Execution Begins with Culture, Rethinking the Operating Model
Melvin Flippin is a leadership strategist & founder of One GOAL LLC, where he offers leadership coaching & development for both organizations & individual leaders. The One Goal leadership framework & tools help leaders coach to & measure behavioral commitments, shifting the focus of management from lagging indicators to leading behaviors.
Several organizations say culture matters, and their leaders spend months writing action plans or creating strategies to elevate culture, only to watch execution quietly stall where it matters most, inside everyday behaviors and decisions. The difference isn’t what’s written in the plan, it’s what’s lived every day in your culture. What if the reason your strategy isn’t working has nothing to do with the strategy itself?
Why strategy alone fails
Many of us have heard the phrase, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” I love this quote, and I have a small addition to the end. Culture doesn’t just eat strategy; it decides whether strategy ever has a chance.
You can have the most brilliant and sound strategic plan in the world, but when your culture doesn’t support it, I’ve witnessed what happens. Execution breaks down in ways that I’m confident you’ve experienced before:
Leaders say innovation matters but punish risk.
Teams are told to collaborate but are rewarded individually.
Speed is emphasized, but decisions require endless approvals.
These contradictions don’t show up in strategy documents; they show up in culture, and culture always wins!
Moving from culture as a concept to culture as an operating system
The mistake many organizations make is treating culture as a “soft” concept, or something to inspire people, not the foundation for operating the business. Great leaders think differently, and they treat culture as a living operating system; a model that drives performance with the same rigor as financial planning or process design.
I once had an Area President, who is an amazing leader, ask me: If there were one change I could make in how we operate, what would it be? Almost without hesitation, I alluded to a performance metric target that our business didn’t consistently discuss and seemed aspirational. I explained to her that I was confident in our ability to exceed this target, and to do so would mean that everything we do and discuss with our teams should point to it like a north star. I later observed her take an action that made a significant impression on me as a leader. She announced to her leadership team that everything we do should be guided by this target, and we would no longer incentivize conflicting behaviors.
This kind of shift changes everything for your leaders. Instead of asking, “What’s our strategy?” they ask, "What behaviors does our strategy require? What environment reinforces those behaviors? What signals are we sending, intentionally or not?"
This provided a fundamental truth for me. Culture is not what you say in meetings, what’s written in your values, and what you hope people believe.
Instead, culture is what your team consistently does, reinforces, and holds each other accountable for. As well as what your systems, incentives, and leadership behaviors consistently reinforce!
That’s where some organizations miss the mark, they build a strategy, they communicate the vision, but they never connect it to daily behaviors and commitments.
The invisible system driving everything
Some organizations like to believe that they run on strategy, structure, and process. Yet, underneath all of that, they run on something far less visible and far more powerful. They run on culture.
Culture isn’t posters on a wall or values listed in onboarding decks. It’s the set of unwritten rules that shape how work gets done. It determines what gets prioritized, what gets ignored, how decisions are made, and how people behave when no one is watching.
And here’s the hard truth, every organization already has an operating model. Culture is it! Once we accept this, the two most important questions become, "Does our culture support our vision and direction?" and "Are our leaders intentionally designing it, or passively inheriting it?"
The leadership shift: From messaging to modeling
Leaders often believe that culture is shaped through communication, but I respectfully disagree; it’s shaped through modeling. Every decision a leader makes sends a signal:
What gets funded
What gets recognized
What gets tolerated
What gets challenged
The truth is that people don’t follow value statements; they follow patterns… especially the patterns of their leaders!
If a leader says “people first” but consistently prioritizes short-term results over team well-being, the real culture becomes obvious. If collaboration is praised and competition is rewarded, the system corrects itself accordingly.
Thus, culture is not declared. It’s demonstrated.
The outcome of elite culture: Self-driven performance
When culture becomes an operating system:
Leaders stop chasing performance
Teams operate with clarity
Accountability becomes normalized
Trust becomes embedded
I once led an organization as part of a large business, and a leader from our company’s systems and process improvement team started an open forum for feedback on tools and processes that did not properly support the work of our agents. Her team had not received much feedback, and she asked all company leaders to encourage the use of the forum to improve our internal ways of working. I had a group of leaders and agents who often shared feedback with me because they trusted me to support them in the success of their daily work. I asked them to capture and funnel all feedback to this forum, as this feedback would help us design the proper processes and tools to support their success.
Within 30 days, my organization submitted the most feedback, and numerous improvement projects were launched as a result. This accomplishment was self-driven by agents in my organization, simply because our culture was one of consistent feedback, accountability, and collaboration. That brings us to one of the most valuable outcomes of a strong culture. Retention of your top talent improves! Because people don’t leave organizations where expectations are clear, leaders are consistent, performance is recognized, and growth is visible.
I mentioned earlier how people follow the patterns of their leaders, and they are aware of when your culture is conceptual. They know this when they only see it in slogans on a wall, written messages from their leaders, or annual surveys.
But when they see it in how their leaders show up for them every day, consistent follow-through, and reinforcing the message in every action they take, it becomes something far more powerful, "An operating model that drives execution, performance, and results!"
The real work of leadership
Rethinking the operating model isn’t about adding more complexity. It’s about recognizing what’s already driving your organization and taking ownership of it. The real work of leadership is not just setting direction; it’s shaping the conditions under which that direction can succeed.
That means asking harder questions:
What culture are we reinforcing through our actions today?
Where are we unintentionally undermining our own strategy?
What behaviors are we rewarding, even if we don’t mean to?
Whether you design it or not, your culture is already executing something. The only question is, "Is it executing what you intended?"
Read more from Melvin Flippin
Melvin Flippin, Leadership Transformation Coach
Melvin Flippin is a leadership development strategist, dedicated to helping organizations & leaders close the gap between strategy & execution, through more effective coaching & accountability. As the founder of One GOAL LLC, he developed a practical framework & proprietary tool designed to transform how leaders manage performance, shifting the focus from outcome alone to the behaviors & commitments that drive sustainable results. He collaborates with clients of all sizes to provide training for the One GOAL framework & tools that empower employees to perform at their highest capabilities, through established clarity, alignment & execution.
