Simon Sinek says culture is what you actively value. If you write your organisational values as verbs and live them, you can build culture by design.
Another definition of culture is often “the shared values, beliefs and behaviours of the team”. On the surface, this makes sense. Culture is experienced in the everyday small moments.
But if your team has done the workshop process, where the values were named and accepted, you may have felt some optimism that the culture might improve. Only for pressure to trigger the old engrained habits soon after. The cracks that were briefly smoothed over are felt more deeply than ever.
It’s not that people don’t want the culture to be better. Our experience tells us even in the most dysfunctional teams, people want the same things: to work better together, to reduce the negativity, to see the organisation succeed.
But relying only on shared values and behaviours to shift culture misses the other elements shaping how people behave.
For decades, leadership development said look for a person to fix. Who needs coaching? Who needs feedback? Who needs training? Who is not living the values?
We have become very comfortable treating culture problems as individual behaviour problems. But behaviour does not happen in isolation. It is shaped by how the environment operates, what it rewards, what it tolerates, and what it makes difficult.
If the environment stays the same, individual-centred fixes won’t change the engrained pattern. There are other layers creating the reality people are working within.
The stories
The stories leaders and team members share become engrained in ways of working that outlive individual leaders or teams.
The “us versus them” story can show up as cynicism and a lack of collaboration between teams. The “we only deliver the best quality” story, when resources are tight, can show up as over-invested perfectionism. The “we are a high performance environment” story can show up as unhealthy levels of expectation and fear.
Stories help people move within the environment. They help people fit in, understand what matters, and avoid going against the grain. They can also motivate and unify a team around a shared identity.
Surfacing the stories that are no longer helpful, or no longer true, is critical to understanding the spoken and unspoken expectations shaping behaviour.
Leadership
Leadership sets the ground rules people respond to.
Not only through formal decisions, but through what they prioritise or avoid, personality, tendencies and what they give their attention to.
If leaders move quickly, people learn to prioritise urgency. If leaders avoid tension, difficult issues move into side conversations. If leaders reward responsiveness, people react quickly but don’t get a chance to step back and be objective.
This doesn’t mean culture is controlled by the leader. It means leadership creates signals people read closely. Who to trust, the processes they follow, the work they prioritise, and who has power and influence.
Systems and processes
When systems and processes work, people are confident with business as usual, and what to do when something falls outside the norm. Good process can provide clear responsibilities and certainty. Everyone can breathe a little easier because risks have been reduced.
But when process is not agreed, trained or reinforced, it becomes negotiable. Personal preference or value judgements start to replace consistency and trust. What sounds like personal conflict or disagreement can actually be team members operating from different sets of rules.
Work design
It can be easy to miss how work design may be shaping culture.
Think of the roles that become a hotchpotch of responsibilities because someone left and the role was divided up. Or systems changed, but roles did not. Or historical reporting lines remain because of alliances, sensitivities or legacy decisions that were never revisited.
If there are bottlenecks, information is not fit for purpose, people are quick to blame, or contribution and influence are skewed, it may not be a values or a behaviour issue.
It may have more to do with how the work is organised, how tasks are sequenced, and how information flows.
Resources and constraints
Does everyone have equal access to the resources they need, and are they fit for purpose? If not, frustration can quickly turn into workarounds. Scarcity can lead to self-interest and hoarding.
And then there are the rules. Whether they are legislative, governance or policy, how well does everyone know and accept them?
Apart from the compliance risk, when rules are known but not followed, it sends a message to the team: rules and authority are negotiable.
Power and influence
There is formal power, based on hierarchy and title. And there are decision-making authorities, reporting lines and governance processes.
But there are also other layers of power and influence. Who has influence. Who controls key information. How is it distributed. Who gets access to it. When it is shared. How are decisions shaped before they are formally made.
These dynamics may not be visible on an organisational chart, but they shape how work gets done, whose voice carries weight, and where people feel able to challenge, contribute or raise concerns.
If you are the person noticing that familiar fixes are not shifting the culture, it can be hard to know where to start.
You may be hearing one explanation of what is happening from leaders, another from managers, and something different again from employees. Similar concerns may be appearing in engagement results, exit interviews, or informal chatter, without one clear issue to point to.
A useful starting point is to organise what you are noticing before trying to solve it.
Start with three questions:
- What are you hearing repeatedly, even if it is being said in different ways?
- Where is the work slowing down, or where are people getting stuck?
- What feels inconsistent, unclear, or difficult to challenge?
It’s worth recognising our own go-to fix. Assuming it is one person. One team. Resistance to change. A training gap. A behaviour issue.
These questions are not designed to give you the answer. They are a way to slow down the rush to solution, organise what you are noticing, and start unpacking the layers.
Because when issues do not sit neatly in one place, they are unlikely to be solved by addressing one person, one behaviour or one team conversation.
They may need a more structured way to understand what is really happening.
If you are noticing friction that you just can’t put your finger on, get in touch for a no-obligation conversation. We can help you sense-check what you are seeing and whether a more structured review would be useful.