Changing Culture
How to find out what your culture is, what it should be and how to change it.
Your culture isn't what's written on your office walls. It's what happens when deadlines are tight, resources are scarce, and no one's watching. It’s the operating system of your business and strongly affects how everything gets done.
In this article, we’ll dig into what culture is, how to find out what you’ve got, and then look at some ways of changing your culture.
What is culture?
It’s something that eats strategy for breakfast (obviously!). I guess the point of this much-repeated quote is culture is arguably the most powerful tool at a leader’s disposal for getting stuff done.
Edgar Schein describes culture as “a pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration”. Schein further elaborates this in three levels:
Artifacts (visible elements like processes, tools, dress code)
Espoused Values (stated norms, goals, and philosophies),
Underlying Assumptions (deep, unspoken beliefs and tacit understandings).
The top levels are the easiest to change but have the least impact. It’s the underlying assumptions that truly drive behaviour.
My favourite definition of culture is much simpler, it’s simply “the way we do things around here” (Kotter might be the reference I’ve picked this up from).
What’s your culture?
Just like every bit of software has an architecture (planned or not!), every company has a culture. How do you find out what yours is?
Well, this is where we go back to Schein’s definition of artifacts, espoused values and underlying assumptions.
Artifacts
Artifacts are easy to find. If you walk into your company with curiosity and observe how people interact and the processes they use, you’ll get a good impression of the artifacts within the company.
What’s the office environment? (cubicles? individual offices? all-remote? hybrid?)
How does work get planned and prioritized?
How does work get done?
How is code written, tested and deployed?
These artifacts are easy to find, but they are often an emergent property of the values and underlying assumptions.
Espoused Values
This is the organization’s publicly declared beliefs and moral codes. Chances are you can find these on the website.
What’s the company’s mission statement?
What are their company values?
Is there a public declaration about “how they do things around here?”
The mission is the company’s reason for existing. For example, Google wants to “organize the world’s information”, LinkedIn wants to “connect the world’s professionals …” and so on.
Values should be the lived behaviours that help shape some of the artifacts. Zappos’s number one value is to “Deliver WOW Through Service”, Amazon has the leadership principles and is customer obsessed and so on.
What’s interesting here is whether these values are truly lived. You can hopefully see this through observation. If you’re watching a team at Amazon, are they truly customer obsessed? (is the legend of the empty chair in meetings true?). If a customer complaint makes it through to Zappos are they really performing a WOW moment?
Almost every company says “trust, “transparency” - is that lived?
One of the things you are looking for when digging is cognitive dissonance (that discomfort of holding contradictory beliefs). For example, as a consumer of Google, I’m pretty sceptical that they are “protecting users” as I receive misleading adverts and my ad-blockers stop working. Is that feeling shared within Google?
Underlying assumptions
It’s much harder to find the underlying assumptions.
One thing that Redgate have done in the past that has been exceptionally useful is to bring in someone to talk to teams about how they work. Redgate have used Tim Lister, Dan North and Pat Kua in the past. All of which have done a stunningly good job with a couple of days of talking to folks and finding out the true culture. Why does this work better?
You might have a culture where no-one will tell you what sucks.
What better than to have an expert listen to you!?
A consultant who’s seen many orgs has a sixth sense about when something is weird
To do a good job here requires some distance, I think. If you can’t afford a consultant, one way to do it is to tap into the new starters. They’ll have got the speel on espoused values during the application process (either through research or you selling the company), and they’ll have lived the artifacts. What conflicts are there between the two?
By the time you’ve collected the artifacts, values and assumptions you should have a pretty good idea of what the culture is, but is it any good?
Is your culture good?
What does good mean? A good culture aligns with your values and helps you achieve your company strategy. Chances are that if your company is succeeding, then your culture is already in a good place, but as always, I’m sure it could be better.
Do the artifacts you see reflect what you imagined?
You might be a tech leader who advocates test-driven development and find that those happen after the fact. Is that good or bad?
Is the agile you imagined, the agile you’ve got? Are practices theatre? Cargo-culted throughout the organization with little understanding of the “why” behind it?
Are people treated how you thought?
(and so on).
I’m not trying to suggest that any given artifact is good or bad, but if it’s not what you imagined it needs further investigation.
However, there are some universal goods with culture. One is the concept of psychological safety. Alas, this is one of those words that’s suffered logicide, and the widely accepted meaning has been diluted to mean things like “friendly” and “collaborative”. It’s not - it’s a high-performance environment where team members are safe to take risks, express ideas and concerns and admit mistakes. It’s radical candour for teams. (expanded upon in Psychological Safety vs. High Standards by Sheril Mathews).
If you haven’t observed these things happening, I’d argue this is an area to explore in greater depth. Are folks scared of making mistakes? You can use Westrum’s culture model to see how your teams fare. If you’re not a generative culture, understanding why feels important!
