In young companies, leaders shape culture. In mature companies, culture constrains leaders. You can only lead as far as the culture allows.
Are you leading a new team and want to create a strong culture? Or have you landed in an established company and you’re not sure about the way things are done around here? Here’s what you need to know about culture to lead more effectively.
How you lead in a young company is different to how you lead in a mature company. In new teams, the “way things are done around here“ isn’t set in stone—because “around here“ barely exists. You’re shaping the culture from the ground up, setting norms, and values, and influencing how people think and act.
Think of culture like an iceberg. Above the waterline is what outsiders see: what people do, what they say, and what they create. Beneath the surface lies deeply rooted assumptions built through years of success and failure. These guide how insiders see the world, acting as a lens that influences everything above the waterline. Culture tells a group how to interpret the world.
In young companies, leaders shape culture. The company hasn’t yet worked out how to survive. In search of answers, people look to their leader. If she leads them to success, they will do what she does and begin to think how she thinks. An engineering leader might value team players over hero programmers. She promotes team players, and her team notices. This is how leaders shape culture.
1) How to create culture in a new company
A leader could embed her beliefs in the organisation in several other ways:
- What she pays attention to
- How she reacts to crises
- Who she rewards
- What behaviours she role models
When you lead a young company or a new team, you are the culture creator. When people look to you, you have the opportunity to shape this culture. Yet it’s a different story in mature companies and long-established teams—you become a culture maintainer.
In mature companies, culture constrains leaders. After years of success, people in the organisation have deeply rooted beliefs on how to interpret the world. Align people to the culture and keep what has made the company successful. You’re a culture maintainer, aligning with existing norms while managing the team. Keep the culture strong through stories of past successes, systems and processes, and ways of working.
2) How to maintain an existing culture
You can reinforced culture through several mechanisms:
- Organisational design
- Systems and procedures
- Rituals of the organisation
- Stories told about important events and people at the company
Yet you can only lead as far as the culture will allow. Do your people believe they need to “move fast and break things” to win? Your proposed Annual Planning Cycle won’t get far. A culture rooted in stability and order will likewise be slow to adopt new and unproven technologies.
How can leaders manage culture?
The easy answer: Find a culture that fits you. One way to think about a company’s culture is to consider how people interact (independence to interdependence) and how they respond to change (flexibility to stability). Which do they value more: Collaboration or achievement? Creativity or stability? No company culture is objectively superior, but some may be better for you.
Sometimes, however, a culture may simply be dysfunctional. Beliefs that made the company great no longer hold in a changed world. If you find yourself faced with such a culture, keep this in mind:
When a leader with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for poor culture, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.
The hard answer: Culture change takes time. Kurt Lewin’s theory of driving and restraining forces can help. What are the forces that keep the culture in place? These could be the rituals of your team, how teams interact, and what type of work gets rewarded. If you reward your team only for individual effort, you’ll struggle to build a culture of collaboration.
When you plan to change the culture, what do you mean? Start by asking what outcomes you want to be different. Then, consider what behaviours you’d like to see. Compare this with current behaviours: what needs to start, stop, and continue? Culture is rooted in deep, unspoken, underlying assumptions. Yet these assumptions are built from small and regular wins. By staying consistent and showing progress, successful leaders can shift the culture.
The bottom line for culture and leadership
Whether you shape it or are shaped by it, culture matters for leaders. Stay consistent and show progress if you want to change the way things are done around here.