Leaders tend to misunderstand culture because they misunderstand behavior...
As a recent HBR article said - leaders treat culture as communication and branding (purpose statements, campaigns, perks) rather than as behavior and system design.
That follow what I have seen in my work with organizations on culture and leadership, that behaviors are talked about in organizational culture, but rarely with much rigor and even when mentioned, there is little written about how to define and work with behaviors or even on how to analyze the drivers of those behaviors with a more evidence based approach.
If you want to help organizations with change (which is constant) and with culture you have to focus on behaviors and on the system to enable those.
You can't put all the responsibility on the individual to change, if the organization is not supporting by changing things in the system.
Our process at my consultancy Aim For Behavior when helping companies with culture change comprises 2 parts :
1. Doing an assessment of the current culture looking at different dimensions to help you understand if current values align and if behaviors are the right ones, or if other behaviors need to be added or changed - this is done from many lenses and what we find are the key tensions.
2. We then take the insights from the assessment and do a behavioral gap analysis that lets you understand the key drivers you need to address, the levers you have to enable them (based on the organization's capabilities) and the prioritized change paths the organization can work on.
This creates a dashboard for change that ties behaviors and drivers with specific interventions, so you can show how these behaviors are being enabled.
Working on your company culture should never feel fluffy... it should be tangible, and done in a systematic and evidence based.
Remember that any time you are working on change, you need to also account context, for the system, the formal/informal structures, the strategic goals of the org... as well as the drivers of behavior, use mixed methods and look at the literature and run experiments in this kind of work.
If you are working on culture change - here are some books to inspire your thinking and doing.
1. Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux
2. The Future of Change Management by Paul Gibbons & Tricia Kennedy **I wrote a chapter in this book**
3. Organizational Culture and Leadership by Edgar H. Schein (with Peter Schein)
4. The Behaviour Change Wheel by Susan Michie, Lou Atkins & Robert West
5.
Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture
Based on the Competing Values Framework by Kim S. Cameron & Robert E. Quinn
6. Exploring Social Psychology by David Myers & Jean M. Twenge