Culture: The Hardest Nut to Crack in Leadership
Why cultural change can’t be managed directly — and what leaders can do instead
Culture is one of the most powerful — and most underestimated — forces in any organization.
It describes the well-worn paths of action people take every day: the informal shortcuts that are often faster and more effective than the official routes.
These behavioral paths usually emerge for good reasons. They reflect what once worked — the solutions that made sense and proved successful. Over time, they solidify into patterns that feel natural and efficient.
But culture becomes a problem when those patterns no longer fit the current environment.
And that’s when leadership faces one of its toughest challenges:
you can’t change culture directly.
Culture isn’t a policy to rewrite — it’s a system of learned assumptions, shared expectations, and unspoken norms that stabilize how people act. It’s the organization’s autopilot.
Why cultural change is so difficult
When leaders sense that “something in the culture isn’t working anymore,” the instinctive response is often to define new values — trust, innovation, customer focus.
But these efforts usually miss the point.
It’s not that employees don’t know those values.
It’s that they experience everyday contradictions — tensions between what’s preached and what’s practiced.
Guidelines and value posters often promise clarity, but real culture is full of paradoxes.
That’s why direct interventions — like imposing new value statements — rarely work. They collide with the lived reality of how people actually get things done.
Culture as a set of learned assumptions
As organizational psychologist Edgar Schein describes it, culture is a pattern of shared assumptions that groups develop when solving problems of external adaptation and internal coordination.
Because these assumptions have proven effective, they are taught to new members as “the right way” to perceive, think, and act.
In systems terms, culture is a bundle of undecidable decision premises — orientations that guide behavior without being formally decided.
They can’t be commanded into existence. They emerge.
That’s also why culture provides stability: it keeps things running smoothly — until it doesn’t.
And when it doesn’t, the autopilot starts to resist.
Leading cultural change “via the side”
So how can leaders act when culture no longer fits?
The answer is: indirectly.
Culture cannot be “managed” in a linear way. But it can be influenced — through new structures, communication patterns, and leadership behaviors that make new experiences possible.
That’s what systemic leadership means:
taking culture seriously enough not to try to control it head-on.
Effective leaders work through the system, not against it.
They use narratives to frame change — honoring what has worked in the past while explaining why some patterns no longer serve.
They create dialogue, not dogma.
And they understand that resistance isn’t the enemy — it’s information.
It shows where meaning, identity, and past success still live.
The real lever: decision premises and leadership attention
Culture is what systems theorists call an undecidable decision premise — it can’t be decreed, only evolved.
That’s why effective culture change happens indirectly.
Leaders create the conditions for new behavior to make sense:
By changing communication paths and decision processes.
By showing or withholding certain behaviors.
And by using negation — making undesired behaviors visible and less likely, rather than prescribing what should happen.
Leaders also shape culture through their own behavior — and through the absence of it.
Sometimes, doing less is more:
Not speaking first.
Not reacting too fast.
Not rescuing every conflict.
Because every act of leadership — every question, glance, or silence — sends a cultural signal.
From words to attention
Culture change doesn’t begin with new slogans or workshops.
It begins with attention.
What leaders notice becomes what others consider important.
What leaders ignore becomes invisible.
And in that sense, the truest statement about culture might be this:
Culture doesn’t change through words — it changes through what you notice.