When Culture accelerates Strategy

Strategy rarely fails because the plan is flawed.It fails because it isn’t executed.

We all recognise the pattern: months spent refining plans, PowerPoints filled with ambition, roadmaps here, SWOTs there… and then? Nothing. Momentum fades. People disengage. The plans gather dust.

What goes wrong?

The root cause is seldom a faulty analysis. It’s behavior. And behind that behaviour lies culture. I see it almost every day in the organizations I work with: strategies that are sound on paper but stall in practice because the behavior on the ground fails to keep pace with the ambition.

Strategy without behavior is worthless

Research keeps confirming what most leaders suspect: organizations struggle mightily to translate plans into action. Gallup reports that worldwide, only 23% of employees feel genuinely connected to their organization’s strategy. The rest are cynical, passive, or focused mainly on self-preservation. And in a world that demands speed, collaboration and adaptability, that gap is untenable.

Culture: accelerator or handbrake

The critical question, then, is not whether the strategy is smart, but whether the culture will accelerate it or hold it back.

Culture may sound soft, yet its effects are hard and measurable. It determines how quickly decisions are made, how effectively people collaborate, and whether mistakes are surfaced or buried.

When culture and strategy reinforce one another, acceleration follows. Teams move across boundaries, decisions are made closer to the facts, and people feel safe enough to raise issues early. But when ambition and behaviour drift apart, culture becomes a brake. Meetings go quiet, teams retreat into silos, and self-protection replaces shared purpose.

Three cultural levers that make the difference

Across organizations, the same three elements consistently determine whether strategy moves or stalls:

1. Trust as a driver of speed

No team moves fast without trust. When people feel safe to share ideas, admit mistakes and ask questions, everything accelerates. Endless coordination and politics fall away.

Trust isn’t built through posters or slogans. It stems from visible leadership behaviour: communicating transparently, acting consistently with stated strategy and values, and creating psychological safety where experimentation is encouraged and feedback flows freely — top-down and bottom-up alike.

2. Decisions closer to the action

When every decision must climb three layers for approval, execution grinds to a halt. Implementing strategy requires decisions made quickly, on the spot, by people who understand the context.

Give teams both the mandate and the trust to act. Otherwise, everyone keeps meeting instead of delivering.

3. Breaking the silos

Even with trust and autonomy, execution falters when teams operate in parallel rather than in concert. Silos are the natural state of any organisation — unless leaders deliberately design for collaboration.

That means shared goals, transparent communication and regular coordination. Not vague “alignment,” but tangible, shared accountability.

A real-world example

One acquisition — eighteen months in the making and supported by consultants, branding work and a compelling business case — looked flawless on paper. The merger promised scale advantages, access to new customers and one strong brand story.

In practice, it unfolded differently. The two entities continued to operate separately. Teams were measured on their own profit contributions rather than collective results. There were no shared goals, no joint accountability and little coordination.

Instead of reinforcing each other, the teams began to compete. Employees withheld customer information to protect individual targets. Trust evaporated. Energy shifted from the market to internal rivalry. The promised synergies never materialized, and the shared growth narrative lost credibility.

The strategy was sound. The execution wasn’t. The culture provided no foundation for integration or shared success. One plus one didn’t make three — it barely made one and a half.

What you can start doing tomorrow

1. Take the temperature: run a quick pulse on engagement and trust. Where are the friction points?

2. Check your decision chain: where does autonomy sit? Where does delay creep in? What could be decided lower in the organization, closer to the work?

3. Build a cross-team pilot: bring together people from different departments around one goal, shared metrics and regular coordination.

In the end

Strategy rarely fails because of bad ideas. It fails in execution. Execution depends on behavior. And behavior is shaped by culture.

If you want your plans to live beyond the paper, don’t stop at strategy. Engage and enable the people who have to make it real.