Why Organisational Culture Cannot Be Forced
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 17 hours ago
Priyanka Ayodele is a leadership and organisational development specialist and the founder of The Leadership Method. As a Chartered Manager and Associate CIPD member, she supports organisations through leadership development, coaching, and culture-focused work with managers and teams.
Most organisations don’t struggle to define the culture they want. They struggle to understand the culture they already have.
I have seen many organisations try to “change culture” by introducing new values, running campaigns, or setting expectations around how people should behave.
But that’s not how culture changes, because culture isn’t what organisations say it is, it’s what people experience every day. Culture will show up in how meetings are run, who speaks up and who remains quieter, how mistakes are handled, and what people feel safe saying and what they don’t feel safe to say.
The reality is that culture is already there, whether we acknowledge it or not.
Culture already exists
Every team has its own way of working. Over time, people figure out what is expected of them, not always because it’s been clearly explained, but because they’ve experienced it.
They learn: What gets a positive reaction, what gets ignored, what gets shut down, and what feels “safe.” These patterns build slowly, through everyday interactions.
This is something Edgar Schein spoke about a lot in his work on organisational culture. He described culture as the deeper patterns and assumptions that shape how organisations actually function.
So, when organisations try to introduce new behaviours without understanding what already exists, there tends to be a big disconnect.
And this is not necessarily because people don’t want to change. It is because the change doesn’t match what they have learned is “normal.”
Why culture change doesn’t always work
One of the biggest mistakes I see is organisations focusing on what they want culture to look like, without really understanding what it currently feels like to work there.
Leaders might say things such as: “We want people to speak up more,” or “We want openness,” or “We want collaboration.”
But if people have been previously ignored when they have spoken up, criticised for mistakes, and left out of decisions, then those messages don’t land in the way leaders expect. They become seen as tokenistic. This is because people don’t follow what organisations say. They follow what they experience. If behaviour doesn’t change, culture doesn’t change.
Culture lives in everyday moments
Culture is not something that is built within strategy documents. It will show itself in those small moments we see every day. It’s how managers respond when something goes wrong, how feedback is given, how pressure is handled, how people are spoken to when things aren’t going well, and how we celebrate and praise the positives. All of these things individually might seem small, but they build up over time. Eventually, they influence how people feel at work, how they behave, and how teams function.
That’s why culture change isn’t about one big initiative, it is about consistent behaviour over time.
You have to understand culture before you can change it
Before trying to change culture, organisations need to slow down and really understand what’s already happening. This means asking questions like, how do people actually communicate here? Who speaks in meetings, and who doesn’t? What behaviours are rewarded, even informally? What do people avoid saying?
Without that level of understanding, change efforts often miss the mark because they are trying to fix something they haven’t fully understood.
We have to work with culture, not against it. We will see that change happens when leaders work with the culture that already exists, rather than trying to override it completely. That means organisations must recognise what already works, understand where resistance is coming from, and introduce change in a way that feels realistic. When we see leaders start to model different behaviours consistently, people will start to notice this, and over time, those behaviours start to shift culture with how others respond, how teams interact, and how the culture begins to evolve.
Culture takes time
There can be pressure to change culture quickly, but working with culture change is not something that works on a quick timeline. It needs things such as repeated behaviours, consistency, and everyday actions to create that shift. It’s definitely not something that requires announcements, posters, and one-off initiatives alone to work.
Culture is not something you can just install, it’s actually something we uncover. Once we uncover it, we understand it better, and once we understand it better, we can start to shape and influence one behaviour, one interaction, one moment at a time to finally create that ripple effect across the organisation.
Read more from Priyanka Ayodele
Priyanka Ayodele, Leadership and Business Specialist
Priyanka Ayodele (CMgr MCMI, Assoc. CIPD) is a Chartered Manager and Associate CIPD member and the founder of The Leadership Method. Her work focuses on leadership, team culture, and organisational development. Earlier in her career, she studied psychology and worked in mental health, which shaped her interest in how people experience leadership at work. Having experienced both poor management and the kind of leadership that helps people grow, she saw firsthand how much impact managers can have on someone's confidence and development. The managers who recognised her potential played a big part in shaping the leader she is today. That experience now influences the work she does at The Leadership Method
