I have often said in boardrooms, “A company’s real culture isn’t on the wall—it’s in the hallway.”
Because here’s the thing: what’s written in the strategy document, what’s printed on those glossy posters, and what’s actually lived every day can be three entirely different worlds.
Over the years, I’ve seen organizations with pitch-perfect strategy decks but a completely different story playing out on the floor. The stated mission might be innovation, but the actual behavior is risk-aversion. The official value might be collaboration, but the real reward system favors individual heroics. This disconnect isn’t a coincidence—it’s the direct result of the strategies we never explicitly teach but silently endorse.
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In the corporate world, we often assume strategy is what leaders communicate in town halls, in reports, and in training sessions. But I have found that there’s also a “silent curriculum” — the unspoken rules, behaviors, and decision-making patterns that people absorb by simply being part of the environment.
Think about it: when a new employee joins your team, they might get a week of onboarding about the company’s values. But what really shapes their behavior is how people around them act when the CEO isn’t in the room. It’s the stories they hear over lunch, the way deadlines are negotiated, and even how mistakes are handled.
In fact, Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends report once highlighted that 83% of executives believe culture is critical to business success, yet only 28% say they understand their culture well. That gap is often because culture isn’t what’s written—it’s what’s practiced in silence.
I once worked with a mid-sized manufacturing company whose leadership was obsessed with efficiency. They ran training after training on process improvement. But in practice, managers would routinely “bend the process” to get urgent orders out—without consequences. The implicit strategy was clear: speed trumps process. Within six months, no one followed the documented workflows.
Where Culture Hijacks Strategy
Here’s the irony: most organizations spend millions on training programs, leadership offsites, and performance frameworks. Yet the actual driver of day-to-day decisions is often not the stated strategy but the experienced one.
If your official strategy says “customer-first” but your managers are measured solely on quarterly cost savings, guess what’s going to win? That’s not a people problem; that’s a design problem.
Say a retail chain trying to improve customer experience scores. They hire consultants, redesign store layouts, and launch customer service workshops. But when bonus season arrives, store managers get rewarded for hitting sales per square foot targets—regardless of service scores. Unsurprisingly, staff will begin rushing customers out the door to make more transactions.
The culture that forms in these cases isn’t random—it’s an emergent property of what leaders actually reward, tolerate, and model. In Blue Ocean terms, this is your “value curve” for behavior. If you don’t intentionally shape it, the market (in this case, your internal market of employees) will do it for you. And it won’t always be pretty.
Spotting the Implicit Strategy
I have learned to listen for certain “tells” when diagnosing an organization’s culture-versus-strategy gap.
Here are a few red flags:
1. Decision Escalation Patterns
Does every small decision end up at the top because no one trusts the process?
2. Reward Structures
Are bonuses and recognition aligned with the stated values, or with completely different KPIs?
3. Conflict Resolution
Are disagreements dealt with openly, or quietly avoided?
4. Role Models
Who gets promoted, and why?
One of the most revealing exercises I have done with clients is asking a simple question to employees at all levels: “What does it take to succeed here?” The answers are rarely about the formal strategy—they are about unwritten expectations.
And these unwritten expectations can sometimes reveal the entire “shadow strategy” of a company. In one tech startup I worked with, the official mantra was “Fail Fast, Learn Faster.” But when I asked people what it took to succeed, they said: “Never miss a deadline, no matter the cost.” In other words, the real rule was “Don’t fail at all.”
A team of 30 seems like quite a significant resource to focus on the digital pound,” Ian Taylor, an adviser to the trade association CryptoUK, told the Times. “It shows the impact it would have, and that the bank are serious about it.
Mitchel Krytok – Quote
Teaching the Real Strategy
So, what do we do with this gap? Pretend it doesn’t exist? That’s a recipe for frustration, turnover, and a culture of cynicism.
Instead, we need to make the implicit explicit. That means:
1. Auditing the Unspoken Rules –
What behaviors actually get rewarded? What’s quietly discouraged?
2. Re-aligning Incentives –
If you want collaboration, stop rewarding only individual performance.
3. Embedding Desired Behaviors into Capability Building –
Don’t just tell leaders to be strategic thinkers; give them scenarios where they have to navigate ambiguity.
4. Story-proofing your Culture –
Share examples of the right behaviors being recognized, not just the big wins.
I once partnered with an IT services company that wanted to build a culture of innovation. They had the labs, the budgets, the hackathons—but nothing changed. Why? Because every “failed” experiment was met with silence or subtle disapproval.
When we rewired leadership training to celebrate learning from failure (and literally added “post-mortem storytelling” to meetings), innovation stopped being a slogan and started becoming muscle memory.
Culture is the Strategy People Experience
Here’s the reality: if strategy is the blueprint, culture is the construction crew. You can have the most brilliant blueprint in the world, but if the crew decides to build a different house, you are living in that one.
This is why I believe culture is not just a “soft” side effect of strategy—it’s the operating system that runs it. And if you are not teaching the operating system, you are letting it code itself.
When I walk into organizations now, I don’t just look at their strategy decks. I watch the Monday morning meeting. I listen to how a sales win is celebrated. I see how people respond when something goes wrong. Because in those moments, the real strategy is playing out in high definition.
My Takeaway
The most effective leaders I have worked with don’t just announce strategy—they teach it, live it, and weave it into the daily interactions of the business. They know that every hallway conversation is either reinforcing or eroding what they are trying to build.
If you don’t teach the strategy you want, you will end up with the culture you didn’t plan for. And in my experience, culture is a much harder thing to fix than strategy is to rewrite.
Reflection Prompt: Next time you are in a meeting, watch the decisions being made. Are they aligned with your official strategy, or are they following an entirely different playbook?
