Written by Senior Performance Consultant Portia Light & Head of Marketing Josh Trebilcock
Culture is one of the most powerful yet misunderstood drivers of business performance. Leaders know it matters, but too often it’s dismissed as intangible or just left to change. Culture can act as the bridge between strategy and execution. It can shape how decisions are made, how quickly teams move, and whether people are engaged in delivering the organisation’s goals.
The truth is simple: you either shape culture deliberately, or it shapes you by default.
In this article we uncover what we mean by culture and why it’s a key strategic tool. We’ll then share practical strategies for diagnosing the ‘current state’ of your culture to help forge a path to the future state you want to get to.
Contents:
At Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? We believe culture isn’t beanbags, ping-pong tables, or a set of values growing dust on the wall. We define it as the shared mindsets, behaviours, and habits that define how things get done around here.
It shows up in how conflict is handled, how leaders respond under pressure, and what behaviours are tolerated or rewarded. It’s visible within the stories teams tell when no one’s watching, and how well people come together when things go wrong.
Culture plays a role in directly driving:
- Performance – how effectively people work together in terms of speed, focus, and quality of delivery.
- Engagement – people thrive when they see how their work connects to a shared goal.
- Strategic alignment – culture ensures teams pull in the same direction, rather than fragmenting into silos.
When you define it this way, culture stops being a “nice-to-have” and becomes a powerful strategic tool. Rather than an abstract concept, it starts to become a crucial part of how strategy is acted out. It’s something leaders need to be sure they have the right strategy to match what they are trying to achieve.
The costs of ignoring culture are real. Deloitte’s 2016 Global Human Capital Trends survey found that 82% of leaders see culture as a competitive advantage, only 28% believe they understand their culture well, and just 19% believe they have the right culture in place. In other words, most leaders know it matters but lack the clarity and discipline to make culture work for them.
Through over a decade of our client work in this area, we’ve learnt that transformations often stall not necessarily because the strategy was wrong, but because the culture wasn’t aligned to deliver it. It fell at the first hurdle when attempting to bring the strategy to life.
The myth of the “right” culture
It’s a common misconception that there is a one-size-fits-all way to ‘do’ culture. There’s no single perfect culture. The “right” culture is the one that best serves your strategy. Here are some of the cultural challenges we’ve helped our clients overcome:
- A Formula 1 team we’ve been working with – realised their culture was “too nice”. Their old ways of working had dulled their competitiveness. Their leadership realised they needed to reset their ambition – and backed it with tough but necessary decisions that impacted how people worked. It changed their performance. The results have been seen in how they’ve broken down siloed ways of working, and that’s translated to results on the track.
- A household name in the Food and Beverage department we are partnering with – has historically thrived on hard work and efficiency. However, they realised their legacy was not suiting the scale they had reached. Decision-making was stalling at the top and causing bottlenecks. They realised they needed to work on how they empowered people to push decisions down the business. The values they created are no longer just “words on a wall,” but the filter for decision-making at every level.
- A global loyalty and benefits business, is evolving from a culture that once worked brilliantly but was beginning to hold them back. They’re now shaping a set of high-performance cultural principles, behaviours and habits that bring their four values to life for their global workforce every single day.
- Our co-founder’s story – In 1998, Ben Hunt-Davis was part of an underachieving GB rowing eight (and a much broader supporting team), who after years of finishing 7th or 8th set themselves the “Crazy Goal” of winning gold at the Sydney Olympics. They recognised that something needed to change if they were going to be in with a chance of their rivals. Simply training harder wasn’t an option. They needed a whole new approach as a team. They decided to ask one simple question about everything they did – “Will it make the boat go faster?” The team relentlessly focused on improving their performance, trusting that the results would follow. They held each other to account, asked the difficult questions other crews avoided and defined a clear culture of ‘how’ they would work together to achieve their ambition. Against all the odds, and despite not being the strongest or most talented team, they achieved their “Crazy Goal” and won gold.
This echoes recent research in the Journal of Business Research, which found that cultures can be grouped into archetypes such as performance, people, and customer. The firms that outperform are those that deliberately lean into the culture profile that best fits their goals – proving there’s no one-size-fits-all model.
So, what culture do you need to deliberately create that will help you achieve your goals?
You might already be at the point where you personally have realised the time to change is now. Where you realise – “what got us here won’t get us there”.
Where the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of making a change. In short, that if you are to reach the potential that you see, then a change is needed.
Below we share the starting point of all our work – diagnosis. To bring clarity to you and crucially those around you, that something different is needed.
