Culture Is Not Soft. It’s the Hardest System You Lead.

A senior executive once told me, “Culture feels like the soft stuff.”
He said it gently, as if he didn’t want to offend the part of the organization that cared about people and values. But the truth is, culture only feels soft to the leaders who haven’t learned how to see it. Once you understand what culture actually is — a system of behaviors, norms, signals, expectations, and power dynamics — you realize it’s anything but soft.

Culture is the hardest system to lead because it touches everything. It influences execution long before strategy does. It determines whether accountability sticks or slips. It dictates how people respond to pressure, how they handle conflict, and how they engage with change. It shapes the emotional climate leaders walk into every morning, often without realizing they helped create it.

And unlike finance, operations, or technology, culture doesn’t give you clean dashboards. It shows up in tone, trust, energy, and alignment — the elements leaders are least trained to measure. That’s why many executives avoid culture until the symptoms become too obvious to ignore: disengaged teams, rising turnover, messy communication, or leaders who only hold people accountable when it’s convenient.

But culture becomes manageable the moment you treat it like a real system. You can define it. You can assess it. You can strengthen it. You can operationalize it in ways that make expectations unmistakable and behaviors consistent across the organization. When leaders put structure around culture, it becomes measurable. And once it’s measurable, it becomes leadable.

Culture isn’t soft. It’s the system that determines whether everything else works.

If you want a roadmap for building a culture strong enough to sustain performance and people, explore my new book, The Making of a Strong Culture: Intentional Organizations