Why culture, incentives, operations and leadership behaviour must tell the same story

LinkedIn posts can be incredibly insightful. But often, the real value emerges in the comments, where a familiar idea is questioned, extended or reframed.

We have all heard the famous phrase: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Some have expanded it to say that culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch and dinner. A leading HR practitioner recently gave it another twist: culture eats talent for breakfast.

Each variation points to something important. A brilliant strategy cannot survive for long in an environment that rewards the wrong behaviours. Talented people cannot perform indefinitely in a culture that depletes, silences or drives them away.

But Chase Dimond’s framing suggests that we may have been looking at only part of the picture. Culture and strategy are not opponents in a contest where one must defeat the other. Leadership requires simultaneous attention to four interconnected areas: strategy, culture, operations and people.

The leader’s role is to connect them.

That demands the ability to move between the macro and the micro: from enterprise ambition to the everyday decisions that shape delivery. It also requires leaders to engage both thinking and feeling—to apply commercial judgement while understanding the human dynamics influencing behaviour, trust and performance.

This is where strategy either becomes operational reality or remains corporate theatre.

Which document really runs the company?

In the comments beneath Dimond’s post, Olena Shevchuk made a perceptive observation: in many companies, culture sits in one presentation while business priorities sit in another. Employees quickly work out which document actually runs the organisation.

That gap is more common than many leaders would like to admit.

The strategy deck may speak about collaboration, customer centricity, innovation and inclusion. The business scorecard may reward individual performance, short-term revenue, cost containment and the protection of divisional interests. The values may celebrate courage and openness, while employees learn that questioning senior leaders carries a personal cost.

People do not take their behavioural cues from corporate language alone. They watch what is measured, funded, praised, tolerated and rewarded. They notice who is promoted, whose conduct is excused and which commitments disappear when quarterly pressure rises.

When the formal strategy and the operating signals contradict one another, the operating signals win.

Dimond’s response captured the essential point: culture becomes real when incentives, decisions and leadership behaviour align with the priorities.

In other words, culture is not merely what an organisation says it values. Culture is the pattern created by its choices.

Digital transformation is an alignment test

Consider an organisation that professes a strategy of digital transformation to reach more customers, particularly underserved and unserved segments.

That ambition cannot be delivered by a technology programme alone. It requires alignment across product, technology, operations, risk, finance, distribution, data and customer service. It may require established business units to share customer relationships, budgets, talent, infrastructure or decision rights. In some cases, leaders may need to support an enterprise initiative even when the most visible benefit appears on another executive’s scorecard.

This raises a question I have often asked leaders: Who takes one for the team?

To date, I have rarely received a clear answer.

The reason is not necessarily a lack of commitment or goodwill. It is often a design problem. Strategic business units are measured primarily on the results they achieve individually, so those are the results they pursue. If executives lose resources, influence or recognition by supporting work outside their own areas, collaboration becomes an act of personal sacrifice rather than an expected feature of the operating model.

We should not be surprised when intelligent people respond rationally to the incentives placed before them.

If the organisation wants enterprise-wide collaboration, it must reward enterprise-wide outcomes. Shared priorities need shared measures. Cross-functional delivery requires clear decision rights, mutual accountability and incentives that make cooperation worthwhile.

Executives should not feel that helping another business unit succeed will cost them power, prestige, funding or career opportunity. If they do, the organisation has created internal competition where strategic interdependence is required.

Resource allocation reveals the real strategy

Strategy becomes credible when leaders make choices about where scarce resources will go.

If growth depends on digital channels and new customer segments, capital and talent must move towards the initiatives capable of delivering that growth. At the same time, leaders must continue managing the traditional “cash cows” described in the Boston Consulting Group Matrix—the established businesses that fund the organisation while newer propositions mature.

This balance is difficult. Protect the legacy too aggressively and transformation remains peripheral. Neglect it too quickly and the organisation may weaken the earnings base needed to finance its future.

The answer is not another presentation. It is disciplined portfolio management: deciding what to grow, what to sustain, what to simplify and what to stop. Every allocation decision should be traceable to the strategy.

