Your Competitive Advantage in 2025 is Culture-Savvy Leadership
Amidst the ever-increasing complexity, accelerating change, and relentless pressure to reduce resources, what is the most impactful action leaders can take to help their organizations succeed in 2025?
According to a recent Forbes article, there are sixteen attributes of good leaders in 2025 from alignment and authentic relationships to care, emotional intelligence, and even unconditional love. If you ask Google “what are the latest trends in leadership?” the AI summary offers a list including increased emphasis on emotional intelligence, purpose-driven leadership, remote leadership, adaptive leadership, continuous learning and adaptability, building a culture for remote teams, investing employee wellbeing, and incorporating ethical considerations into leadership development. Even with the overlap, this cursory search produces too many options to be practical.
There is one particular path that can equip us for the critical trends of both today and tomorrow. A time-tested, evidence-based, powerful concept that can literally prepare leaders for anything: culture.
Culture as Foundation
A Google search on the word “culture” brings up dictionary definitions pointing to social norms, the arts, and bacteria. Of these three realms of meaning, the social realm of culture is the one that matters most to leaders and organizations.
Culture isn’t an actual, physical thing that exists in the world, but rather an idea or concept for describing how humans interact and engage with the world. Culture is a foundational system at both the individual and collective level: humans cannot engage with each other and the world except through culture. Because of culture’s capacity to account for (practically) all of human behavior, it is the most powerful framework for thinking about leadership and organizational success.
Geert Hofstede called culture the “software of the mind” in his 1991 book Cultures and Organizations. Thirty years later in a 2021 Forbes article, Patti Fletcher also used a computer analogy to refer to organizational culture as the “operating system” of a company. This operating system includes, among other things, the tasks and activities that occupy our days, the frameworks for making decisions, who we surround ourselves with, who has a seat at the table, and how respect is shown.
This way of thinking about human behavior as a system called culture comes from anthropology, a discipline devoted for the past century and a half to understanding the vast diversity of humanity. On the coattails of the Enlightenment project to classify the natural world in the 18th century and Darwin's bombshell on human evolution, anthropologists began to rely more heavily on the culture concept, especially after British scholar Edward B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture in 1871. Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, anthropologists from Edward Sapir to Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Clifford Geertz, and Arjun Appadurai (among many others) embedded culture into social science as the central, overarching concept for analyzing human behavior.
Culture has since supplanted all physical and biological explanations for who we are and how we behave. Today there is a scientific consensus that culture – independently from physiology or biology -- is the primary driver of human identity formation and behavior.
No human is born with a built-in culture or language. Our temperaments, dispositions, and personalities, regardless of genetic propensities, are developed within sets of meanings and values that we call “culture.” Studies of infant and early childhood learning and behavior attest to the reality of our cultures in forming who we are. It is a basic tenet of anthropological knowledge that all normal human beings have the capacity to learn any cultural behavior. - American Anthropological Association Statement on Race
Culture Definition: A System for Engaging with Each Other & the World
Culture is the operating system for human interaction with each other and the world. It consists of the norms, languages, relationships, and technologies that connect each individual to any number of intersecting communities.
If culture is our programming – our software - we are born with only two programs pre-loaded into the system: grasping and suckling. We have needs (like food, shelter, and connection), but we only know to do those two actions. We have to learn everything else from the people around us in our communities of origin. That process of learning – and then the process of living according to that learning – is culture. As we grow up and expand beyond our communities of origin, we move in and out of multiple communities of adoption. All of the values, languages, tools, and identities we learn and share in those multiple, intersecting communities throughout our lives make up our cultural identity.
Because it encompasses the totality of human behavior, understanding culture is essential for understanding the organization as a whole and every individual within the organization. Culture is both “the way we do things around here” and the context for each individual’s engagement with that way of doing things. In other words, in organizations culture necessarily exists at two levels – group and individual. In order to successfully engineer the group culture, we need to have the skills to navigate the fact that each employee has a unique, complex cultural identity of their own. The two levels of group culture and multiple individual cultures are inescapably interconnected in a chicken-and-egg relationship. In bringing our unique mix of cultural identities to the organization, we impact the organizations as individuals, just as the organizations impact us.
Working at the Intersections of Me and We
We have found over the course of almost two decades of working with organizations of many types, from multinational corporations to small, local non-profits, that organizations are more successful when they deliberately put their attention on the intersection between the individual cultural identities present in the workplace (including, importantly, those of leaders) and the group or corporate identity they are trying to create.
What does it look like for leadership to put attention on the intersection between the desired organizational culture and the cultures of people in the organizations? We believe it is a three-step process:
First, leaders commit to developing their cultural intelligence as a first step to understanding what the cultural landscape looks like at both the individual level (starting with themselves) and the group level (the employee experience)
Second, leaders decide what cultural attributes they want to embed into the group environment to support the organizational strategy AND commit to embodying those attributes
Third, everyone learns and adopts the skills they need to collaborate and adopt – in ways that are meaningful and authentic to them – the cultural attributes leaders want to see.
