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The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture
by Boris Groysberg, Jeremiah Lee, Jesse Price, and J. Yo-Jud Cheng

STRATEGY AND CULTURE ARE AMONG the primary levers at top leaders’ disposal in their never-ending quest to maintain

organizational viability and effectiveness. Strategy offers a formal logic for the company’s goals and orients people around them.

Culture expresses goals through values and beliefs and guides activity through shared assumptions and group norms.

Strategy provides clarity and focus for collective action and decision making. It relies on plans and sets of choices to mobilize

people and can often be enforced by both concrete rewards for achieving goals and consequences for failing to do so. Ideally, it also

incorporates adaptive elements that can scan and analyze the external environment and sense when changes are required to maintain

continuity and growth. Leadership goes hand-in-hand with strategy formation, and most leaders understand the fundamentals. Culture,

however, is a more elusive lever, because much of it is anchored in unspoken behaviors, mindsets, and social patterns.

For better worse, culture and leadership are inextricably linked. Founders and influential leaders often set new cultures inand

motion and imprint values and assumptions that persist for decades. Over time an organization’s leaders can also shape culture,

through both conscious and unconscious actions (sometimes with unintended consequences). The best leaders we have observed are

fully aware of the multiple cultures within which they are embedded, can sense when change is required, and can deftly influence the

process.

Unfortunately, in our experience it is far more common for leaders seeking to build high-performing organizations to be confounded

by culture. Indeed, many either let it go unmanaged or relegate it to the HR function, where it becomes a secondary concern for the

business. They may lay out detailed, thoughtful plans for strategy and execution, but because they don’t understand culture’s power

and dynamics, their plans go off the rails. As someone once said, culture eats strategy for breakfast.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Our work suggests that culture can, in fact, be managed. The first and most important step leaders can

take to maximize its value and minimize its risks is to become fully aware of how it works. By integrating findings from more than

100 of the most commonly used social and behavioral models, we have identified eight styles that distinguish a culture and can be

measured. (We gratefully acknowledge the rich history of cultural studies—going all the way back to the earliest explorations of

human nature—on which our work builds.) Using this framework, leaders can model the impact of culture on their business and assess

its alignment with strategy. We also suggest how culture can help them achieve change and build organizations that thrive in even the

most trying times.

Defining Culture

Culture is the tacit social order of an organization: It shapes attitudes and behaviors in wide-ranging and durable ways. Cultural norms

define what is encouraged, discouraged, accepted, or rejected within a group. When properly aligned with personal values, drives, and

needs, culture can unleash tremendous amounts of energy toward a shared purpose and foster an organization’s capacity to thrive.

Culture can also evolve flexibly and autonomously in response to changing opportunities and demands. Whereas strategy is

typically determined by the C-suite, culture can fluidly blend the intentions of top leaders with the knowledge and experiences of

frontline employees.

Idea in Brief
Executives are often confounded by culture, because much of it is anchored in unspoken behaviors, mindsets, and social
patterns. Many leaders either let it go unmanaged or relegate it to HR, where it becomes a secondary concern for the
business. This is a mistake, because properly managed, culture can help them achieve change and build organizations that
will thrive in even the most trying times.

The authors have reviewed the literature on culture and distilled eight distinct culture styles: , focused on relationshipscaring

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EBSCO Publishing : eBook Subscription Harvard Business Publishing Collection (EBSCOhost) – printed on 8/18/2023 4:20 PM via LIBERTY UNIVERSITY
AN: 2003606 ; Harvard Business Review, Adam Grant, Boris Groysberg, Jon R. Katzenbach, Erin Meyer.; HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Building a Great Culture (with Bonus
Article ‘How to Build a Culture of Originality’ by Adam Grant)
Account: liberty.main.ehost