GRAMMATICAS CONSULTING LTD
Briefing Note
By Dominic Grammaticas FCA
October 2026
I hear this more often than you might expect. A CEO who attended a workshop, read a book, brought in a facilitator for a team-building day, and then moved on. Box ticked. Culture sorted. Back to business.
Except culture is the business. It is the mechanism by which strategy gets delivered. It is how the message gets from the boardroom to the coalface. And if you think a training session a year or two ago is still shaping how your team behaves today, you are almost certainly mistaken.
In my last post I asked whether your team could articulate your strategy. This week the question goes deeper: even if they know the strategy, does the culture of your organisation enable them to deliver it?
Culture is not a programme. It is not a set of values on a poster. It is the accumulation of thousands of small daily behaviours, decisions, and interactions that collectively define how your organisation actually works. It is what happens when a guide decides whether to follow the code of conduct at a sighting or to push closer because the guest wants a better photograph. It is what happens when a chef is under pressure and decides whether to cut a corner on food safety. It is what happens when a manager sees something wrong and decides whether to speak up or stay quiet.
These moments are where strategy either lives or dies. And they are shaped not by what the CEO said in a meeting last year, but by what the organisation rewards, tolerates, and ignores every day.
The CEOs who build great cultures do three things consistently. They model the behaviour they expect. They address the behaviour they do not accept, promptly and visibly. And they create an environment where people feel safe to raise concerns without fear of consequences. None of this requires a training programme. All of it requires sustained, personal commitment from the top.
Culture is so easy to ignore because it does not show up as a line item in your management accounts. But it is the single biggest determinant of whether your strategy succeeds or fails at the point of delivery. If your guests are not getting the experience you promised, the problem is almost never the strategy. It is the culture.
If you would like to talk about building a culture that delivers, Grammaticas Consulting Ltd would welcome the conversation.
Dominic Grammaticas FCA
Managing Director, Grammaticas Consulting Ltd
dominic@grammaticas.com
www.grammaticas.com
