The Culture Change That Never Happened

I’ve seen this movie before. Leadership team gets together for a strategic planning session. Someone mentions that “culture is our competitive advantage” and “we need to be more innovative/collaborative/customer-focused.” Everyone nods knowingly.

Six months later, consultants are brought in to “drive culture change.” Twelve months later, employee survey scores haven’t budged. Eighteen months later, leaders are wondering why their “transformation” didn’t transform anything.

The problem isn’t with culture change itself—it’s with how most organizations think about it.

The Announcement Fallacy

Most culture change efforts start with an announcement. New values are unveiled, behavioral expectations are communicated, and training sessions are scheduled. Leadership assumes that telling people what the new culture should look like will somehow make it happen.

This approach treats culture like a software update—something you can install and expect to run automatically. But culture isn’t a program you implement; it’s a pattern of behavior that emerges from how work actually gets done.

What Culture Actually Is

Culture is what happens when leadership isn’t watching. It’s the decisions people make when no one is telling them what to do. It’s the stories people tell about what really matters around here.

You can’t change culture by changing your website or repainting your conference rooms. You change culture by changing the systems, processes, and incentives that shape how people behave every day.

The Three Culture Change Mistakes

In my experience, failed culture transformations usually make the same three mistakes:

Mistake #1: Starting with Values Instead of Behaviors

Organizations spend months crafting value statements but little time defining what those values look like in practice. “Innovation” sounds great until someone tries something new and gets shot down for not following established procedures.

Mistake #2: Assuming Leadership Alignment

Senior teams often think they’re aligned on culture change when they’ve simply agreed on language. Dig deeper and you’ll find different definitions of success, different priorities, and different tolerance for the discomfort that real change requires.

Mistake #3: Underestimating the Immune System Response

Organizations have immune systems that resist change, even positive change. Existing processes, power structures, and performance metrics can quietly undermine new cultural initiatives without anyone realizing it’s happening.

What Successful Culture Change Looks Like

The organizations that successfully evolve their cultures do things differently from the start:

They Start with Specific Behaviors

Instead of saying “we want to be more collaborative,” successful culture change identifies specific behaviors: “In meetings, we ask questions before proposing solutions” or “When projects get stuck, we involve people from other departments rather than working around the problem.”

They Change Systems, Not Just Mindsets

If you want more innovation, change how you evaluate risk. If you want better collaboration, change how you structure teams and measure success. If you want more accountability, change how you handle missed commitments.

Culture follows systems, not the other way around.

They Start Small and Build Proof Points

Rather than launching company-wide transformation programs, they identify small groups willing to experiment with new ways of working. They learn what works, adjust what doesn’t, and gradually expand successful practices.

A Real Example

One client wanted to shift from a “hero culture” (where individuals solved problems alone) to a “team culture” (where people collaborated to solve problems together).

Instead of announcing this change and hoping for the best, they started with one specific behavior: when someone escalated a problem, the response became “Who else needs to be involved in solving this?” instead of “I’ll take care of it.”

This simple shift required training managers to ask different questions, but it didn’t require anyone to fundamentally change their personality or work style. Over six months, problem-solving became more collaborative because the system encouraged collaboration.

From there, they expanded to other team-oriented behaviors, building on success rather than fighting cultural inertia.

The Time Factor

Real culture change takes longer than most leaders want but happens faster than most people expect—if you’re changing the right things.

Surface-level changes (new values posters, team-building exercises, culture surveys) can happen quickly but don’t stick. Deeper changes (decision-making processes, communication patterns, accountability systems) take longer to implement but create lasting shifts.

The key is being honest about which type of change you’re really committed to making.

Why Most Organizations Stop Too Soon

Culture change is uncomfortable, even when it’s positive. New behaviors feel awkward at first. Old habits creep back. People resist processes that used to work but no longer serve the organization.

Most culture change efforts fail not because the approach was wrong, but because leadership stopped supporting the change when it got difficult. They retreat to familiar patterns and blame the initiative rather than acknowledging that change takes sustained effort.

The Real Question

Before launching your next culture change initiative, ask yourself: Are you willing to change how decisions get made, how success gets measured, and how problems get solved?

If the answer is yes, you have a good chance of creating meaningful cultural evolution.

If the answer is “we just want people to be more [collaborative/innovative/customer-focused],” you’re probably going to waste a lot of time and money.

Culture change isn’t about getting people to adopt new values. It’s about creating conditions where the behaviors you want become the natural way to get work done.

Start there, and the culture will follow.