This is Part 2 of a three-part series on organizational culture. Read Part 1: Tending the Soil: Why Leaders Must Cultivate Organizational Culture.
There is a phrase often attributed to Peter Drucker that most experienced leaders have heard: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” It has become a management cliché because it keeps proving itself true. You can have the most brilliant strategic plan, well-engineered standard operating procedures, and a cutting-edge performance dashboard. But if the soil of your organizational culture is toxic, depleted, or misaligned with what you’re trying to grow, your strategy will fail to take root.
In Part 1 of this series, I argued that attending to organizational culture is the quintessential “Quadrant II” leadership activity — deeply important, rarely seen as urgent, and perpetually crowded out by the “permanent whitewater” of public service. But before you can tend the soil, you have to understand what’s actually in it. That requires some digging.
Schein’s Three Levels: What’s Actually in the Soil
Organizational psychologist Edgar Schein provides a map for examining what lies beneath. Schein described organizational culture as existing across three levels, distinguished by how visible they are to an observer.
Artifacts are the surface layer — the visible, tangible signs of culture that a perceptive newcomer picks up right away. In a public agency, artifacts include:
- The physical layout of your facility. Are executive offices tucked behind locked doors, or integrated with staff?
- Communication patterns. Who emails at 10 PM? Is information shared freely or hoarded?
- Meeting dynamics. Is dialogue genuinely invited, or does the team wait to hear what the director thinks before speaking?
Espoused Values are the next layer — the explicitly stated beliefs and principles your organization claims to stand for. This is the language of your strategic plan, your onboarding materials, and your team values statement. “Service Excellence.” “Innovation.” “Transparency.” “Teamwork.” These aren’t meaningless. But they are aspirational and may not reflect or capture what is really guiding behavior.
Underlying Assumptions are the deepest layer, and the most consequential. These are the unspoken, taken-for-granted beliefs that shape how people behave on the job. What employees believe they must do to survive, get ahead, or stay out of trouble, regardless of what the mission statement says. Underlying assumptions are the true chemical composition of the soil.
You’ve seen these assumptions at work, even if you haven’t named them. Consider:
- The “Face-Time” Assumption (despite an espoused value of “Work-Life Balance”): “If the director doesn’t see my car in the lot until 6 PM, I’ll be seen as not fully committed.”
- The “Mistakes Are Fatal” Assumption (despite an espoused value of “Innovation”): “One public misstep is a career-ender. Keep your head down, and don’t volunteer for anything new.”
- The “Silo” Assumption (despite an espoused value of “Collaboration”): “Coordinating across departments without clearing it with upper management first creates friction. Stay in your lane.”
The gap between what we say we value and what the culture reinforces is where friction, cynicism, and burnout take root. When your team experiences that gap daily, it erodes trust, quietly and persistently. Closing that gap is the central challenge of leading culture.
The Culture Audit: Analyzing the Soil
If you want to cultivate a healthier culture, you first must honestly diagnose what you are working with. Consider setting aside time outside the normal flow of operations to conduct a Culture Audit with your leadership team.
A few tips before you begin:
Start with yourself. Before bringing your team into the conversation, take 30 minutes on your own to work through the audit. Leaders are often surprised by what they notice when they slow down and look. Your self-assessment also sets the tone. You are modeling the kind of honest reflection you are asking of others.
Create the conditions for honesty. People are often reluctant to name assumptions that openly contradict stated organizational values, not because they’re dishonest, but because doing so feels risky. Thus, the conditions you create for this conversation matter as much as the questions you ask. Name the risk when you open the session. Acknowledge that you are there to understand the real culture, not to defend the stated one. Consider having team members do individual written reflection before sharing with the group to reduce the pull toward groupthink and while giving quieter voices a chance to be heard.
Don't try to fix everything at once. The goal of the audit is clarity, not an immediate action plan. Resist the urge to jump to solutions mid-conversation. Diagnose first.
Work through the three levels together, using these reflection prompts:
Level 1 — Artifacts (What’s visible above ground)
What would a thoughtful outsider notice about our team in their first week?
Look at: meeting dynamics, how decisions get communicated, how space is arranged, the tone and timing of internal communications, what (and who) gets celebrated publicly.
Level 2 — Espoused Values (What we claim to be growing)
What do we say we stand for?
Look at: your stated mission, strategic plan language, what you tell new hires, the values language you use in performance conversations.
Level 3 — Underlying Assumptions (The actual soil composition)
What are the unspoken rules people actually follow?
Ask: How do we really treat failure? What actually gets rewarded here? What do people learn quickly not to say in a meeting? When espoused values and daily reality conflict, which one wins?
Once you have mapped all three levels, look for tension points, places where your underlying assumptions are working against your espoused values. Those gaps are not just cultural problems; they are operational ones. They are where your people are experiencing dissonance that impacts the work.
Those tension points are also entryways for real cultural change. In Part 3 of this series, we’ll examine the practical levers leaders can pull to begin shifting underlying assumptions and how to work the soil so that what you say you value and how your team actually operates are in better alignment.
Edgar Schein’s three-level model of organizational culture is developed in Organizational Culture and Leadership (Wiley, 2016), a foundational text for any leader serious about this work. The term “culture audit” originates with Alan L. Wilkins, “The Culture Audit: A Tool for Understanding Organizations,” In Organizational Dynamics, Autumn 1983.Also, a note for those who want to go deeper: the simple audit described here is offered as an accessible starting point. For leaders who want a more rigorous, research-validated approach to diagnosing organizational culture, Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn’s Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture: Based on the Competing Values Framework (Wiley, 2011) is the gold standard in the field. Their Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) offers a structured, validated method for mapping culture across competing organizational values.
