This is Part 3 of a three-part series on organizational culture. Read Part 1: Tending the Soil: Why Leaders Must Cultivate Organizational Culture, HERE, and Part 2: Beneath the Surface: Auditing the Culture of Your Organization, HERE.
Knowing your soil (your organizational culture) is not the same as improving it.
The gap between diagnosis and change is where most well-intentioned culture efforts stall. Your Culture Audit has given you a map; the artifacts above ground, the espoused values you’ve declared, and, most importantly, the underlying assumptions that shape mental models and drive behavior. Now comes the harder question: what do you do about it?
Healthy soil is not made in a day, and it cannot be commanded into existence. It is built through patient, deliberate tending. Consistently applying the right inputs over time. The same is true of organizational culture. Leaders cannot decree their way to better underlying assumptions. What they can do is work the soil: introducing conditions that gradually displace old assumptions and cultivate new ones. Research on organizational culture identifies levers that leaders can pull to move the needle on culture. Here are five to consider.
Lever 1: Establish a Shared Cultural Vision
Before you can cultivate something new, you need a clear picture of what you are trying to grow. Mary Parker Follett, in her classic essay “The Essentials of Leadership,” introduced the concept of the “invisible leader” nearly a century ago. True leadership, she argued, is not about commanding loyalty. It is about articulating a common purpose so clearly that the shared vision itself becomes the guide. In public service, where elected boards and management teams shift regularly, this kind of cultural anchor provides stability amid constant change.
With that in mind, you could challenge your team to craft a Six-Word Culture Vision. This activity is borrowed from the “six-word story,” a creative writing format that forces writers to strip a story to its essential truth. The same discipline works remarkably well for teams trying to cut through jargon and name what they really want to stand for and be about. Six words force clarity about the culture you are trying to build. Here are a few examples:
- Fire and Emergency Services: “Uncompromising safety, fierce loyalty, quiet professionalism.”
- Public Works: “We show up, rain or shine.”
- Finance and Budget: “Partners in performance, engendering public trust.”
Two important notes. First, do this collaboratively. A vision developed together is a shared commitment, and that is the difference that matters. Second, let your audit guide the words. If you surfaced a “mistakes are fatal” assumption, your vision should speak directly to it. These are not merely aspirational phrases. They are your replacement assumptions. It’s what you are deliberately growing toward.
Lever 2: Model the Way
Edgar Schein’s research found that one of the most powerful culture-shaping mechanisms available to leaders is what they pay attention to, measure, and react to on a regular basis. Your team watches your behavior far more carefully than they read your announcements. When you say you value growth and improvement but react defensively to critical feedback in a staff meeting, that reaction becomes a cultural data point that shapes assumptions and behavior.
Kouzes and Posner, in The Leadership Challenge, frame this as leaders needing to “model the way.” Schein adds an important nuance: it is not only your intentional behaviors that model culture, but also how you respond in critical moments. A budget crisis. A public mistake. A difficult personnel situation. How you handle those unscripted moments in real time sends louder cultural signals than any planned message. Make those moments count.
Lever 3: Replace Old Artifacts and Build New Stories
Artifacts are powerful because they signal, every day, what is (really) valued here. Culture begins to shift when new artifacts displace old ones. If your audit revealed a “mistakes are fatal” assumption, you cannot talk people out of it. You need to create experiences that demonstrate a different reality. Adding a regular “lessons learned” segment to your staff meetings is a concrete artifact that, repeated consistently, begins to relax the old assumption. Researcher Amy Edmondson calls this kind of practice a building block of psychological safety: the shared belief that it is safe to take interpersonal risks, speak up, and admit failure. Without it, no amount of “we value innovation” language will move the needle.
Beyond replacing artifacts, be deliberate about the stories you tell. As Alan Wilkins demonstrated in the research we drew on in Part 2, stories are the primary vehicle through which cultural assumptions travel through organizations. People do not learn culture from posters. They learn it from the stories that circulate, about who got promoted and why, how a crisis was handled, what happened to the person who spoke up. When an employee takes a smart risk, owns a mistake transparently, or crosses a departmental boundary to solve a problem, tell that story publicly and repeat it. These become the new stories, and new stories carry new assumptions.
Lever 4: Be Deliberate About Who You Promote
Nothing signals what a culture values more clearly than promotion decisions. Schein identified this as one of the primary mechanisms through which leaders embed (or undermine) cultural values. If your espoused values call for innovation and collaboration, but your promotion decisions consistently reward cautious, siloed performance, the culture will not change regardless of what the strategic plan says.
Look at your last three promotion decisions. What assumptions did they reinforce? What story did they tell the rest of your organization about what it takes to get ahead here? Those decisions are among the loudest cultural messages a leader sends, and they are often sent without realizing it.
Lever 5: Realign Your Core Organizational Routines
We rarely improve culture through dramatic overhauls. We build it through consistent, everyday practices. Examine your core routines (e.g. hiring, onboarding, budgeting, and performance reviews) and realign them to reinforce your cultural vision.
Hiring: the questions you ask, the behaviors you screen for, and who sits in the room all signal what the culture values. If you want genuine collaboration, involve cross-functional voices in hiring decisions. Onboarding: a new budget analyst who spends a day with field crews before their first week learns something about organizational values that no orientation packet can teach, namely, that administrative support exists to serve operational reality. Performance conversations: if your evaluation process measures only individual output and never asks how someone contributes to team culture, you are underinvesting in culture.
Small, consistent adjustments to routines are how new cultural assumptions get institutionalized. They are woven into the daily fabric of organizational life rather than posted on a wall.
The Long Game
None of these levers yield an immediate harvest. Culture is formed through accumulated experiences over time, and it shifts the same way: gradually, then noticeably, then sustainably, when you stay the course.
Returning to our soil metaphor: the farmer who gives up after the first season of cultivation never sees the harvest. The work of cultural leadership is not dramatic. It is persistent. It is choosing to step into Quadrant II, again and again, to tend the soil even when the urgency of the moment (the permanent whitewater) has tried to pull your attention back to the rapids.
The culture is the soil, the Production Capability (PC) that makes everything else possible. The harvest, things like responsive service delivery, collaborative teams, public organizations that communities take pride in, is what you are investing in with culture work. Start digging.
Sources referenced in this series: Mary Parker Follett, “The Essentials of Leadership,” in Dynamic Administration (Harper & Brothers, 1942); Edgar Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership (Wiley, 2016); James Kouzes and Barry Posner, The Leadership Challenge (Wiley, 2023); Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization (Wiley, 2018); Alan Wilkins, “The Culture Audit: A Tool for Understanding Organizations,” Organizational Dynamics, Autumn 1983; Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn, Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture (Wiley, 2011).
