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“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
I’ve believed that line for most of my career. Peter Drucker usually gets the credit, though the earliest record of it is a consulting firm’s headline from 2000, and his name only got attached years later. It doesn’t matter much who said it first. It’s true.
What the line doesn’t tell you is that culture isn’t something you set once and keep. Cultures slide. Quietly, and then all at once.
The team I let slide
Early in my career I led a group that got so bad two of my teammates nearly got into a fistfight. At work.
Teams don’t get there overnight. It usually takes months of small things nobody addresses: a sharp comment in a meeting, a missed deadline that lands on someone else, a little contempt that goes unanswered. Each one seems too small to make a fuss over.
Looking back, I’d missed one of the most important parts of leadership: deciding what you will tolerate and what you won’t. And then holding the line.
I didn’t do that. So my team learned what was acceptable from what I let go.
Where I actually learned it
I learned that lesson later, and not from a manager. From my mother.
When she drank, she was cruel, to me, to my dad, to my wife. For a long time I put up with it, and eventually I realized that by putting up with it, I was endorsing it. I stepped away for about a year. When we reconnected, I didn’t demand she get sober; that was hers to decide. But if she was drinking, we didn’t visit. I wrote the whole story in The Year I Stopped Talking To My Mother.
What stuck with me was simple. I couldn’t change her. I could only decide what I was willing to show up for.
What you tolerate becomes your culture
Leading a team works the same way. You can’t control every person on your team. You can control what you allow.
Whatever you keep putting up with becomes the culture. Not your values poster. Not your offsite slides. The behavior you let pass on an ordinary Tuesday is the real policy, and everyone on the team can read it.
That cuts both ways. The things you tolerate spread, and so do the things you refuse. People watch what happens when someone crosses a line. If nothing happens, the line wasn’t real.
How to decide what you’ll tolerate
A few questions I come back to, with clients and with myself:
- What behavior would I be embarrassed to explain to a new hire? If you’d have to make excuses for it, it’s already part of your culture.
- Where am I avoiding a conversation because it’s uncomfortable? That avoidance is a decision, and the team sees it as one.
- What’s my line, stated plainly? “We disagree hard in meetings, but we don’t make it personal” is a line. “Be respectful” isn’t.
- What happens when someone crosses it? Decide that before it happens, not in the heat of the moment.
- Am I holding myself to the same line? Nothing erodes a standard faster than a leader who exempts himself.
Hold the line
Holding the line isn’t punishing people. With my mother, it wasn’t an ultimatum. It was a clear statement of what I would and wouldn’t take part in, kept consistently. With a team, it looks like naming the behavior early, saying what you expect instead, and following through the same way every time.
It’s uncomfortable. It’s also the job. Strategy matters, but the culture you allow will decide whether any strategy survives contact with your people.
So decide what you’ll allow. And hold the line.
How you show up at work is inseparable from how you show up in life. If you’re a leader working out where your lines are, that’s the work I do with CEOs and founders.
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