A first step is culture diagnosis. Traditional engagement surveys tend to only skim the surface. To shape culture, whether it’s that of your executive team or something broader, you need to uncover the behaviours in your business that really drive or block performance.
Far from being static, culture is a dynamic and evolving process, driven by the countless social interactions that unfold every day. Culture consistently proves to be one of the key drivers to sustained success. It influences every aspect of how an organisation operates and can be seen as the underlying patterns that uphold the status quo.
Despite its profound impact, very few organisations intentionally nurture and shape their culture. Most simply allow it to form naturally, hoping it will align with their goals.
If you picture your culture like an iceberg, a lot goes unseen. If we were to lower the waterline and expose that – what would show up? If a culture lives and breathes in mindsets and behaviours of people a key first step is to understand the unique perspectives, thoughts, and feelings of people in the business. Doing so gets an accurate gauge on a ‘current state’. It can reveal blind spots – both in terms of overlooked strengths and weaknesses to improve upon.
At the same global loyalty business mentioned above, we are running a series of global Culture Conversations, enabling the whole organisation to share their perspectives together, in a real-time interactive experience that’s designed to surface detailed insights. The result has been an ‘iceberg view’ of culture – revealing hidden, often unspoken behaviours.
Our proprietary culture diagnostic, created from data collected during the Culture Conversations, is now enabling a ‘Culture Design Team’ (a representative group of colleagues) to make conscious choices and recommendations about what to keep and what to change, to move the business forward, via a series of culture co-creation workshops, facilitated by our team. This process allows a business to identify, shape and preserve areas unique to their DNA, whilst also providing a clear route forward in terms of what might be holding them back and strengths to double-down on.
External research underscores why this matters. McKinsey has shown that 44% of failed mergers cite culture misalignment as a top reason. If culture can derail multi-billion-dollar integrations, imagine its impact on day-to-day execution. Diagnosis isn’t a “nice step” – it’s essential. Additionally, Kurt Lewin’s industrial psychology experiments from the 1940s demonstrated that workers who were involved in setting and creating goals achieved more sustained engagement in achieving them, as opposed to groups where their goals were imposed by management. The participative approach we bring fosters much greater employee commitment for making culture change a reality.
Leaders often let culture happen by chance. They often fail to realise they actively shape the culture. Their actions, choices, and the standards they uphold set the tone for everyone else.
High-performance leaders:
- Model the behaviours they want to see.
- Reinforce them through recognition and accountability.
- Sustain them by embedding mechanisms – team rules, feedback both formally and informally, what they celebrate and reward (both results-wise or behaviourally) capability frameworks – they can make behaviours stick (or, not!).
Across our client work, the pattern is consistent: culture evolves when leaders make deliberate choices and follow through with consistency.
A 2024 survey of over 1,300 North American executives by Harvard Law School’s corporate governance centre reinforces this point: senior leaders overwhelmingly agree culture is critical to long-term value – driving motivation, retention, and ethical behaviour – but admit it is often undervalued because it’s harder to measure than financials.
That’s why deliberate leadership is so vital: culture won’t measure itself. Leaders must make it visible, measurable, and intentional.
If you’re looking to strengthen your organisation’s culture, here are some practical starting points:
- Anchor culture to your strategy. Ask: what culture will enable us to deliver our goals?
- Diagnose your ‘current state’ reality. Use tools like our team diagnostic, Culture Conversations, and proprietary culture diagnostic to capture and make sense of open and honest insights from the those who know your business best – your people.
- Define your cultural principles. Create simple, memorable principles unique to your organisation’s heritage, values, and ambition.
- Embed through mechanisms. Reinforce behaviours via a set of team rules, 360s, and performance frameworks. Even better, invite your employees to design and implement these.
- Be consistent. Culture change isn’t about new models every quarter – it’s about doing the simple things well, repeated consistently over time, to deliver the shift.
We’ve found that the organisations that outperform others don’t leave culture to chance. They treat it as a strategic asset, measured and managed with the same rigour as financials or operations.
For some, that means moving from “nice” to accountable. For others, it’s about bringing values to life. For all, it requires deliberate leadership and consistent reinforcement to bring about a shift in the dial to operate at a higher level than you were.
At Will It?, we believe culture is not about how nice or nasty you are – it’s about being deliberate. It’s about shaping the environment that enables your people to do their best work, every day, together, in service of your biggest goals.
Because culture isn’t the soft stuff. It’s the simple stuff that’s hard to do consistently well that makes the boat go faster.
