Why culture is strategy

We’ve grown strangely comfortable separating things that were never meant to be separated: leadership from management, vision from execution, and perhaps most damaging, culture from strategy.

Inside companies, this split shows up everywhere. A CEO announces a bold future about democratizing access or building a place where people take smart risks. Then culture gets handed to HR as if it belongs on a separate track, while the business strategy unfolds on its own timeline. The result is predictable. Employees are asked to navigate the distance between what leaders say and how the organization actually works.

That distance is not neutral. It creates avoidable friction, the kind of drag that occurs when people try to act on values the organization has not built around. Built In’s 2024 Culture Report shows that 74% of employees feel demotivated in a poor cultural fit, and 61% would leave for a stronger cultural fit even without a major raise. The message is clear: Misalignment is expensive.

NEEDED: CLARITY AND STRUCTURE

But the deeper cost is structural. Avoidable friction emerges when leaders declare a value but never define it or embed it into the operating model.

You say you value accountability, but there is no shared understanding of what it looks like.
You say “family first,” but still expect employees to respond while out of office.
You say being a good partner matters, but your incentives penalize anyone who extends the sales cycle to build trust.

This is not about leaders being disingenuous. It is about the reality that business is messy, and unspoken values tend to override the ones printed in the handbook. When leaders are not honest about what truly matters, employees spend more energy decoding the hidden rules than doing the work they were hired to do.

The fix is clarity, not charisma.

The organizations gaining ground today are not the ones with inspirational posters or expansive value lists. They are the ones willing to make their values operational. That is why the B Corp movement has more than doubled since 2020, with 10,394 certified companies currently, across 103 countries. Leaders are discovering something simple and powerful: When culture is strategy, performance compounds. According to Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends, companies with positive cultures deliver 30% higher innovation and 40% better retention. Analysis from McKinsey has shown that companies with a healthy culture are three times more likely to outperform companies with unhealthy cultures.

What these companies share is not moral perfection. It is precision. They name fewer values. They define them. They make them actionable. They hold themselves accountable in the same ways they expect from their teams.

Because here is the truth most leaders overlook: Every organization already has a culture. The question is whether it reflects the strategy or contradicts it.

CULTURE MUST BE VISIBLE

If you want to reduce avoidable friction—and the burnout, confusion, and turnover that follow—culture cannot remain a sentiment in an employee handbook. It has to be visible in hiring criteria, promotion decisions, meeting norms, resource allocation, and the daily choices that signal what actually matters.

This often feels intimidating, which is why culture gets handed to HR like an extracurricular. But culture is not extra work. Culture is the work. And you do not need more values to fix it. You need fewer values with deeper integrity. When your words match your systems, the organization exhales. People stop guessing. Teams regain momentum.

Alignment is not just a leadership obligation. It is a relief. For leaders, for employees, and for the business.

When culture becomes strategy, you no longer have to push the organization forward. You create the conditions, and the culture pulls the strategy with it.

Natasha Nuytten is CEO of CLARA.

source https://www.fastcompany.com/91470133/why-culture-is-strategy