At Highrise Vista we believe that you cannot succeed without all three steps, and especially without the italicized part of step two. Leaders must lead by example, period. Cultural intelligence is the secret skillset that makes it happen.
Oftentimes organizations leave culture to chance, or they simply declare what cultural attributes are needed without any sort of behavioral reinforcement. Leaders at these organizations usually have the unpleasant experience of watching the culture eat their strategies for breakfast. Culture can't be an afterthought for the 21st-century leader. Rumi, a Turkish poet who lived towards the end of the 13th century, wrote in The Third Book of Masnavi that “fish begins to stink at the head, not the tail." The maxim remains relevant today. Certainly, most practitioners of organizational psychology agree that leadership’s role in maintaining organizational health is primary. Culture has a crucial role to play.
The leaders who reach their organizational goals typically take the time to first understand what culture is and how it operates, how their own cultural identities have impacted their behavior and leadership style, and how well they recognize and manage cultural differences around them. Only then are they equipped to intentionally curate and model cultural attributes that will help them execute their strategy. Skipping the step of developing cultural intelligence leaves them vulnerable to error and failure.
Success comes when you manifest the values through execution, reinforcing your culture instead of sidestepping it. Values-based execution means reinforcing values through behavior, every day. - Alice Fletcher, 2021
Cultural Intelligence is the 21st Century Leadership Edge
People rarely behave how we want or expect them to behave, and understanding our own expectations about other peoples’ behavior is crucial to being able to lead them. Cultural intelligence is a skill that prepares leaders and everyone to manage their expectations about and reactions to the behavior of other people. Below we detail our three-phased approach to helping leaders and organizations work in more culturally intelligent ways.
The core of cultural intelligence is knowledge of the self. It is a longstanding and powerful truth that if you want to understand other people, you have to start with looking at yourself.
We all look through a window that turns out to be a mirror […] The most empowering personal skill is the ability to look inside and gain awareness of the origins of your reactions. – Dr. Ronald R. Short, 1998
Phase One: Know Thyself
We believe that an impactful starting point for knowing oneself as a leader is to begin building cultural intelligence. This means first and foremost understanding your own cultural histories and identities (these are necessarily plural) before developing the skill of shifting perspective and adapting behavior when confronted with people whose histories and identities are different.
How we help: This leadership exploration and skill development is a necessary first step. During this “cultural unpacking” phase, we deliver leadership assessments, provide executive coaching, and have strategic conversations about your leadership style, your team of direct reports, and the broader employee experience.
Questions we help you answer: Who am I as a leader? Who do I want to be? How will I bridge the gap between the leader I am and the leader I want to be? Am I getting the best of everyone on my team? How skilled am I at bridging and navigating human differences in the workplace? What are the cultural attributes of the ideal environment I want to create?
Phase 2: Systems Thinking
Once leaders have established a baseline of knowledge and skill around their cultural selves they are ready to begin thinking systematically about the group culture they need to achieve their strategic goals. At this stage, we move beyond leaders’ initial ideas about desired cultural attributes and work on deciding what cultural attributes to actually embed, assessing the current state of the culture to determine what kind of shift is needed and the scope of that shift, and continuing the skill-building with leaders to reinforce practical approaches to modeling and embedding desired behaviors.
How we help: We conduct culture assessments, strategy meetings, and leadership training focused on applied cultural competence, e.g., effective talent management strategies, fostering alignment, and improving collaboration and teamwork.
Questions we help you answer: What values and behaviors do I need to embed into the culture to support the strategy? How far away are we now from those values and behaviors, and what do we need to stop, start, and continue to close those gaps? How can leaders and managers both speak a uniform language and model the desired values and behaviors in a consistent way that is also authentic to each person?
Phase 3: Skill-Building for All
After working with leaders to develop their cultural intelligence and lay the foundations for deliberate culture creation, we turn our focus to the collective. At this stage we deliver training to embed both baseline cultural intelligence skills and specific cultural attributes (e.g., feedback, conflict management or collaboration practices) into everyday work. We build a shared skillset and vocabulary among all employees for enhancing collaboration, leveraging unique strengths, and amplifying the specific cultural attributes that leaders have defined for future success.
The training we offer is designed to align all employees, regardless of role or location, around a common set of values and behaviors that will drive success for the organization. Participants will learn the fundamental building blocks of trust and collaboration on teams, practice the skill of bridging differences, and develop communication capabilities and interpersonal skills designed to enhance individual and team performance.
How we help: We tailor our training program to fit the needs of your particular audience (location, industry, function, or other) and scale it to reach everyone in your organization. We adapt to geography and culture as needed, and can train virtually or in person.
Questions we help you answer: What are the core skills I need to push in my organization to ensure people can work well together? What are some key cultural attributes I want everyone to adopt, and what tools can I give them to help the process of adoption?
Culture only eats strategy when we let it. Culture-savvy leaders know that cultural intelligence is the capability that will catapult them to new levels of collaboration, innovation, and performance.
Want to upskill your leaders to manage any team dynamic? Need to enhance collaboration, engagement, and performance? Looking to build the right culture to support your strategy and empower your teams to work better together? Contact us at info@highrisevistaconsulting for a no cost consultation today.
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