Today’s leading boards want a clearer view of organizational culture—an engine of strategy and warning light for risk. Yet, despite engagement surveys and other tools, board members often have at best an opaque view.
To address this need, The Conference Board and Semler Brossy developed a framework to spark deeper dialogue between boards and management. The framework helps boards understand the current and desired state of their organization’s culture and what leadership is and can be doing to align culture with strategic direction.
Trusted Insights for What’s Ahead®
- Boards must understand organizational culture through two complementary lenses. The foundational strength lens highlights the core elements that create stability and coherence and expose the organization to potential cultural risks when they are weak or inconsistent. The strategic choice lens focuses on whether the organization’s cultural choices align with its current strategic direction and business model.
- Using both lenses strengthens governance and enables a shared language for culture. Assessing foundations and strategic fit equips boards and management to identify cultural risks; evaluate alignment with aspirations and future direction; and engage in clearer, more focused dialogue about the organization’s cultural strengths and needs.
Defining culture: Culture is the shared foundation and set of learned choices that shape how people work. In other words, it’s what we do and why we do it.
Understanding the Foundational and Strategic Elements of Culture
Boards and management teams can view culture through two complementary lenses: the foundational elements that give it strength and coherence and the strategic elements that reflect deliberate choices about how the organization engages with people and change in pursuit of its goals.
In their pursuit of understanding, boards and management teams can pose two key questions:
- How strong are the foundational elements of culture—our shared vision, values, accountability, and commitment to leadership development?
- This question helps boards understand the clarity, integrity, and resilience of the culture that underpins performance across the enterprise. Weakness here signals fragility and risk, regardless of strategic intent.
- How aligned is our current state with our desired future state for the organization’s strategic culture choices?
- These strategic culture choices reflect how the organization operates—its approach to time horizon, innovation, and speed—and how it engages—its approach to collaboration, customer orientation, and talent strategy orientation. The degree of alignment between the current and desired future culture reveals how well the organization’s ways of working support its strategic business goals. Misalignment suggests culture is not reinforcing strategy.
Foundational strength and strategic choice are deeply connected: the first makes the second possible. Clarity of vision, values, and accountability provides the trust and stability that enable change. Conversely, strategic choices test the strength of those foundations; efforts to innovate, grow, or transform often expose where values and leadership practices are inconsistent or unclear. Together, they offer boards a balanced view of how culture both anchors and advances strategy.
What This Conversation Can Unlock
When boards and management teams use this framework for discussion, the payoff is sharper judgment and more grounded decisions. A few examples illustrate how this perspective could come to life in practice:
- Foundational review highlights leadership risks. A board assessing its foundational elements might notice that while the company has strong values, it lacks a clear system for attracting and developing leaders who embody them. Recognizing this, the board can work with management to strengthen leadership pipelines and succession planning tied explicitly to cultural attributes.
- Strategic review uncovers misalignment on approach to change. A company’s long-standing risk discipline—once a source of strength—might stifle innovation. The board can gain insights from management to clarify where a more adaptive posture is essential to executing strategy, leading to changes in investment criteria and leadership incentives that reward experimentation alongside reliability.
- Strategic review reveals misalignment on posture to decision-making. A board might identify that a strong emphasis on cooperation is slowing decision-making and therefore stalling growth. By asking management how greater local autonomy might accelerate growth and speed to market without sacrificing shared accountability, the board can help shape a shift in decision rights and incentive design—freeing regional teams to move faster while maintaining enterprise cohesion.
Culture has always influenced performance; this framework simply gives boards a structured way to see it, talk about it, and act on it. By using these two lenses—foundational strength and strategic choice—boards can anchor oversight in what truly drives behavior and outcomes. The result is governance that is responsive to risk and catalytic for strategy.
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