Three Reflections from our Annual Conference
We recently welcomed 128 senior leaders to the Emirates Stadium for our annual conference, Building the Culture Your Ambition Demands. The afternoon centred on one deceptively simple question:
‘does your culture enable the performance your ambition demands?’
Many organisations have a strategy in play and talented people. Far fewer have the culture capable of delivering what comes next. As a business grows, changes ownership or welcomes new leadership, the habits that once helped it succeed can begin to slow it down. The strategy may have moved on. The lived culture on the other hand, may not have.
That tension is familiar to strategic leaders trying to deliver a step change, and to people leaders charged with creating the conditions for people to make it happen. Culture is not a separate “people” conversation. It is the environment in which every commercial decision, leadership choice and everyday interaction takes place. It therefore cannot be ignored when it comes to organisational performance and strategic execution.
Across three connected sessions, Kate Richardson-Walsh OBE, Dr Cath Bishop and Natalie Macaluso helped us move from possibility, through reality, to action:
1. Make the ambition meaningful – light a fire in people’s bellies – give people a goal worth changing for.
2. Make the culture real and lived day to day – turn your values into day-to-day behaviours. Make room for the messy conversations.
3. Make the gap visible and take a first step – diagnose what is helping performance, what is holding it back and what needs to happen next.
1) Make the ambition meaningful
Kate Richardson-Walsh OBE opened with the story of the GB women’s hockey team. In 2014 they finished 11th out of 12 at the World Cup. Two years later, they won Olympic gold in Rio. The turnaround did not begin with a polished plan. In Kate’s words it began in a difficult and toxic period. She recalls how an honest question from their coach: “How do you want to be remembered?” – got them to envision making a shift.
That question helped the team form a vision that went beyond a medal: “Be the difference, create history, inspire the future.” Gold gave them a clear near-term outcome. The deeper meaning gave them a reason to pursue it together.
A financial target can be important, but it rarely tells people why the work matters or what must change on a given Monday morning. A compelling goal sets a standard. It helps a team decide what to prioritise, what to stop and what “good” now needs to look like. It also creates the shared context that makes challenge easier to hear: the conversation is not about winning an argument; it is about serving an ambition everyone has chosen. It decided the bar by which their standards would fall to as that drove – what they said, did, and accepted of each other.
For leaders, the test is not whether the goal appears in a strategy deck. It is whether people can name it, connect with it and use it to guide their own actions. Ask yourself:
· Is there one clear, compelling organisational goal that guides decisions when priorities compete?
· Can people explain why this goal matters now, beyond the financial measure?
· Does each function, team and individual understand the part they play?
· Have you translated the ambition into the standards and everyday behaviours it demands?
If your answers vary by team or level, clarity may be the first issue to solve. Revisit the ambition with your executive team. Make it specific and challenging, build a narrative around why it matters, and invite people to explore what it means in their world. Buy-in is not achieved by broadcasting more often. It grows when people have had the chance to make sense of the goal, have their questions answered and locate themselves within it.
2) Make the culture real and lived day-to-day
Kate’s story also challenged the polished picture we often hold of high performance. The journey was messy. The team had to confront behaviours (often their own) that were undermining trust, turn good intentions into observable habits and learn how to hold one another to account. As the John Amaechi observation Kate brought into the session reminds us:
“Your culture is defined by the worst behaviour tolerated in yourself and others.”
Values only become useful when people know what they look, sound and feel like under pressure. “We collaborate” means little if meetings still reward the loudest voice, difficult information travels slowly or leaders close down challenge. The gap between articulated culture and lived culture is often where performance leaks away.
Dr Cath Bishop told an impactful story from her Olympic background. Her Olympic coaches were articulating that Psych and Physical sessions carried equal weighting. In practice however, when the team got stretched for time, it was widely accepted that ‘Physical is king’. Psych sessions were allowed to fall by the wayside, despite messages from leadership to the contrary. Cath unpacked this as an example of how an articulated culture can differ from what actually gets done – the actual reality of what happens under pressure, despite best intentions.
