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106 HBR Leader’s Handbook

Culture also is a key factor in people’s decisions about whether to be a
party to the social contract of your team—that is, whether your unit will be
a place where they can meet their personal needs. And if the culture turns
out not to be a good fit with their expectations or abilities, people might
opt out.
Managing your team’s culture is thus a powerful way to determine how
effectively your people execute on your vision and translate your strat- egy
into action. If your new vision or strategy is generally in accord with the
culture, then change can happen quickly. But if the current culture is at
odds with the kind of strategic change you are proposing, it can be a true
roadblock. That’s why many CEOs are fond of saying that “culture trumps
strategy,” a truism that Jon Katzenbach and his coauthors explain in their
HBR article “Cultural Change That Sticks.”
The main problem with managing culture, however, is that it’s invisi-
ble, implicit, and hard to describe. If you ask ten people in your company
or team to portray your culture, you’ll probably get ten different answers
because everyone sees it from their own perspective. In addition, every or-
ganization has subcultures, perhaps in geographies (how things are done
in a particular office) or functions (R&D works differently than finance),
or in units that were bolted on through acquisitions (but retained their old
cultures).
Perhaps you can’t change your team’s or organization’s culture com-
pletely or quickly, but you can try to get some key aspects of culture to work
for you instead of against you. To do so:

• First, make your cultural goals explicit to your direct reports and
their people.

• Then, use the elements already described in this chapter to move
people toward those goals.

Define your cultural goals
It’s not up to us to say what your team’s culture should be or how you should
try to shape it. That’s a decision that you and your team should make,
based on your vision and the strategy that you are trying to execute. Given