In rapidly evolving industries like life sciences and technology, organisational culture plays a crucial role in shaping success. From fostering innovation to assisting with quality and regulatory compliance, a well-embedded culture directly impacts how teams perform, collaborate, and drive results. However, many organisations face the challenge of aligning their cultural vision with the realities of day-to-day operations. In fact, 57% of HR leaders report that managers fail to enforce the desired cultural vision within their teams. In this article, we’ll explore how leaders can align their vision with reality by embedding culture across their organisations.
Many organisations have well-articulated mission and vision statements, often focusing on well-being, fostering innovation, or driving growth. Yet, these statements can often remain aspirational and disconnected from people’s day-to-day operations. According to a recent study by Gartner, less than one-in-four employees fully understand the values driving their organisation’s culture. While they may be well equipped to list these values and demonstrate decent awareness of the overall driving mission and vision, the challenge is trying to tie these core themes and messages into the real, lived experience of their day-to-day work.
While this disconnect can be damaging to organisations in every sector, it is particularly challenging in life sciences and technology where regulatory compliance, innovation, and collaboration are tantamount to success. Without strong cultural alignment, organisations risk becoming a collection of loosely connected individuals, as opposed to a unified team pulling in the same direction towards collective success, which can lead to underperformance, disengagement, and missed opportunities.
Activating organisational culture can be a deeply complex endeavour. While it can be relatively straightforward for everyone, including those in leadership positions, to articulate the organisation’s cultural vision, turning that vision into a lived reality across all levels of an organisation is far more difficult.
Leadership Inconsistency
One of the most significant barriers to activating culture is inconsistency in leadership behaviour. Leaders may signal or express certain values or behaviours during strategic meetings, such as monthly or quarterly performance reviews, however if their actions when managing their teams don’t reflect this alignment, people will quickly pick up on it. In simple nomenclature, “talking the talk” and not “walking the walk” becomes very noticeable! This erodes trust and sends mixed signals about what’s truly important in the organisation.
Communication Breakdown
Even in organisations where leadership is aligned, poor communication can hinder cultural activation. If team members aren’t presented with regular, consistent messaging (both explicitly and implicitly) of the organisation’s values and how they should guide their behaviours, the cultural vision remains an abstract mystery. In many cases, employees will only encounter cultural touchstones during the more formal parts of their tenure with an organisation, such as during induction when they first start or during performance reviews. This still leaves the day-to-day gap in understanding of how values are translated to and impact everyday work.
Internal Resistance
Changing or embedding culture can face significant resistance from team members, particularly those accustomed to old ways of working or those overly attached to an engrained notion of “the way things are done around here”. This resistance is to be expected and should not be maligned. Its in many people’s nature to resist change; they may feel unsure about what’s expected of them, or they may view new cultural initiatives as mere “corporate rhetoric” rather than genuine efforts to improve the workplace. This can be particularly common in organisations that have undergone frequent changes in a relatively short space of time, leading people to be “change fatigued”.
Lack of Accountability
While this is often the most trying and controversial hurdle for leaders to address and overcome, without clear accountability structures culture is difficult to realise. Even when people understand the organisation’s values, if they remain in the ephemeral and abstract, they may not feel compelled to act on them. This is where embedding culture into formal processes, such as performance reviews or recognition programmes, becomes critical. Organisations that hold leaders and teams accountable for cultural behaviours are more likely to see those values come to life in everyday operations.
Siloed Departments and Fragmented Efforts
In larger organisations, separate departments may frequently operate in silos, each with its own priorities, structures, goals, and subcultures. Not only does this fragmentation make it difficult to instigate an overall cohesive organisational culture, but it also discourages internal mobility of skilled people between departments as they seek to further their career within the organisation, thus damaging retention. This “us” and “them” mentality makes interdepartmental communication and collaboration an inherent challenge. For example, the marketing department may value creativity, lateral thinking and a laissez-faire attitude towards procedures, whereas the finance team may prioritise attention to detail, caution, and adherence to strict procedures. Without a unified approach to culture, these subcultures can clash, making it difficult to align everyone to a shared vision.