How to change a culture.
The culture you’ve got is a consequence of decisions taken throughout the lifetime of the company. It’s not an accident. Just as every bit of software has an architect, every company has a culture. Would you rather have an emergent culture, or deliberately create the one you need?
How do you define the culture you need? Again, start from the company strategy. What is the organization trying to achieve? If you’re in engineering, put the strategy in the context of engineering. Let’s say the strategy involves releasing a brand new product line for the first time in a decade; are the artifacts, values and assumptions you’ve found fit for purpose? That’s almost certainly a very different culture than a company optimizing for costs.
Change is really hard, but there are some lessons we can learn on things that work, and those that don’t.
What doesn’t work?
This is the easiest bit. I’ll just give you a list of bullet points.
Top down mandates - Culture can’t be changed by decree. A new slogan is not going to change your company. Who’d have thought “Good morning everyone, customers are important.” is not a compelling way to change culture!
Rip and replace - Forcing culture change isn’t going to work either. Just look at the emergent cultures that happened during the pandemic. Folks started working from home and enjoyed it. Now we’re seeing a whole bunch of companies trying to change that aspect of culture. How’s that working?
Cargo culting - Doing new things without the reasons why. Agile is the most commonly cargo-culted thing I’ve seen. When the “why” behind a change isn’t communicated, people just go through the motions. Stand-ups become the morning meeting. Retrospectives become meetings to add more process. Reviews become finger-pointing. And so on.
Hypocrisy - The leadership team that talks of psychological safety and then shouts at people for failure. The exec that jets off around the world after extolling the new company value of being green. Bad!
No buy-in - A decision to change the culture needs to have broad support. When Zuckerberg talks about “masculine energy” because of a “neutered” company culture or Musk advocates for 80 hour working weeks I’d guess that doesn’t have buy-in. That’s not cultural change, it’s a deliberate rip and replace without taking responsibility for it.
What does work?
This is much harder. Changing people’s behaviour is hard. If you’ve ever tried to change your own behaviour (diet, fitness) you’ll recognize how hard that is, now multiply that up by however many people are in your organization and you’ll get an idea of the challenge.
But there are techniques that work. Here’s a few:
Why? - If you’re not clear why the culture needs to change, then how on earth can you expect others to be? Having the stories of change from real examples is incredibly powerful. These stories need repeating until they turn into anchors for the new culture. A powerful example from Redgate was the time we accidentally replaced all our products with a copy of Spotify. We didn’t hide this away, in fact it became one of the stories we told in the “Book of Redgate”.
Change actions/environment, then mindset - The classic article “How to Change a Culture: Lessons from NUMMI” shows that change happens when you change what people do and the environment they are in. This doesn’t have to be so grand - Redgate wanted more spontaneous collaboration, so all coffee machines were moved to the ground floor. Result, more coffee conversations, more links across bits of the company. Win!
Build on strengths - Chances are that when you did that culture audit, you found some awesomeness. Write it down, you’ve found a value! Showing folks, you’re aiming to evolve the culture and keep the good stuff is reassuring.
Focus on one element at a time - Culture is a super complicated multi-dimensional system. Changing many things at once in any such system is a bad idea, and culture is no different. Focus on the fewest number of things you can. Satya Nadella focused on “growth mindset” as the core driver of change at Microsoft. If Microsoft can change with a focus on one thing, I bet you can too!
Empower grassroots influencers - I suspect your team knows more about how they need to change than you do. Empowering them to change, and lead that change bottom-up is incredibly powerful. For example, the DevOps culture change might start with a small group adopting the practices and then spread organically. This fits in well with the change environment point - give people the tools they need to change.
Role model the new behaviours - You want psychological safety? You’ve got to role model it - demonstrate humility! If the planet is important, perhaps get the train (and so on). You can scale this up by making sure that leaders at all levels are following the example you set. And if they aren’t, it’s time to have those difficult feedback conversations.
Patience and persistence - Change ain’t going to happen overnight. It’s a constant process and requires constant attention to continually reinforce. It also requires constant assessment!
Conclusion
Culture is that invisible operating system running in your organization. Like any complex system, it's resistant to change yet ultimately malleable when approached with the right mix of strategy, patience, and authenticity.
Remember that your culture is constantly evolving whether you're paying attention or not. The choice isn't between having a culture or not—it's between deliberately shaping it or letting it form haphazardly. As we've seen, the latter rarely produces optimal results.
Effective cultural change requires clear purpose, focused effort, and genuine modelling from leadership. Start with honest assessment, celebrate what works, and address what doesn't with humility and persistence. Most importantly, recognize that meaningful change happens through consistent actions rather than grand declarations.
In the end, the culture you create will determine how your organization responds when faced with challenges, opportunities, and moments of truth. It's worth the investment to get it right!