or unintentionally encouraging that are taking us off track?”

Because whether intentional or not those behaviours are creating your culture.

Organisational culture is complex. That’s what makes it frustrating, difficult to define and often hard to shape.

But It changes when leaders lean in and work together to consistently focus on the things that matter most. When they reinforce different behaviours, align systems to support them, and sustain that focus over time.

If you are looking to move beyond describing culture to actively shaping it, Steople can help.

We work with organisations to measure culture, identify behavioural levers, and design practical, evidence-based pathways to sustainable culture change.