When You Don’t Know Where to Start with Culture
Most leaders don’t come to me saying, “we have a culture problem.”
They say something else.
“We’re not moving as fast as we should.” “I feel like I’m repeating myself.” “People are working hard, but it’s not translating.”
It’s rarely labeled directly.
Because culture doesn’t present as a single issue.
It shows up as patterns.
And when you’re inside those patterns every day, they start to feel normal.
That’s what makes culture difficult to address.
Not because it’s abstract - but because it’s embedded.
It lives in how decisions are made.
How expectations are communicated. How follow-through happens - or doesn’t.
So when performance isn’t where it should be, the instinct is to fix what’s visible. Add more structure. Increase oversight. Introduce new initiatives.
But without understanding what’s actually driving the behavior, those efforts rarely stick.
This is where assessment becomes critical.
Not as a formality, but as a way to create clarity.
Research in evidence-based management consistently shows that interventions grounded in diagnostic data are significantly more effective than those based on assumption or intuition (Briner et al., 2009). Because they target the actual issue - not the symptom.
And in culture work, symptoms can be misleading.
A lack of accountability might actually be a clarity issue. Slow execution might be a decision-making bottleneck. Disengagement might be tied to inconsistent leadership behavior.
Without assessment, you’re guessing.
And guessing at this level is expensive.
In time, in energy, and in credibility.
What assessment does is remove ambiguity. It gives you a shared understanding of what’s happening, why it’s happening, and where to focus.
From there, the work becomes much more direct.
Not easy - but clear.
And clarity is what most organizations are missing.
Because once you can see the system, you can start to change it.
Without that, you’re reacting to pieces of it, hoping something shifts.
Sometimes it does.
Most of the time, it doesn’t.
If you’re not sure where to start, that’s not a failure. It’s a signal that you need better visibility.
At Catalyst, we help organizations assess what’s actually happening beneath the surface so you can act with precision instead of guesswork.
If you’re ready for that level of clarity, schedule a discovery conversation.
References
Briner, R. B., Denyer, D., & Rousseau, D. M. (2009). Evidence-based management. Academy of Management Perspectives.