Your engagement survey says the culture is strong. The corridor behaviour says something else entirely...
Which one is the culture? If I'm leading change...what do I pay attention to?
A couple of weeks back I put out a provocation: your transformation has a financial strategy: a budget, a baseline, a review cadence. So what's the cultural and behavioural equivalent?
And why do I even have to ask that?! Thanks to the power of LinkedIn, a Scottish practitioner in manufacturing asked a very good follow up question: How do you differentiate cultural from behavioural? And in the wider sense, what do you actually mean by cultural?
Acknowledging upfront that there are many academic angles to this, which I have personally seen from an undergraduate degree in Culture, Communications and Media through to a Masters in Strategy, Innovation and Organisations.
I'm sure you could find theories to both advance or negate the below, which is my pragmatic change leader answer.
Behaviour is observable, individual, and traceable.
Behaviour is observable, and it sits more at the individual level. Ideally it's traceable back to deliberate decisions on strategy.
That last part is at the working end of the 'golden thread' aka: the connective tissue from boardroom intent to the specific thing a person does differently on a Tuesday morning. When a behaviour can't be traced back to a strategic decision, one of two things is true. The behaviour is noise, or the strategy is.
Behavioural change is the bulk of transformation work, and it's the designable bulk. You can define it, observe it, resource it, support it.
What you can't do is mandate it into lasting, or working as intended. In my former People and Culture days, this was the first thing you learned about 'performance and reward'.
Put simply (and much more profitably over his lifetime!) by Charlie Munger: "Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome"
In an ambiguous transformation environment, the incentives are emergent - which makes behaviour emergent and the culture formed from the 'doing'.
Culture is a verb.
Culture is the rituals and practices teams enact, but also the formal and informal ways in how those practices are enacted.
There's the Monday stand-up...and then who actually talks first at the Monday stand-up.
The documented escalation path, and the corridor conversation that really decides what is going to happen here.
The values on the wall...versus what happens to the person who "lives them" at the wrong moment.
Most organisations treat culture as a noun instead. A thing with attributes, measurable on a survey, adjustable through programs. So Engagement Pulse scores trend up, Values posters get reprinted and the new Code of Conduct is launched.
A culture survey is a helpful snapshot and can yield real insight. When the underlying dynamic is healthy, the organisation behaves the way the survey says it does. When it isn't…the survey gives you the central tendency as the norm, and the corridor vibe tells you everything.
Underneath the rituals is a better word for describing true culture: belief.
Rituals and practices are what you can see of culture. Belief is what powers them and it's what you can feel (more on that later).
In Chapter 9 of my upcoming book I make the case that belief is the honest name for culture. People deciding, day by day, whether they still believe. Enact the rituals without the belief and you get theatre — the practices hold exactly as long as the supervision does.
I learned this at footy clubs long before I learned it in boardrooms. When belief is distributed, the senior players own the culture as much as the coaching staff, and you get genuine, durable change. When it isn't, you get compliance at best.
The belief in the mission creates the incentives and aligns the behaviours. Watch how quickly individuals in a team change their behaviours, once the belief in "winning" is gone...
If you're leading change, understanding how belief is actually distributed in your organisation is a primary part of the job.
(Genuinely unsure how you'd assess that in your program? That's exactly what Pragma was built for…bring it your real situation.)
The pragmatist's question: which one pays - behaviours or culture?
The evidence is strong on the pair. Alex Edmans found companies on the "100 Best Companies to Work For" list generated 2.3% to 3.8% higher stock returns per year than their peers across nearly three decades — a study built specifically to rule out the "successful firms just treat people better" objection. Gallup's meta-analysis — 183,806 business units in its latest 2024 edition, puts the profitability gap between top and bottom engagement quartiles at 23% (or in other words...the top quarter of engaged business units have 23% more profitability). A number that caught my eye; there is a difference of 78% for absenteeism for that interquartile range.
Not worth having arguments about "behaviour versus culture", if err...there's no one there!
Here's the honest methodological complication: the research can't cleanly separate 'culture-profit' from 'behaviour-profit', because the measures entangle — at a rolled up level, engagement surveys capture belief and enacted behaviour together.
So the sharper pragmatic question is: where is your current constraint?
If behaviours are undefined, belief has nothing to convert into.
If behaviours are defined but only hold under supervision, your constraint is belief.
Invest your time and effort as a leader, at the constraint.
Sense check: whose culture are you building anyway?
I've written previously about the skewed Westernised assumptions regarding the cultural and social architecture people bring into the room — how their context treats hierarchy, time, directness and disagreement. Chapter 5 of the book argues most change frameworks were built without noticing that architecture at all. A serious cultural strategy works with the inherited context and wider zeitgeist.
The Duality of Change remains
There is an interplay between Hearts and Minds, when you think about a behavioural and cultural strategy.
Behavioural definitions precise enough to design, observe and support. Each one traceable to a deliberate strategic decision. And a deliberate plan for how belief (the artist formerly known as culture) gets earned and distributed through the rituals your teams actually enact.
There are plenty of academic definitions of both words, and I'd never claim mine settles it. This is the practitioner's version — the one I've lived in the room.
My Monday suggestion: go find out what your teams do when nobody senior is watching. Compare it with what the survey told you. The gap between those two answers is where your cultural strategy starts…and closing it will do more for the transformation than the next comms and training plan.
(As for why you can physically feel a culture within minutes of walking into a building — an Adelaide neuroscientist has spent her career on exactly that; an article about that is long overdue...and up next!)
Thanks to David MacNicol for the question that prompted this piece.
The full argument lives in Chapter 9 of my upcoming book, Pragmatic Change — register your interest here. Last week's provocation is in The Duality of change.
Sources: Edmans (2012), Academy of Management Perspectives; Gallup (2024) Q12 Meta-Analysis, 11th edition