Why align culture and strategy? What is the point?

Leaders often put all their efforts into delivering the strategy for an organisation, hoping that it will generate results, but make the mistake of forgetting to prioritise the culture needed to drive a strategy to success. It’s important to remember that strategy defines where you’re going, while culture will determine how, or if, you’ll get there. One without the other? Misfires, drift, and missed targets.   

Without a clear standard of expectations and defined patterns of behaviour or mindsets to achieve your goals, your chance of success boils down to luck. At Culture Impact, we help leadership teams to take back control of their future business performance by aligning their culture and strategy.   

Signs of misaligned culture and strategy   

Misaligned culture doesn’t just slow you down - it breeds internal friction, erodes trust, and drives talent out the door. 

The symptoms of a misaligned culture and strategy will be shown in your performance metrics: poor financial results, poor employee engagement scores, lack of customer and employee retention, loss of market share, etc.  

You’ll also hear it in the language used across the company:  

“That’s not how we do things here.”  

“This sounds good in theory, but no one actually acts on it.”  

“We tried that—leadership changed their minds.”  

When behaviours contradict the strategy, people stop believing in both. But alignment unlocks momentum.  

This isn’t soft stuff. It’s business critical. So, if they sound familiar, it’s crucial to your sustainability that you bring culture back into focus.  

Reasons your culture and strategy are misaligned

 

1. External factors  

Your strategies and culture may be out of line for many reasons, but some of the external influences include new regulation, market disruption, competitor activity, and perhaps the most significant, during mergers and acquisitions.   

2. Siloed strategy ownership   

There is a risk in organisations when the strategy is being ‘owned’ by the executive alone. Strategy must be communicated and understood by all employees to ensure everyone is moving in the same direction.  

 3. Leadership shielded from reality   

In some organisations, the leadership is seen to be in ‘an Ivory Tower’, removed from the employees. This may be linked to a ‘good news’ culture where leaders are shielded from bad news. The risk in this case is that the leadership team doesn’t take a full challenge of the culture changes needed within the organisation to achieve the strategy they are proposing.   

For example, a CEO for one of our clients wanted to drive innovation through the organisation, but from our culture survey, it was clear that mindsets, behaviours, and expectations of the employees needed to significantly change to achieve this strategy. Ambitions were then calibrated into a realistic, achievable culture change programme to get the company fit to achieve its goals.   

Changing behaviour patterns to model success   

Recently, we worked with an investment firm that had a growth strategy demanding rapid innovation and cross-functional collaboration, yet the behaviours being rewarded internally led to caution, siloed working, and risk aversion.  

They had the right strategy. But significant changes needed to be made to the culture to deliver it.  These culture changes required consistency, congruence, and alignment between the key executive leadership team and the next line of management. We helped their executive team identify and reset key Culture Focus Areas. With a sharp focus on feedback loops, leadership alignment, and visible behavioural shifts, the business moved from strategy-on-paper to strategy-in-motion.   

Within nine months, as employees started modelling the behaviours of leadership, product innovation accelerated by 28%, and employee engagement scores climbed sharply.   

The key difference? The culture stopped blocking success and started enabling it.  

Change starts from the top   

When senior leaders model the behaviours they expect, those patterns cascade. Performance sharpens. Accountability rises. Culture starts to drive a competitive edge.  

Culture is not a side project or a poster on the wall. It is the living, breathing pattern of behaviours - encouraged, discouraged, or tolerated - that drives every decision in your business. And when those patterns are designed to support your strategy, everything moves faster.  

More focus. More alignment. More results.  

Culture Impact exists to build patterns of success.  

We help leadership teams:  

• Ensure the executive team is aligned on the future of the organisation.   

• Identify the cultural friction slowing performance. 

• Activate the systems and patterns of behaviour that embed change. 

Because high performance doesn’t happen by accident. It’s built through deliberate, expert design.  Find out more about how we can help assess and align your culture, or contact Fraser to explore how we can support your strategy and culture challenges.    

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