What is culture, and how do you manage it in a business?
Culture is how your organisation lives out its values and its vision, day to day. You can’t grab hold of it directly (it’s a bit like chimney smoke), but you can manage it through three levers: the behaviours you expect, the systems and processes you run, and the symbolism people see around them every day. Align those with your values and vision and the culture follows.
What does culture actually mean for a business?
The simplest way to think about culture is that it’s how you live out your values and your vision as an organisation. Your vision is what you’re all striving for as a team, ideally tied to a financial metric (“be number one in our market, doubling the business within three years”). Your values are what you value in your people. Culture sits in the middle: the day-to-day expression of both. That’s why it belongs in a business plan rather than floating separately, because it’s the thing that either carries your strategy or quietly undermines it. You can’t catch culture directly, it’s a bit like chimney smoke, but once you see it as the lived-out version of your values and vision, it becomes something you can actually shape rather than just talk about.
What are the three things that shape culture?
Three things, and only the first is widely understood. Behaviours are the obvious one: if you value agility, you expect quick decisions, and you don’t walk past behaviour that contradicts your values. The second, far less recognised, is systems and processes. If you claim to value agility but every decision needs five layers of approval on spreadsheets, no one will believe you, so your processes have to match your values. The third is symbolism: the visual cues people see every day. Say you value collaboration but have no collaborative spaces, or the management team sits on a separate floor and disappears upstairs each day, that undercuts the message. Or you preach transparency while the shared drives are full of files people can’t open. Atlassian, by contrast, shares almost everything bar payroll. Behaviours, systems and symbolism together are what actually build or break a culture.
Should values be company values or people values?
They should be people values, because the word “value” really means what you value in your team members, and a company can’t hold values on its own. That’s why we put values along the bottom of the one-page strategy: they underpin everything above them. Two rules make them stick. First, keep them grammatically consistent, “we value people who are agile, honest and collaborative”, rather than mixing forms, or the team won’t remember them. Second, don’t have too many. If Apple manages with three, you don’t need six (companies that merge often end up with a bloated list nobody recalls). Personify them so people recognise them in real life: if you value bravery, call out someone who had a hard, honest conversation as exactly what bravery means here. Simple, personified values tie straight back to your strategy.
How 24HRBP approaches this
In a 24 Hour Business Plan session we treat culture as part of the plan, not an afterthought, mapping the behaviours, systems and symbolism that need to line up with your values and vision. When those three are aligned, the culture supports the strategy instead of quietly working against it.
Watch the full episode on The 24HR Business Plan Podcast: Episode 6 - Unpacking Culture, Vision and Values
