What eats culture for breakfast?

I’ve heard the well-known quote ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ a few times since finishing my Master’s in Organizational Psychology. The quote was on a podcast, a LinkedIn post and a leader mentioned it in an all-hands call. The way the quote was being used bugged me! Anecdotally, I know that culture feels intangible – it’s hard to define, even harder to measure and takes time to change. When this quote was being used, culture was mentioned without any plan of how to use it to make the strategy successful, probably because of the challenges I mentioned for defining culture or changing it. When the quote was used it felt as though an invisible force, culture, was the scapegoat for why a strategy will not be successful. Which could give leaders a convenient narrative to save face if targets weren’t achieved.

I became a management consultant to be helpful. To be helpful, I offer you the follow up sentence: ‘Leadership eats culture for breakfast’. I suggest this so we may move our focus to something actionable: empowering leaders. I presume by the way, that leaders are not intentionally eating culture for breakfast, but of course it’s our impact not our intentions that matter.

I believe Peter Drucker is attributed with the popularity of the quote ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’, and as I understand using culture as a scapegoat was not his point. The quote is brilliant because it’s so simple, thus memorable. For leaders that are over-worked/time-poor, simple is of course welcomed. Alas, organizations are complex interconnected systems¹, therefore simple will not suffice.

For being helpful, it’s my mission to make the complex understandable, without diluting the message. With the caveat, I can only share what I’ve learned and I can only learn from you what you share! Let’s start with a definition for culture I’ve learned and love:

“It’s the way we do things around here”

The definition from Deal & Kennedy (1982)² is a great starting point for making culture tangible – the way we do things around here is our collective behaviors. How we behave is of course complex, being driven by what we value and what we believe.

Why is the saying ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ too simple?

An organization is an open system like a living organism¹. That is, it takes inputs from its environment like customer needs and gives back to that environment an output like goods or services (see the figure below).

For an open system to allow inputs to pass through the system to outputs, the parts of the system must be interconnected, therefore if you impact one part it affects another part. This cause-and-effect relationship is no different to any living organism. For example, if you have a stomach ache (from eating too much culture for breakfast) the stomach ache may cause you to find it hard to concentrate or move around, and vice-versa mental stress may make your stomach feel uneasy i.e. your whole body/system is interconnected. Culture can eat strategy for breakfast, but because an organization is interconnected the research on organizational systems is clear that other parts of the organization can have an effect on culture too e.g. Leadership¹.

Why does Leadership eat culture for breakfast?

Let’s focus on why leadership has such an impact on culture… All elements of an organization can impact culture, but research finds that the biggest factor to affect culture is leadership. Schein & Schein argue that: “Culture and leadership are two sides of the same coin”³. Of course, you won’t find that surprising when you consider how purpose driven a founder-led company is e.g. consider Steve Jobs’ return to Apple and the company’s turnaround as an example of leadership influencing how things are done at an organization.

According to the Burke-Litwin model¹ the biggest influences within an organization are its Leadership, Mission & Strategy, and Culture, referred to as the transformative levers. If you want to change your organization, it’s those three transformative levers you must pull (or keep off the breakfast menu). The Burke-Litwin model has helped me to better understand the complexity of an open system of an organization, its interconnected parts, and the cause-and-effect relationships therein. I’ve included a copy of the model at the end of this post. As you’ll see, all parts of the organization have a little culture for breakfast, Leadership merely eats the most.

How does leadership eat culture for breakfast?

The most humbling questions coaches and mentors have asked me when reflecting on my behavior is “What example does that set for those you lead?” or “Would you expect your team to aspire to do the same?”. For example, I thought a great servant leader move was “taking one for the team”, but alas if I’m a leader that throws them self under the bus, who aspires to be the next in line to throw them self under a bus? No one. I certainly have learned that leading by example is easier said than done. By definition, if you don’t have followers, you’re not a leader.