Cath then took this into the business world. Honest feedback can feel relatively straightforward “on the field”, when everyone can see the immediate link to the result. Off the field it can feel personal. In organisations, where people are almost always on the field, leaders must deliberately create space to step back, reflect and challenge.
That means normalising some discomfort. A culture of ‘niceness’ can look healthy while preventing the conversations that would make the team better. Psychological safety does not mean avoiding disagreement. It means people can raise concerns, test assumptions, admit mistakes and disagree constructively without fearing that the interpersonal cost will outweigh the value of speaking.
Consider what happens in your organisation when pressure rises:
· Do your stated values still guide behaviour, or do unwritten rules take over?
· Can people challenge senior or influential voices, or are some opinions automatically given more weight?
· Is feedback offered early and in service of the shared goal, or saved until frustration has built?
· Do teams try, learn and adjust, or protect themselves by sticking rigidly to what is known?
Leaders shape the answer in small moments. What do you reward? What do you overlook? How do you respond when someone tells you something inconvenient? Trust accumulates when leaders show vulnerability, ask for honest input and respond with curiosity. It weakens when the invitation to speak openly is followed by defensiveness or silence.
Start by choosing one value that matters to your ambition. Describe the behaviours that demonstrate it, the behaviours that contradict it and the routines that will reinforce it. Then agree how the team will challenge one another when the standard slips. Accountability becomes less personal when the standard is explicit and the purpose is shared.
3) Make the gap visible and take a first step
Natalie Macaluso brought the final session back to each leader’s own organisation. Culture often appears in the way we say we get things done: the vision, values, policies, structures and processes. But it is also present below the surface in beliefs, assumptions, stories, power dynamics, unwritten rules and feelings. The latter frequently determine how work really gets done.
That is why culture change should begin with diagnosis rather than assumption. Before adding another set of values or launching another initiative, understand the current state. Which parts of your culture accelerate progress towards the ambition? Which create drag? Where is the experience inconsistent?
Natalie invited leaders to examine two connected questions:
“Can everyone name your goal, and is your culture serving it?”
The first question is about direction. The second is about the behavioural environment required to deliver it. Treating them separately creates predictable problems: a clear strategy that the culture quietly defeats, or an energetic culture programme with no commercial destination.
A useful diagnosis explores both:
· Direction – Is the intent clear, compelling and understood across the organisation?
· Commitment – Do people see why the goal matters and how their role contributes?
· Challenge – Can teams debate well, surface different perspectives and improve decisions?
· Learning – Is there a habit of trying, learning and adjusting, particularly when conditions change?
· Leadership – What do leaders model, reward and tolerate, and how consistently?
Do not try to change everything at once. Identify the cultural gap that carries the greatest performance cost. Decide what must be different, who needs to be involved and what evidence would show progress. Then choose one concrete action: a leadership conversation, a clearer goal, a revised team habit or a deeper diagnostic of the current culture.
Where will you begin?
The close of a conference can create energy. The real value comes from what happens when everyone returns to the day job. Before that energy gets absorbed by the urgent, take ten minutes to answer:
· Where is the biggest gap between your business ambition and your current culture?
· What is really getting in the way?
· Who do you need to speak to next week to understand it better or begin to change it?
· What is the cost of doing nothing for another six or twelve months?
· What is the first visible change you want to make?
If your gap begins with direction, our Crazy Goal solution can helps leadership teams forge a clear, compelling strategic goal, build genuine commitment to it and help everyone understand the part they play.
If the challenge is less visible, our Cultural Diagnostic helps organisations understand how leadership, behaviours and ways of working are influencing performance – and identify what is driving progress or holding it back.
Both begin in the same place: diagnosis – getting honest about where you are, getting clear about where you need to go and creating the conditions for people to move there together.
If the question “Does your culture enable the performance your ambition demands?” feels relevant to your organisation, do get in touch. We would be very happy to have a no-strings-attached conversation about where your greatest opportunity may lie.
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