This article is by Chris Paton – CEO of Quirk Solutions (full bio at the end of the article).
The biggest barrier to your organisation’s performance may be hiding in plain sight.
It isn’t your strategy. It isn’t your technology. It may not even be your people. More often than many leaders realise, it is the culture their organisation has quietly created over time. That might seem like an overstatement. After all, culture has become one of the most discussed topics in modern leadership. Organisations invest heavily in defining values, refreshing behaviours and creating the environment they want people to experience.
Leadership teams debate purpose, commission engagement surveys and launch initiatives designed to strengthen culture, yet many continue to wrestle with exactly the same frustrations. Decisions bottleneck at the top, collaboration becomes harder than it should be, innovation slows as uncertainty increases and leaders are left wondering why capable people seem reluctant to exercise judgement without first seeking permission.
The instinctive response is often to question capability. Do people have the confidence? Have they been given enough training? Are they simply avoiding accountability? Those questions matter, but they often distract from a far more important one.
What has the organisation unintentionally taught people about how work really gets done?
That question sits at the heart of culture, and it is where many organisations begin to discover an uncomfortable reality.
People learn remarkably little about culture from values statements. They learn it from experience. One of the biggest misconceptions in leadership is that culture is created through communication. It isn’t. Communication can explain intent, but it cannot compete with what people consistently observe every day.
Employees pay far more attention to what leaders tolerate than they do to what leaders communicate. They notice who gets promoted, whose behaviour is excused because they deliver results and whether difficult conversations are genuinely welcomed or quietly discouraged. They observe whether senior leaders really empower people to make decisions or whether every significant issue eventually finds its way back to the executive team.
Over time, those observations become far more influential than any values framework ever could. People stop responding to what leaders say and begin responding to what leaders consistently do. This is why organisations can sincerely believe they have created one culture whilst their employees describe something entirely different. Many organisations spend months refining their values. Far fewer invest the same energy examining the systems that either reinforce or undermine those values. An organisation may describe itself as collaborative whilst rewarding individual performance above collective success.
It may encourage innovation whilst requiring multiple layers of approval before decisions can be made. It may speak passionately about psychological safety whilst quietly remembering mistakes long after the learning has taken place. Most of these contradictions evolve gradually, one process, one decision and one leadership habit at a time, until they become accepted as simply “the way things are done around here.”
Organisations get the culture their systems are creating
Seen through that lens, perhaps the most uncomfortable truth for any CEO is that organisations often get exactly the culture their systems are creating. That isn’t to suggest leaders deliberately create bureaucracy, dependency or risk aversion. Quite the opposite. Most genuinely want empowered teams, confident decision-makers and people who feel trusted to exercise judgement, but every process, every governance structure, every incentive and every leadership behaviour quietly teaches people what success really looks like. Eventually those repeated experiences become the culture itself.
This is also why we should be cautious about talking as though organisations have a single culture. In reality, most organisations contain dozens of micro-cultures. Walk through any large organisation and you will find teams with completely different experiences despite working under the same strategy, the same values and the same executive leadership. One team will challenge ideas confidently, collaborate naturally and make decisions quickly because trust has become embedded in everyday interactions. Another may avoid difficult conversations, escalate relatively minor decisions and become increasingly dependent on hierarchy because that is what experience has taught them is safest.
The logo is the same.
The culture is not.
The challenge for leaders
For leaders, this presents an important challenge. If culture is experienced differently across the organisation, then understanding it requires much more than an annual engagement survey or a dashboard of metrics. Culture reveals itself in the moments that are often overlooked: how quickly bad news travels upwards, how mistakes are discussed, whether meetings invite genuine challenge or simply reinforce hierarchy, and what conversations take place after senior leaders have left the room.
Those everyday moments reveal far more than any values statement ever could because they expose the beliefs people have formed about what is expected, what is rewarded and what carries risk. Perhaps that is why culture should never be viewed as a people initiative sitting alongside strategy.
Culture is strategy in practice.
The strongest CEOs understand that culture cannot be managed through communication alone. They spend less time asking whether people can recite the organisation’s values and more time asking what the organisation has unintentionally taught people to believe. They become curious about the systems producing behaviour rather than simply the behaviour itself, recognising that sustainable cultural change rarely begins by trying to change people. It begins by changing the environment within which people make decisions.
Ultimately, culture is neither what appears on the office wall nor what is written in the annual report. It is the collection of experiences that shape judgement when nobody senior is in the room. It is reflected in the decisions people make when there is no time to ask permission, the conversations they choose to have when things go wrong and the behaviours they believe will help them succeed.
Which leaves every CEO with one question worth reflecting on. If your organisation is experiencing exactly the behaviours it experiences today, is that because of the people you employ… or because of the system they have learned to navigate?
The answer to that question is often where the real conversation about culture begins.
More about Chris Paton
With 32 years of experience in strategic leadership, organizational performance and cultural change, Chris’ emphasis is on assisting people and companies to work more effectively. Through tailored diagnostic assessments and leadership programs, he drives client improvement, and enhances performance. In his former career Chris was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Royal Marines and saw active service for over 18 years. One of his senior roles was Head of Strategy on Afghanistan to the David Cameron Government.
Chris is a highly regarded and skilful trainer, who has worked with C-suite teams from the across the GCC, Fortune 500 and FTSE 250, and a wide range of sectors. He is also a best-selling author, and has had articles published in Harvard Business Review as well as Strategy Magazine. Chris is a Fellow of the Strategic Planning Society, and has been a visiting lecturer in London Business School’s Executive Education Program.