Organizations are constantly changing, responding to feedback from their external environment. As leaders execute the strategies, their followers, the organization, are waiting for guidance on how to behave i.e. asking ‘how should we do things around here?’. Research indicates that about 75% of the workforce say that their immediate supervisor is the worst single aspect and most stressful aspect of their job⁴. Being a leader often puts you in paradoxical situations⁵. I personally find I’m constantly immobilized by the paradox of being expected to ‘give direction’ and ‘listen and be participative’ – which one is it?!  Here are paradoxes from Kanter⁶ you may have experienced that are examples of leadership promoting a strategy but unintentionally driving a different behavior:

• Be entrepreneurial and take risks but don’t cost the business anything by failure

• Be creative and innovative to take us in new directions, and “stick to your knitting”

• Have a sense of urgency and strive for faster execution, faster results, but take more time to deliberately plan for the future

These are typical paradoxes, hence my presumption that leaders are not intentionally eating culture for breakfast.

How do you eat less culture for breakfast?

That is, how do you behave in a manner that sets an example that fosters the right culture needed to execute your strategy? The answer is in Kurt Lewin’s famous formula⁷:

Behavior is a function of the person and their environment

Person is personality traits, values learned responses, attitudes, needs, goals, choices etc.
Environment is everything exterior to the individual

It makes sense, we cannot understand human behavior without considering the context that it happens in. Let’s make this formula action orientated:

Person

First, let’s look at us, the person. A key part of leadership development is self-awareness, knowing who you are as a person and how others experience you. The challenge with self-awareness is that individuals are not accurate self-reporters (regardless of how certain they may be). Moreover, co-workers tend to avoid frankness when they deal with each other (especially true in reporting relationships). The higher the level, the less honest feedback leaders receive. All this can lead to distorted sense of strengths, weaknesses, and abilities

So what can you do to be more self-aware? A key way to become more self-aware is receiving anonymous 360 multi-rater feedback⁸. The easy part is receiving the feedback, the hard part is changing your behaviors to better align with the examples that you intend to set. Within your control, this is the single most effective way to develop as a leader and eat less culture for breakfast.

Environment

Second to consider is the environment, which you’ll likely have less control of. To bring this to life, consider a personal strategy to eat healthy food. You want to fill your environment with conditions conducive to eating healthy. That may mean eliminating or hiding unhealthy food in your home, having an accountability buddy, meeting with friends at restaurants with lots of healthy options etc. whereby you make it as easy as possible to eat healthy food and as hard as possible to eat unhealthy food.

The same is the case in an organization’s environment, where within your control you want to strengthen forces within the organization that make it easy to follow your example (the desired behaviors) and weaken the forces within the organization that make it hard to follow your example⁹. Forces within the organization making it easier or harder could be policies and procedures, the organization structure, role requirements/KPIs etc. see the Burke-Litwin model below for a system wide view. Exploring how to change the environment further will have to be the subject of a further post, or a book or two!

Although leaders cannot control all parts of culture sneaking into their breakfast, there is much within a leader’s control to

• Build their self-awareness to help navigate paradoxes thrown at them, and
• Influence the system to better enable the culture.

Concluding thought

Next time someone says, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”, I invite you to politely add “Yes, and what eats culture for breakfast?”.

This article could not have been written without the encouragement, feedback and input of Ann-Marie Davis and Debra Noumair. For which I’m grateful!

Burke-Litwin model

References

1. Burke, W. Warner (2018). Organization change: Theory and practice, 5th Ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
2. Deal, T.E. and Kennedy, A.A. (1982) Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley Publishing Company
3. Schein, E. H., & Schein, P. (2019). The Corporate Culture Survival Guide: Culture, Change, leadership. Hoboken, New Jersey:  Wiley.
4. Hogan, R. (2007). Personality and the fate of organizations. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers
5. Burke, W. Warner; Noumair, Debra A. (2015): Organization Development: A Process of Learning and Changing. New Jersey: Pearson Education
6. Kanter, R. M. (1989). When Giants learn to dance mastering the challenges of strategy, management, and careers in the 1990s. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster 
7. Lewin, K. (1939). Experiments in social space. In Lewin, G. W. (Ed.), (1948): Resolving social conflict (pp. 71-83). New York, NY: Harper & Row
8. Church, A.H., Dawson, L.M., Barden, K.L., Fleck, C.R., Rotolo, C.T., & Tuller, M.D. (2018). Enhancing 360-Degree Feedback for Individual Assessment and Organization Development: Methods and Lessons from the Field. Research in Organizational Change and Development
9. Lewin, K. (1951) Field theory in social science. New York: Harper.