We started our cultural transformation in governance

Culture lives where you’re not necessarily looking for it. We see this pattern repeatedly. Organisations invest in culture programs while the infrastructure underneath quietly undermines them, write Joanne Gladding and Katie Williams.

Culture lives where you’re not necessarily looking for it. We see this pattern repeatedly. Organisations invest in culture programs while the infrastructure underneath quietly undermines them.

Culture isn’t just the values on the wall or the engagement survey results. It’s the accumulated signal of every decision an organisation makes, signalling what matters, who has power, and whether people’s work counts, and it’s transmitted, above all else, through governance.

When governance is unclear, that is, when decisions get relitigated, projects are killed late and without explanation, and people can’t tell who owns what – it sends a cultural message that alignment is non-existent, your effort is expendable, and what you produce may or may not matter. It’s an uphill battle for an engagement program to fix that, because the infrastructure underneath is sending a completely different message.

Why the CPO pulled up a chair with the CFO

Anything that demotivates, wastes effort, or destroys alignment is a people problem, regardless of whose org chart it sits in.

At Sky, governance and planning sat in finance and technology. Traditionally, that’s where it stays. But when the loudest cultural barrier in your organisation is its decision-making infrastructure, that distinction stops mattering.

The cultural transformation at Sky required a reframe. Not “HR has identified a culture problem”, which is a framing that invites the CFO to hand it back, but “we have a productivity and performance opportunity, and it’s rooted in how decisions get made”. It also only works if the CPO has done the diagnostic work first: not assumed the problem, but evidenced it. Where are decisions getting stuck? Where is work being duplicated or abandoned? Where is the gap between what leadership says the priorities are and where people are actually spending their time?

For organisations navigating similar terrain, the path forward tends to follow a few consistent principles.

Diagnose before you advocate. The CPO raising a cultural concern with the CFO may be met with polite interest at best. The CPO walking in with evidence of how governance is affecting the business: in inefficient use of resources, in stalled projects, in people making misaligned decisions because no one has given them a clear framework – is having a different conversation.

Frame it in the CFO’s language. Governance reform landed at Sky because it was positioned as a performance and efficiency opportunity, rather than another culture program. The cultural benefit was real, but it wasn’t the only argument.

Make it a shared problem. The CPO’s role is to surface the cultural cost and build the case. Everything the people team does must be visibly built on and in service of the company strategy and the long-range financial plan.

Measure what changes. If governance is a cultural lever, treat it like one. Track decision velocity. Monitor how often significant decisions get reopened. Ask people whether they understand what the priorities are and why. The engagement survey won’t capture all of this, but the data is available if you do the deep listening within the organisation and collect data from multiple sources.

What CFOs are missing about governance

For finance leaders, governance is primarily a control function: accountability, risk management, financial rigour. But governance has a second function that rarely gets named in the CFO’s remit: it can be one of the most powerful cultural levers in the organisation.

Culture Amp research shows that companies that moved into a ‘Peak Performance cultural state’ shared one thing above all: they got better at redirecting resources towards stated priorities, and made that shift visible to their people. This shows up on the P&L too: Culture Amp’s research into high-revenue growth companies found that prioritising accountability and communicating a motivating vision are critical to achieving and sustaining revenue growth, linking organisational clarity directly to a three-year financial outcome.

Every relitigated decision tells people the process doesn’t work and their time isn’t worth protecting. Every project killed at 90 per cent sends a message about how much the organisation values effort. Real motivation crushers. Every unclear prioritisation framework forces people to guess what matters while the strategy says something different. The question of how decisions get made isn’t just an efficiency question. It’s a culture question, and it belongs in the room where the CPO and CFO are talking to each other.

Start with the decisions

Most cultural transformations stall because the operational infrastructure is sending a completely different message to the one the culture program is trying to land.

If you want an honest read on the state of your culture, begin with how many times your last 10 significant decisions were revisited. How many projects were stopped after most of the work was done? How clearly can people articulate what gets prioritised and why?

Those answers will tell you whether the next culture conversation in your business starts in finance rather than HR.

Joanne Gladding is a senior people scientist at Culture Amp, and Katie Williams is the chief people officer at Sky.

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