Business success rests on two things that appear on no balance sheet: A company’s culture and the leadership that shapes it. A good strategy only works once people act on it in their daily work, and how they act is largely set by the culture. The executive team shapes that culture more strongly than any other group in the company.
Look through annual reports, careers pages and company brochures, and you’ll read about values and culture everywhere. An attractive culture counts as a precondition for being seen as a credible employer, inside and outside the company. I welcome this development, even if there’s often a gap between the mission statement and everyday reality.
Culture is something intangible. Values, inner attitudes and mindsets are hard to explain in black and white, and yet they steer what happens in a company every day.
Corporate culture means the shared values, norms and habits by which people in an organisation act, mostly without thinking about it. Every employee is already part of a culture and acts on the basis of earlier experiences with culture. That explains why so many people find it hard to let go of the old and adjust to the new.
For the executive team, this means a new strategy always runs into old habits, and the habits are usually faster. If you want to secure business success over years, plan the change in behaviour from the start. How that works is the subject of Change management: How to make change a success.
Culture grows out of norms and relationships, in every interaction and every conversation. Organisations anchor it with images, stories, symbols and rituals. In practice, this means very concrete things: Who gets promoted, and how the executive team reacts when a project fails.
With social skills and passion, the people in a company help make the work succeed. Their collaboration creates a positive perception, internally and externally. Culture becomes a success factor this way, and it stays one as long as leadership looks after it.
Employees read culture from actions. A mission statement that speaks of openness loses value in every meeting where dissent is punished.
A culture carries the most weight when the company’s leadership makes sure employees can help shape “their” company. That starts with real room for decisions and extends to the question of who gets to help think through the next strategy. Co-creation also means wanting to hear objections before a decision is made.
The reason is simple. People bring all their knowledge and skill to bear in a meaningful way when they identify with their company and can live their own values at work. If you constantly have to bend yourself out of shape, you’ll tend to deliver the bare minimum.
The precondition is an attitude in the executive team: The ability to keep questioning itself and keep developing. That applies to its own leadership behaviour just as much as to structures and processes.
Every executive team should decide deliberately which corporate and working culture it wants to help shape. In my engagements, 4 questions help me get this conversation going.
First: Which behaviour do we actually reward today, regardless of what the mission statement says? Second: Where do our own habits contradict the values we expect from others?
Third: How much room to shape things do employees really have, and where do we take it away again? Fourth: How would customers notice that something has changed here?
The answers are rarely comfortable. That’s exactly why they’re worth the effort. It works best when the executive team answers the questions for itself first and only then discusses them with senior managers.
Culture is a matter for the top. I often see executive teams delegate the topic to HR and then wonder why the new mission statement fizzles out in daily work. What top leadership lives counts for more than any campaign.
Honesty includes a limit. How strongly culture influences business success in a given case is hard to measure cleanly, because too many factors act at once. And a good culture won’t rescue a business model that misses the market.
Then again, I’ve rarely seen a good strategy win against a culture that doesn’t carry it.
Business success is secured by a clear strategy and a culture in which people put that strategy into practice every day. Both are the responsibility of the executive team. It shapes the culture because it models what gets rewarded and what gets tolerated.
Yes, though slowly. Culture changes through repeated behaviour, above all the behaviour of leadership. If you proclaim new values and reward old habits, you change little. A noticeable cultural shift usually takes years.
HR can design processes that fit the desired culture, for example in recruiting and promotion. The tone is still set by the executive team. Without its visible example, every HR programme stays on paper.
By conversations that are held openly, even when they get uncomfortable. And by decisions that are made where the knowledge sits. People who can live their values at work usually stay longer, too.
Further reading on hofmann.coach: Top management coaching: Why successful leaders work with a coach · Executive coaching Zurich · Corporate culture: What you can change as a leader · Learning organisation: What defines it and how leadership sustains it
Note: This article was first published on 17.01.2019 and was revised and expanded in October 2026.
Cristian Hofmann is an executive coach in Zurich and Schaffhausen (MAS Coaching & Supervision BSO, Forbes contributor). Over more than 20 years he has coached more than 1,500 leaders: CEOs, executive boards and leadership teams in Switzerland, with measurably agreed goals and, on request, pay-for-results. More about Cristian Hofmann.
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