Driving strategy and performance through leadership alignment and culture building
- John R. Childress
- Feb 16
- 4 min read
In one APAC integration I supported, the challenge wasn’t expertise or market knowledge. It was cultural.
The business needed to unify eight separate country organisations—each with its own P&L, local leadership team, and established ways of working—into a single regional entity.
The aim was straightforward: create operational, marketing, finance, and supply-chain efficiencies to win in a fast-growing agriculture equipment market. The hard part was getting eight different national and business cultures (Russia, Turkey, Kazakhstan, India, Australia, China, SEA, Japan) to operate as one APAC region.
You can think of that as a merger and integration exercise—with “culture clash” thrown in eight times over. And we already know the statistics on integrations aren’t encouraging: the global value of M&A deals in 2019 was stated as $3.7T, and 70% of integrations fail to deliver sustainable value, with culture clash a significant factor.
This is where leadership becomes decisive.
Culture follows leadership—and misalignment multiplies risk
Even when country cultures differ (sometimes dramatically), the principles of corporate culture are consistent.
The difference is how they get operationalised.
One of the core truths I’ve seen repeatedly is this: organisations are a shadow of their leaders. What senior leaders do—how they decide, what they prioritise, what they tolerate—travels quickly through the system.
So if the newly formed APAC senior team did not adopt a shared set of leadership behaviours, cultural values, and operating principles, misalignment at the top would show up everywhere:
infighting over limited budgets
poor information and resource sharing
weakened teamwork on APAC-wide projects
slower decisions and reduced performance
In short: lack of alignment increases risk and reduces performance.
Culture is a business issue, not an HR issue
A second principle matters just as much: culture is a business issue—not an HR issue.
You can redraw org charts and rewrite job descriptions, but that doesn’t automatically produce an effective organisation. Alongside new roles and responsibilities, you have to build a culture that supports delivery of the strategy and engages employees in the work.
That’s the point many transformations miss: the strategy is often fine. The system that has to execute it is not.
The APAC road to success: a practical methodology
The growth ambition was significant: moving the APAC region from $1.4B to $5B in revenue in four years.
The market opportunity was there. The question was whether leadership and culture could scale to match it.
The new General Manager had two immediate priorities:
Build the senior team by selecting the right leaders from across the region
Align that team around APAC performance—not individual country or functional agendas
From there, we built what became known as “The APAC Way”—a shared culture and operating model designed to support strategy execution.
At a high level, the methodology followed a simple pattern:
1) Establish objectives and diagnose reality
Establish objectives with the GM
Conduct 1-to-1 interviews with the new senior team
Run selected interviews with direct reports
Review historical business performance
2) Measure culture, then feed it back to leadership
Run a culture survey to assess the current APAC culture
Produce an executive feedback report and review it with the GM and team
3) Align the senior team and lock in commitments
Hold a 3-day senior team strategy & culture retreat focused on:
alignment
teambuilding
establishing new culture and team behaviours
a strategy execution roadmap
Confirm individual and team commitments
4) Build cadence and reinforce behaviour in every country
Run quarterly 1-day senior team acceleration workshops
Run 2-day culture alignment workshops in each country
5) Re-measure, refine, and repeat
In year two, run another culture survey to assess the new APAC culture
Hold another 3-day senior team retreat to continue alignment and update the execution roadmap
One line in the write-up matters because it’s often overlooked: effective culture change needs measurement, constant communication, and a direct link from culture to business outcomes—and it must be reinforced by shifts in internal policies and work processes.
What changed (and why it worked)
This approach works because it treats culture as a system leaders can manage—rather than a slogan leaders can announce.
It creates:
shared priorities across the senior team
explicit operating principles (how we decide, how we escalate, what “good” looks like)
a rhythm of reinforcement (cadence beats one-off events)
measurement to keep everyone honest
And it makes local leaders part of the solution, not passive recipients of a corporate programme.
Results: performance followed alignment
The COO of the APAC region credited the approach for helping deliver “significant top line and bottom line performance.”
And by the end of the second year, the APAC region delivered 50% of total global profit and was well on its way to reaching the goal of becoming a $5B region.
If you’re leading a transformation or integration, start here (next 30–90 days)
If you’re navigating a merger, regional integration, or enterprise transformation, you don’t need another comms campaign.
You need alignment and execution mechanics.
A practical 30–90 day starting point:
Clarify the objective: what must be true in 12 months for this to be “working”?
Diagnose leadership alignment: where are priorities and decision rules inconsistent?
Measure culture as it is: surface the real conditions people are working under.
Align the top team: shared priorities, decision rules, and expected behaviours.
Build cadence: a rhythm of review, reinforcement, and course-correction.
Culture becomes visible when pressure is high—and consequences are real. The job of leadership is to ensure that, under pressure, the organisation defaults to the behaviours that protect performance.
Contact John
If you want to adapt this approach to your context—post-merger, multi-country, or enterprise-wide transformation—use the contact form and share a few details about what you’re trying to integrate and what “success” needs to look like.