When low-priority projects remain protected because of executive sponsorship while strategic initiatives struggle for people and funding, employees learn that politics carries more weight than strategy. When duplicated work continues because business units defend their territories, the operating model undermines the stated ambition.

Budgets, talent allocation and executive attention are among the clearest expressions of what an organisation truly values.

Collaboration does not happen by proclamation

Enterprise alignment requires a leader who can rally an executive team around a shared purpose. It also requires a mature executive team—one whose members understand that helping one another succeed is not a loss of individual relevance but a contribution to organisational performance.

However, maturity cannot simply be assumed. Collaboration must be intentionally designed into the ways of working.

That includes:

• shared enterprise outcomes alongside individual business-unit targets;
• explicit decision rights and escalation paths;
• accountability for both results and conduct;
• transparent resource-allocation principles;
• regular forums for surfacing dependencies and resolving trade-offs; and
• honest conversations about the emotions, fears and status concerns that often sit beneath executive conflict.

The last point matters. Organisations often treat strategy as purely analytical, but strategic decisions can trigger very human responses. Leaders may fear losing control, status, resources or relevance. If these dynamics are ignored, they do not disappear; they simply resurface as resistance, delay, territorial behaviour or competing narratives.

Effective leadership makes space for both the thinking and the feeling. It names the tension, examines the evidence and steers the conversation towards the enterprise outcome.

Culture is shaped by consequences

Leadership behaviour is one of the strongest signals in any organisation.

If collaboration is celebrated in speeches but executives are rewarded for empire-building, the speech is irrelevant. If respect appears in the values statement but bullying and harassment carry no meaningful consequences, employees learn that power provides protection. If people are encouraged to speak up but those who raise uncomfortable issues experience exclusion or retaliation, silence becomes a survival strategy.

A healthy workplace culture therefore requires both positive reinforcement and credible accountability.

Leaders who share information, develop others, collaborate across boundaries and make decisions in the organisation’s best interests should be recognised and rewarded. Dysfunctional and toxic conduct—including bullying, harassment, intimidation and deliberate obstruction—should attract clear consequences regardless of the seniority or commercial performance of the person involved.

Transparency also matters. Organisations do not need to disclose confidential personal details, but employees should understand how concerns are assessed, what standards apply and whether the process is fair. Without that visibility, even legitimate processes may be perceived as protection for the powerful.

Trust grows when stated standards are applied consistently.

Replace productivity theatre with real conversation

Many organisations are highly skilled at performative alignment. They hold town halls, publish values, launch transformation slogans and convene steering committees. Yet the difficult subjects—competing incentives, protected projects, destructive behaviour, capacity constraints and unclear accountability—remain untouched.

This creates productivity theatre: visible activity that gives the appearance of progress without resolving the conditions preventing delivery.

Real conversations are different. They ask:

• What behaviour are our current incentives producing?
• Which decisions contradict our stated strategy?
• Where are business-unit targets undermining enterprise outcomes?
• What are we continuing to fund because of politics rather than value?
• Which leadership behaviours are damaging trust and execution?
• What must leaders stop doing if the strategy is to succeed?

These conversations are uncomfortable because they move the discussion from aspiration to accountability. But without them, strategy remains a story told by leaders rather than a set of choices lived by the organisation.

Strategy needs an ecosystem

Culture does not eat strategy because culture is somehow separate from leadership. Culture is produced by what leaders repeatedly decide, reward, permit and model.

For strategy to achieve its intended business outcomes, leaders must manage four connected elements:

• Strategy must provide clear choices and priorities.
• Operations must translate those choices into resources, processes, measures and decisions.
• People must have the capability, clarity and support to deliver.
• Culture must reinforce the behaviours the strategy requires.

None of these can compensate indefinitely for the failure of another.

A compelling strategy with misaligned incentives will stall. Efficient operations without an engaged workforce will become brittle. Exceptional talent in a toxic culture will disengage or leave. A warm culture without strategic discipline may feel good but struggle to produce sustainable results.

The task of leadership is not to choose between culture and strategy. It is to align strategy, culture, operations and people around the same North Star—and then ensure that everyday decisions tell the same story as the presentation.

That is when culture becomes real. That is when strategy becomes executable. And that is when the organisation has a genuine chance of achieving the outcomes it intended.