Stop Trying to Fix Culture. Fix the System That Creates It.

For years companies have been told that culture drives performance. It sounds good, it feels right, and it is comforting. But there is very little scientific evidence behind the claim.

Most of us have been part of teams or organisations that simply did not rhyme. Places where you could not understand why things happened the way they did and where performance felt stuck. Our brains tell us that the culture must have been the cause. But a major 2022 evidence review by the CIPD examined more than five hundred studies and found something very different. There is little evidence that culture consistently affects performance and if a link exists it is tiny.

So why do ninety two percent of executives still believe that improving culture will boost results. Because a bad culture is a symptom just like bad performance is a symptom. Both point to something deeper which is a dysfunctional system.

We prefer to talk about culture because it feels easier than the real work. The real work is changing how decisions get made, how behaviour is rewarded, how leaders show up, and how the system actually operates. Over the years I have learned to focus on a few things that truly matter. They help you fix your culture and your performance at the same time.

1. Culture is not a vibe. It is the behaviour your system produces.

Most organisations treat culture like a mood that can be shaped with posters, values, and town halls. But culture is simply the sum of the behaviours the system rewards, tolerates, or ignores.

If the system rewards heroics over collaboration you get heroes.
If it rewards speed over quality you get shortcuts.
If it rewards politics over candour you get politics.

People do not follow values. People follow consequences.

I once worked with an organisation that had a predictable ritual every time something went wrong. A crisis happened, gossip spread, emotions rose, and then someone stepped up to save the day and received public praise. Enough heroic recoveries and you were promoted. You can see where this goes. No one had an incentive to prevent the issue from coming back, so the organisation lived in constant firefighting mode because firefighting was what got rewarded.

If you want to change behaviour start with the way the work moves. Redesign workflows so the desired behaviour becomes the easy behaviour. When the system makes the right behaviour the practical choice it spreads fast. This changes culture faster than any offsite.

2. Leaders shape culture by what they do especially when someone behaves badly.

One of the strongest cultural signals in any organisation is how leaders respond when behaviour crosses the line. If leaders ignore bullying because someone hits targets that becomes culture. If they avoid conflict that becomes culture. If they correct behaviour quickly and fairly that becomes culture too.

Employees watch what leaders do far more than what they say. Culture is not what leaders announce. Culture is what leaders do and what they tolerate.

And we also need to name something organisations often avoid. Sometimes the most damaging patterns come from leadership itself. When leaders undermine others, play politics, take credit, spread fear, or behave unpredictably under pressure, those patterns cascade through the organisation. Leadership behaviour carries more weight than any other behaviour because people assume it is not only tolerated but expected.

This is why you need a clear system for gathering feedback on leadership behaviour. Without a mechanism that hears the truth and a process that acts on it you are relying on hope as your strategy for change. Hope is not a system.

Pay attention to how leaders behave in the hard moments. People believe what leaders do in the hard moments not the easy ones. I worked with an organisation where a senior leader shifted into extreme micromanagement during difficult times even though they claimed they wanted managers to be more self steering. Middle managers saw the signal and immediately slipped back into instruction awaiting mode. It took a lot of coaching to undo that shift.

When leaders stay consistent under pressure trust grows and culture shifts. When damaging patterns in leadership go unaddressed the culture absorbs them and the organisation pays the price.

3. Who joins and who leaves does not shape culture. It locks it in.

Every organisation has a quiet sorting mechanism that operates in the background. Newcomers adapt quickly to whatever behaviour already works. People who do not match the lived norms eventually leave even when they are exactly the people you need for the future. The ones who stay and move up are the ones the current system already favours.

This does not change culture. It cements it.

When you hire people who represent the direction you want to go whether more creativity, more collaboration, or more candour the existing system often tries to sand them down. If your system rewards caution your future leaders will be cautious. If it rewards politics your future leaders will be political. If it punishes initiative the initiative takers will be the first to walk out.

This is why culture is so difficult to shift. The system keeps selecting the same behaviours again and again until they become the bedrock of the organisation. When you bring in people who should carry the future culture senior leaders must actively protect them or they will become absorbed into the old pattern.

Departures tell the truth. If the problem solvers leave and the political players stay that is not a culture issue. It is a system issue. Learn why the people you wanted to keep walked away and fix what pushed them out.

4. Do not copy. Decide who you want to be.

We often look at the stars whether they appear on a screen or in the business press. We crave their secret sauce and convince ourselves that copying what they do will bring the same results. An entire consultancy industry worth billions is built on that promise.

But copying Netflix or Nvidia or Amazon or whichever company is fashionable this year will not work.

Your strategy is different.
Your constraints are different.
Your leadership is different.
Your system is different.

There is no best culture. There is only the culture your system naturally creates.

If you want to change be specific about what success requires. Not vague ambitions like a culture of innovation or a culture of accountability, but concrete behaviours in concrete situations aligned with concrete strategic choices.

Culture shifts when expectations become explicit and the system reinforces them. A tool like CultuurLens can help you make these expectations concrete and translate them into the behaviours your organisation actually needs.

5. Culture does not follow slogans. Culture follows incentives.

People behave according to the consequences they experience. And those consequences come in three forms.

Natural consequences are the internal reactions people feel such as pride, discomfort, motivation, or frustration. You can influence this only in two places which are hiring and job design. Beyond that natural consequences live inside the person.

Social consequences come from peers and matter more than most leaders expect. People learn quickly what earns support, what gets ignored, and what triggers resistance. If speaking up leads to silence people stop speaking up. If finger pointing gains traction finger pointing spreads. If collaboration earns appreciation more people collaborate. These patterns come from norms, recognition, meeting habits, and group behaviour. Change what the group rewards and behaviour shifts fast.

Managerial and systemic consequences are fully in the control of leaders. They include how managers react, how processes react, and what the organisation rewards or penalises. This is where the real leverage sits. Adjust KPIs, timelines, decision rules, recognition, and bonuses so the behaviour you want becomes the behaviour that succeeds. And never overlook promotions because promotions are culture. Before every promotion ask which behaviour you are selecting for. If you promote people who fit the past you guarantee the past.

When incentives point in the right direction behaviour follows every time.

The real message

Culture does not change because people suddenly decide to show up differently. It changes when the system around them makes new behaviour possible, safe, and worth doing. Every organisation gets the culture its system produces which means the real work is never about slogans or posters or inspirational speeches. It is about the structure of decisions, the patterns leaders reinforce during the hard moments, the behaviours that get rewarded or sidelined, and the quiet sorting mechanisms that decide who stays and who leaves.

If you fix the system the culture will follow. When workflows support the right choices and incentives align with the behaviours you want and leaders stay consistent under pressure and you protect the people who represent the future, culture begins to shift in a real and lasting way. If the system stays the same the old culture always returns no matter how many workshops you run or how many new values you publish.

In the end culture lives in the rules you enforce not in the words you endorse. And when you change the system that drives behaviour you no longer have to push the culture forward. The culture pulls itself there.