From Agile Rituals to Real Culture Change: A Leadership Playbook¨

“We’ve adopted stand-ups, retros, and Kanban boards. Why aren’t we moving faster?”

It’s a familiar question. Teams embrace Agile rituals, declare themselves “agile”, install shiny new collaboration tools, and redesign their workflows, yet the underlying dynamics stay the same. Decisions are slow. Trust is fragile. Silos persist and no additional value is delivered.

The truth? Rituals alone don’t change culture. They reflect it.

If you're serious about building a high-performing team, it’s time to stop mistaking frameworks for transformation and start treating culture as a leadership responsibility, not an separate transformation workstream or initiative.

The Illusion of Progress

Agile, OKRs, hybrid collaboration norms, these tools are powerful. But without a shift in how people think, relate, and act, they become surface-level choreography. I’ve seen teams complete flawless retrospectives… and then avoid giving each other feedback for months.

Culture isn’t what’s on the Miro board. It’s what happens between meetings, in moments of uncertainty, pressure, or ambiguity. That’s where the work begins.

What Culture Change Actually Requires

Here’s what I’ve learned from working with leadership teams across industries: meaningful change doesn’t start with a shiny new vision statement explained once at an all-hands and turned into a poster at the entrance of the building, it starts with how leaders show up and modelling the behaviour they`re expecting their employees to show.

1. Clarify What ‘Good’ Looks Like

Do people know what high performance looks like beyond delivery speed?

• What behaviours do you value in meetings? In conflict?

• What kind of decision-making do you expect in ambiguity?

• How do you want people to disagree?

Codify this, not as a values poster, but in team agreements, onboarding, and rituals.

One practice I often introduce with teams: At the start of a new project or leadership cycle, co-create a short “Ways of Working” agreement. Not a slide deck. Just one page. Include four things:

1. What we expect from each other and what is non-acceptable behaviour(e.g., challenge ideas, not people) 

2. What we do when things go off-track (e.g., how we give feedback)

3. What success looks like beyond metrics (e.g., healthy debate, speed of decision-making)

4. How we prefer to communicate with each other: email, slack, teams, meetings (especially in not co-located teams, or hybrid ways of working)

This simple exercise surfaces unspoken assumptions, and turns them into shared norms. You’re not guessing what “good” looks like. You’ve defined it together.

2. Model the Change You Expect

Leaders can’t outsource culture. Your behaviours signal what’s truly rewarded.

One area where this disconnect is especially obvious: fear culture. Many organisations say they want to move away from it, or is not persistent in their organisations. However, talking to employees, or simply observing behaviour you see a different picture. But if mistakes are still (quietly) punished, or never acknowledged at senior levels, people will play it safe.

Saying “it’s okay to make mistakes” isn’t enough. You have to show it.

One ritual I often recommend: Ask senior leaders to share one of their biggest professional mistakes during the monthly town hall. Not as a one-off, but as a recurring, core moment. Let the most senior voices go first. Be specific. Be human. To bring the point home even more: let the CEO interview this person on the mistake, how it happened, why it happened, and what was learned from it.

This simple act models vulnerability and signals psychological safety. It tells people, "We’re serious about learning, not about pretending we never get it wrong.”

Culture doesn’t shift through permission. It shifts through demonstration.

3. Redesign the ‘Invisible’ Moments

The biggest culture levers aren’t always the big workshops. They’re the micro-interactions:

• How meetings are opened and closed

• Who gets consulted on decisions

• What happens when someone misses a deadline

These are often the unspoken rituals that shape how people feel, decide, and act. Culture lives in these moments.

One practical shift I often recommend: Start meetings with a one-minute round where each participant shares a recent win, challenge, or blocker. It sounds simple, but it fundamentally changes the energy in the room.

You move from status to story. From updates to connection. It surfaces early signals, fatigue, tension, breakthrough ideas, that otherwise stay hidden.

When this becomes a shared habit, it builds psychological safety and deepens alignment.

And what about missed deadlines? Instead of defaulting to silence or frustration, try this: build in a monthly “What Slowed Us Down?” reflection. Not to blame, just to understand. Is the issue resourcing? Decision bottlenecks? Misaligned priorities?

By normalising these conversations, teams stop treating delays as personal failures, and start seeing them as systemic signals. You go from reactive to reflective. And that’s the culture shift.

Start Here: A Culture Change Checklist for Leaders

You don’t need a full transformation plan to start shifting culture. Here’s where to begin:

✅ Have an intentional team kick-off meeting where ways of working and non-negotiable team behaviours are agreed 

✅ Audit one ritual, what’s the hidden message it sends? 

✅ Start sharing your own mistakes and the learnings taken from it 

✅ Ask your team: “What’s one thing we can change to work better together?”

Final Thought

Culture isn’t a workshop. It’s a thousand decisions. It’s what people whisper after a meeting, not what they write on the whiteboard.

So yes, keep your Agile rituals. But don’t stop there. Design the invisible. Name the unspoken. Model the shift.

That’s where the real change happens.