Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast Every Day of the Week
- Michelle Scott
- Jul 25
- 6 min read
Too often we see strategic plans fail. Why do so many great plans fall short on execution?
The answer: culture. Strategy fails to execute in a handful of predictable ways. Although this is not an exhaustive list, here are a few way it typically breaks down:
• There's no clear vision, or no real alignment around that vision.
• The senior team isn't aligned with the strategy.
• The senior team doesn't operate as a single unit accountable for the whole vision — each leader focuses only on their own domain.
• Teams are siloed, working for their department or business unit rather than the organization as a whole.
• There's a lack of accountability.
• Communication is ineffective, in the senior team and below.
Trust and conflict: the deeper breaks
There are two culture failures tend to run deeper than the rest and are worth calling out on their own.
1) Lack of trust shows up when people withhold information, take credit for others' work, stay quiet instead of contributing ideas, fail to acknowledge or support one another, or operate from fear of blame — sometimes even gaslighting colleagues.
2) Conflict and personal clashes show up in how people talk to each other: yelling, arguing, not listening, interrupting, and needing to be right rather than understanding other perspectives and making the decision that's best for the organization. Left unaddressed, this kind of conflict erodes trust further and drives disengagement and stifles innovation and productivity.
What does this cost the organization?
We know the cost of absenteeism, burnout, turnover, presenteeism, and disengagement — commonly estimated at anywhere from half to four times the departing employee's annual salary, depending on the role and level of seniority (Center for American Progress; Applauz, 2025). But what is a culture misstep also costing you when you miss the mark on sales revenue, growth targets, reputation, customer satisfaction, project delays, cost overruns and lost opportunities?
Yes — culture eats strategy for breakfast every day of the week, and twice on Sundays. And left unchecked, it will eat into your balance sheet, too, through the compounding cost of ignoring the warning signs.
What Are the Warning Signs to Watch For?
Leadership and communication
• High turnover, especially among strong performers or within a specific team — usually a manager problem.
• Decisions get made in back channels; people find out about things that affect them second-hand.
• Leaders talk about “transparency” and “values” but don't demonstrate them through their behavior and decisions.
• Bad news gets hidden. When something goes wrong, the focus lands on who rather than what, and people learn not to raise problems.
How people are treated
• Fear-based motivation — people work late because they're scared not to, not because they're engaged.
• Favoritism that's obvious to everyone.
• “We're a family” rhetoric used to justify overwork or manufacture guilt.
• People who push back or disagree get sidelined, labeled “not a culture fit,” or quietly pushed out.
• Burnout is treated as a personal failing rather than a systemic problem.
Day-to-day signals
• A lot of meetings about meetings; unclear ownership; frequent rework and reorganizing.
• Gossip and triangulation are the main way information moves.
• Praise and recognition are rare and vague; criticism is frequent and personal.
• Roles, responsibilities, expectations, and priorities are unclear.
• Lack of clear goals and accountability projects tend to have delays or cost overrun.
Ethical drift
• Pressure to cut corners, mislead customers, or hit numbers in ways that feel off.
• Known bad actors — harassers, bullies, underperforming favorites — get protected because they're senior or “high performers.”
• NDAs, settlements, or sudden departures with no explanation.
• Diversity and ethics statements that don't match who actually gets hired and promoted.
What's the Answer — and How Do You Stay Ahead of These Warning Signs?
Watch for the warning signs at every level and be intentional about building the culture that will drive and execute the organization’s strategy. Here are four places to focus that intentional effort to build the culture for organizational success.
1. How effective is your senior team?
In Senior Leadership Teams, Ruth Wageman and her co-authors identify the components that are critical to a leadership team's success. Is the team behaving as one team, or as individuals who only concern themselves with their own business unit or department? Does the team have the diversity of thought, experience, expertise, and skill to support innovation and problem-solving? Is the team communicating in a way that supports candid conversation and debate, so it can reach the best possible outcome? How aligned is the team on the vision, the strategy, and the goals needed to execute it? Do they hold themselves and each other accountable — engaging in productive conflict in service of the common vision, rather than operating from a place of scarcity and fiefdom?
The CEO has to make the call on who belongs on that team and who doesn't. Without an effective senior team, it's far harder for everyone below them to operate with clarity, execute well, and be held accountable for results. The senior team models the way for everyone else — they should be the gold standard and the mentors for the next generation of leaders.
2. Are your senior leaders modeling the way?
The senior leadership team should be passing the fundamentals of a high-performing team down through the organization: setting team norms and behaviors that intentionally support the culture they want, clearly articulating values, vision, purpose, and goals, and leveraging each person's strengths so everyone understands their role and how to collaborate toward shared outcomes.
The piece that's easiest to overlook is how the team works together to achieve those goals. Are leaders' decisions, behaviors, and actions actually aligned with the values they espouse? When leaders aren't having conversations about how they show up and treat each other, that's when culture starts to get away from you. Without the tools and communication skills for productive conversation, teams avoid conflict instead of resolving it — and trust breaks down, leading to the kind of dysfunction that makes it impossible to deliver on strategy.
3. How clear is your team on understanding that what they do matters?
When employees don't understand how their work connects to the organization's vision or strategy, disengagement follows. Bottom-up approaches to strategy and goal-setting — ensuring voices are heard, clarifying roles and responsibilities, and getting clear on how the team works together — help build that alignment between individual work, team goals, and organizational strategy. This alignment of purpose between the individual, team and organization is a key focus area that gets overlooked by many. And yet this is one of the pivotal discussions with your teams that will increase engagement and productivity.
4. Leadership development will save your customers
People leave bad managers and bad cultures. If your culture is toxic, your customers will know it. When you have strong leaders running high-performing, highly engaged teams, customer satisfaction rises — and so do revenue and profitability.
In First, Break All the Rules, Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, working with the Gallup Organization, laid out the financial case for employee engagement as a chain of cause and effect:
a) The right people, in the right roles, with the right managers, drive employee engagement. (See also Jim Collins's Good to Great.)
b) Engaged employees drive customer loyalty.
c) Loyal customers drive sustainable growth.
d) Sustainable growth drives real profit increases.
Investing the time and resources to develop your leaders — and to prepare the next generation before they need to lead — sets that chain in motion. Too often, organizations promote their star performer into a management role without the training, skills, or even the desire for it. That doesn't set anyone up for success; it creates the very problems you're trying to avoid. Leadership development isn't a nice-to-have. It's essential to organizational success.
Strategy execution and success hinges heavily on culture. Your strategy will fail if you're not paying attention to the culture that's meant to drive it. Culture isn't soft — it's strategic. It drives retention, productivity, innovation, and customer loyalty, and it shows up directly in revenue growth and cost savings. The organizations that watch for the warning signs and treat culture as a deliberate investment, rather than an afterthought, are the ones built to lead.
That's the work we do. Northridge Executive Partners facilitates strategic planning, provides leadership development and helps leadership teams turn culture into a competitive advantage. Let's talk about what that could look like for your organization.
About the Author: Michelle Scott, MCC, ACTC, NBC-HWC
Michelle Scott is the CEO/President of Northridge Executive Partners, providing Executive/Leadership Coaching, Consulting, Facilitation, Team/Board Effectiveness, Well-Being Coaching, and customized solutions and workshops. She is a Master Certified Executive Coach (MCC), an Advanced Certified Team Coach (ACTC), and a National Board-Certified Health & Wellbeing Coach (NBC-HWC). She is sought after as a keynote speaker and facilitator on topics including Leadership Solutions, Burnout / Health & Wellbeing, Culture Transformation, and Team and Board Effectiveness.