Leadership Success Pattern #4

Jack led a commercial unit that had been successful for years, selling standard products. Then the strategy changed. The company wanted more solution sales, more tailored offers, earlier technical involvement, and closer coordination across sales, engineering, and delivery.

Jack responded as many competent leaders do. He invested in competence development. He updated roles. He clarified responsibilities. And still the change stalled. What he eventually realised was that the problem was not mainly skill. It was culture.

Many leaders talk about culture as if it were weather. They describe it, work around it, and assume they largely must live with it. But culture is not weather.

Culture is a social pattern continuously reproduced through shared beliefs, routines, informal norms, follow-up, and role modelling. If those patterns remain unchanged, people keep enacting yesterday’s logic, even when the strategy has moved on.

That was Jack’s problem. His team still interpreted its purpose through the old commercial logic: close deals, optimise locally, and sell in your own way. That had worked in product sales. It was no longer fit-for-purpose in solution sales, where value creation depended on disciplined handovers, shared requirement capture, and cross-functional coordination.

This is where many culture efforts fail. Leaders change messages without also changing the underlying social logic of performance.

What most leaders call company culture is usually not one thing. It is a mix of subcultures. In each part of the organisation, three or four subcultures will usually do most of the work of shaping performance. In Jack’s case, three mattered.

First, the focus and ambition culture. Solution sales required goal-path clarity. People needed a shared understanding of what the new strategy meant for customer value, how that value was created across functions, and how to prioritise accordingly. Goals do guide behaviour, but only when people understand the means-end chain well enough to use it in daily judgement.

Second, the discipline culture. Jack’s unit had long benefited from strong empowerment, but it was combined with weak discipline. Everyone had developed their own way of working. In solution sales, that became costly. Accountability was now essential: clear commitments, clarity on who owned what, follow-up on agreed standards, and constructive correction when execution drifted. This was not about reducing autonomy. It was about making autonomy usable in interdependent work.

Third, the collaboration culture, especially the liaison element. The critical challenge was no longer only what happened inside sales. It was what happened between functions. Where were the exchange spaces that determined performance? Which handovers required common formats, communication gates, and regular dialogue? If those interfaces were left informal, the strategy would fail in execution.

You cannot communicate your way to a new culture. Not through value posters. Not through campaigns. Not even through well-crafted presentations of expected behaviour. Culture shifts when leaders run a focused, guided social learning process.

That is why the PIA cycle moves culture.

Priorities & Principles means clarifying what the new strategy requires. In Jack’s case, it was earlier technical involvement, shared documentation, discipline around shared processes, and better cross-functional coordination.

Involving & Interpreting means bringing the relevant people together to work out what those principles mean in practice. This is where leaders often fail. They explain, but they do not facilitate collective thinking. Yet shared interpretation is what builds common ground around OK and not-OK behaviour, daily prioritisation, and the exchange spaces that matter most.

Acting & Aligning means turning that interpretation into behavioural commitments, routines, templates, review points, and leadership follow-up. People cannot think their way into a new culture. A team, an individual, and an organisation act their way into it through repeated practice, reinforcement, and adjustment.

Jack’s unit did not improve because the culture was “fixed.” It improved when Jack put in the effort to reshape the culture through focused involvement, ending with clear commitments. Followed by persistently keeping each other accountable to develop the new work patterns that eventually turn into a culture.

The real question for leaders is not whether culture can change, but whether you are actively shaping the beliefs and behaviours on which your strategy now depends.