As evidenced by the myriad challenges, embedding organisational culture is a nuanced and ongoing challenge that leaders face that requires a multi-faceted approach. While leaders may have a strong vision for the culture they want to build and the lived reality they want to see, making it happen requires a strategic approach with solutions tailored to not only overcome challenges faced but to also ensure long-lasting cultural alignment.
Leadership Consistency and Role Modelling
A consistent cultural vision must begin with leadership. Leaders at all levels, from c-suite executives to team managers, need to embody the organisation’s values in everything they do and lead by example. Whether intentional or not, people take cues from those they perceive as having greater authority and seniority then themselves and will model their own behaviour accordingly, so its vital that leaders consistently demonstrate core cultural values. This means truly “walking the walk” and going beyond mere verbal commitments and corporate platitudes – how they make decisions, address challenges, and interact with their teams – in alignment with cultural vision.
Its important for organisations to recognise that people in leadership positions are still just that – people – and as such don’t automatically unlock amazing leadership skills with the wave of a promotion. To empower their leaders and ensure consistency across the various teams and departments, organisations should invest in leadership development programmes that focus not only on operational success but also on cultural integrity. Evaluating leaders on how effectively they model and promote the organisation’s values can help ensure that culture is not only articulated, but actually lived, across the organisation.
At the risk of sounding somewhat Orwellian, the question needs to be posed, “who watches the watchers?” In order for leadership modelling to have its desired impact, it must be reflected right the way up the organisational hierarchy. Alignment with and accreditation by impartial, third-party bodies, such as the Irish Centre for Diversity, can help leaders stay on the straight and narrow and avoid the natural state of entropy which could turn good cultural intentions into disarray over time if not actively managed.
Continuous Communication and Reinforcement
A culture cannot be built through a single statement or annual meeting. For culture to be deeply embedded, it must be communicated regularly, consistently, and in ways that really resonate with people. This involves integrating discussions about culture into regular communications, such as team meetings, newsletters, internal bulletin boards (physical and digital), performance reviews and project discussions. The more people hear about the values of the organisation, the more they understand their relevance to their everyday tasks. Culture and values are the bedrock of an organisation, and with proper communication employees should be able to quickly relate what they’re doing during any given task back to an element of these underpinning values. Leaders can use casual moments, one-on-one check-ins, or team-building exercises to remind everyone of these values and align them with people’s personal and professional goals.
Employee Engagement and Ownership of Culture
Resistance to cultural change is a normal and not entirely irrational reaction to changing or embedding culture, particularly in organisations where people feel disengaged or view new cultural initiatives as “top-down” mandates. For a culture to truly take root and flourish, employees must feel like they have a role tending to it. Engaging employees early in the cultural development process can create a sense of ownership, making them more likely to embrace and live the organisation’s values.
To facilitate this, organisations should encourage feedback and open discussions about cultural initiatives. People need to feel empowered to voice their concerns, contribute ideas, and understand how the culture supports their individual roles and career developments. This feedback mechanism needs to be a safe space where people feel confident in expressing themselves and their ideas. Its important that employee-generated suggestions and initiatives are enacted, or else the entire process will be viewed as a box-ticking act of lip service. When people get to see personal benefits from embracing the culture, they become more invested in its success, thus reducing resistance to change.
Accountability and Embedding Culture into Processes
Without clear mechanisms for holding people – including leaders – accountable for aligning their behaviours with organisational values, cultural initiatives can fall flat. To help ensure long-term momentum and adherence to cultural principles, they need to be made tangible and integrated into processes, from performance reviews to promotions and reward systems. Core values should not be siloed into early training and onboarding, they need to be a visible element of business functions. This might mean taking into account how well employees collaborate, innovate, or demonstrate ethical decision making, alongside their operational or financial performance. By aligning real processes and metrics with cultural values, organisations can create a structure that reinforces and rewards cultural alignment.
Aligning an organisation’s cultural vision with its day-to-day reality is a strategic process that requires consistent leadership, continuous explicit and implicit communication, and a clear structure of accountability. By aligning processes with cultural values and integrating culture into strategic planning, organisations can make steps towards overcoming the challenge of cultural misalignment. Through this proactive approach organisations can ensure that their cultural vision is not just aspirational, but a reality experienced and lived by every employee.
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