Why Top IT Leaders Focus on Culture (and How You Can Too)

What is your current culture?

Every organization has a culture—much like a reputation or customer sentiment—whether you’re actively shaping it or not. Your organization’s reputation is built on the many interactions you and your team have with customers, vendors, partners, and other stakeholders. Over time, those interactions combine to form an impression that can be positive, negative, indifferent, or somewhere in between. This ultimately shapes whether people see you as a trusted, strategic partner and their first choice for IT advice and services—or as the one to avoid.

Managing your reputation starts with defining clear customer service principles, standards, and values that guide your IT staff in their daily interactions. Without these guiding principles, service delivery is left to individual interpretation, leading to inconsistency and unpredictable experiences for your customers. Much like how a reputation is formed, culture is shaped by the many daily interactions staff have with one another throughout their work. While many IT organizations do a good job of setting standards for Service Desk and other customer-facing functions, fewer invest in developing a broader organizational culture—which ultimately has an even greater influence on lasting success.

What is organizational culture?

Organizational culture is the system of shared values, beliefs, norms, behaviors, and practices that shape how people interact, make decisions, and approach their work. It creates the social and psychological environment that influences how employees behave and collaborate. Again, your organization has a culture—deliberate or not.

The business thinker Peter Drucker put it well when he said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” No matter what strategies or policies are written down, your culture ultimately drives how employees behave in practice. For example, many IT groups have detailed change management procedures, but often fewer than half of changes actually follow those policies. That might be because the procedures are too cumbersome, but it also signals a culture that implicitly allows the policy to be bypassed. If the culture tolerates this, then it communicates that policies aren’t always important to follow strictly—and this mindset can spread to other critical areas like security, risk, governance, and procurement.

This ties back to reputation management. You can define what excellent customer service looks like, but without culture as a foundation, those standards will be unevenly applied. Customer service standards should be closely connected and grounded in your organizational culture.

Developing an intentional culture

Building an intentional culture isn’t complicated, but it does require dedication, planning, and effort. It begins with establishing or revisiting your organization’s Vision, Mission, and Values (VMV). When I ask IT leaders about their experience with VMV efforts, I often get mixed responses: about half see it as valuable, while the other half view it as a waste of time and resources. Both perspectives make sense. If you spend months crafting a VMV document and then simply hang it on the wall or put it on your website without integrating it into daily life, it’s not worth the effort. But if you’re committed to improving your culture in a meaningful way and are open to long-term transformation, VMV development is a crucial and foundational step.

There’s no single “right” way to carry out a VMV initiative, but some key points are important. First, it should be collaborative, involving people at every level of your IT organization. Values are the centerpiece here because they define expected behaviors—for example, following policies. A common mistake is having too many values, which can dilute focus and become impossible to remember. Keep it simple. In one recent initiative, we settled on three core values, each supported by 6-8 behavior statements that illustrate those values in action.

It’s important that each employee and team feels heard—that their input shapes the final VMV. This builds a shared sense of ownership, rather than a perception that leadership is imposing it from above. A well-crafted VMV becomes the foundation for an intentional culture and enables employees to hold one another accountable in a constructive way.

Making your intentional culture a reality

Your VMV document is like the concrete foundation for the culture you want to build. But living those values must start at the top. IT leadership—directors, CIOs, CTOs—must demonstrate unwavering commitment to the VMV and model the behaviors expected of everyone. Staff notice closely, especially right after a VMV rollout. Culture efforts are quickly undermined if leaders don’t practice what they preach or hold each other accountable, particularly when “integrity” is one of the stated values.

Within your broader IT organization, you may have hundreds of unwritten and written policies, practices, and procedures governing how work gets done and how people interact. As you review, update, or create these documents, your VMV values should serve as a touchstone. For instance, if one value is “excellence” with a statement like “We strive to be excellent in everything we do,” then that value should frame how you evaluate things like staff performance reviews. Are they done on time? Are they consistent across managers? If not, that’s not living up to excellence. This approach can extend across all IT operations—from change management to security to customer support. With the VMV in place, then staff who own these processes and documents have permission and the set expectation to update and execute them to meet the organization's VMV. The VMV acts as the tide that raises all boats, driving transformation at scale across the organization.

Published, team-developed VMV gives employees a shared language to encourage each other toward positive behaviors, not just management enforcing rules.

Leadership must consistently reinforce these values. That means integrating them into communications, performance evaluations, policies, meeting practices, SLAs, contracts, and more. Make it clear why “we do it this way”—aligning every part of the organization with your culture. This is a long-term commitment and the way the organization will operate from now on, with no exceptions.

When this is done consciously and thoughtfully, you’ll begin to see visible signs of cultural transformation everywhere. A healthy intentional culture creates a high performing organization that delivers increased stakeholder value.

If you would like to talk more about this or would like assistance with creating an intentional organizational culture, please reach out to me at steve.monaghan@lgov.llc - www.lgov.llc