Culture Always Tells the Truth
Leadership books and boardrooms spend an enormous amount of time talking about strategy: five-year plans, organizational charts, metrics, and benchmarks. Ask anyone who has truly led a family, a college, a business, or a team, and they’ll tell you the same truth: culture defeats strategy every single time. Strategy may write the script, but culture performs the show.
Every organization, whether a Fortune 500 company, a community college, a small-town high school, a football team, or even a household, is “culturized.” They all project an image to the public, a polished face meant to inspire confidence. The real culture isn’t found in the mission statement or the social-media post. It shows up in daily habits, quiet interactions, and in how the people inside that group treat others when no one is watching.
Families are the clearest example. You can dress up for church on Sunday, take a perfect Christmas picture, and speak politely in public. The true culture of a family shows itself in how members support one another during a crisis, how they speak to each other at home, and how they treat guests, or strangers. Love, patience, generosity, and respect can’t be faked for long. The real culture always rises to the surface.
Businesses and teams operate the same way. Leaders can talk about excellence, teamwork, and service all day long, but the organization’s actual behavior will reveal whether those values are real or just words on a wall. Employees know when leadership is authentic, just as players know when a coach’s message is consistent. If the team’s actions contradict the message, the culture cracks, and once culture cracks, strategy collapses with it.
Yet even in strong organizations, there are always a few team members, especially ones in leadership positions, who quietly work against the mission. They stir emotions, whisper how they would have done things differently, and try to present themselves as the “real” supporter of their coworkers. On the surface, they appear helpful, but beneath it, they are promoting themselves at the expense of the team’s unity. These back-door critics rarely rise to the top of their profession, not because they lack talent, but because they fail to understand that leadership requires loyalty, humility, and alignment. When someone spends more time undermining others than supporting the direction of the organization, they reveal why they have never advanced to their desired position. Culture exposes the truth about people just as clearly as it exposes the truth about teams.
For a college, business, family, or team to earn respect, it’s not enough to build a great strategic plan. Respect is built through how people act, how they serve others, and how well they follow through on the values they preach. A strategy may outline where an organization wants to go, but culture determines whether the people inside it actually want to take the journey together.
That’s the leadership challenge: Are you building a culture where the majority is committed to the mission? If you aren’t, even the most polished plan will fail. If you are, if you create a culture of trust, service, and shared purpose, then even an imperfect strategy can succeed.
Thought for the week, “In leadership, strategy may guide the path, but culture decides whether you ever reach the destination.” Wade Phillips, Former Head Coach of the Dallas Cowboys and San Antonio Brahmas.
Dr. Jack Welch serves as President of Fort Scott Community College. With a career spanning professional sports, public education, and rural community development, he brings a servant-leader mindset and a passion for building trust-driven cultures that empower people to thrive in the classroom, on the field, and in life. He is also the author of Foundations of Coaching: The Total Coaching Manual.