Ready to unlock your culture code? Picture your company as a movie.
Now imagine your employees, your leaders, even your recruiters—they’re the cast and crew.
But here’s the twist: your script was written for a drama, and your team thinks they’re filming a documentary. Chaos, confusion, and a lot of “Why doesn’t this feel right?” That mismatch?
It’s culture misaligned with strategy.
In today’s episode, we’re digging into something powerful—almost revolutionary: the Competing Values Framework by Kim S. Cameron and Robert E. Quinn.
This tool shows you how to connect your business strategy, leadership style, performance expectations, communication tone, and even your hiring profile—all through the lens of your organisational culture. I’ve used this tool tons of times when helping our clients diagnose and change their organizational cultures.
And the best part?
When you understand this connection, you gain a roadmap to transform your business into a story-driven brand.
One where every piece of content, every leadership message, every recruitment ad supports the same strategic mission. No more guessing. No more generic fluff. Only resonance.
Let’s dive in.
Episode #195 Unlock Your Culture Code: The Secret to a Story-Driven Brand
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Unlocking The Culture Code with An Overview to the Competing Values Framework
Let’s start by digging into the Competing Values Framework (CVF).
It is one of the most respected culture models in the world—and for good reason. Think of it as a two-axis grid.
On one axis: do you prioritise flexibility or stability?
On the other: are you more focused on your internal people or the external market?
This creates four culture types. Visualise a 2×2 matrix:
- Top left (Clan): Flexible + Internal = a family-style culture. Think team spirit, loyalty, people development. HR is a caretaker. Leadership is mentorship.
- Top right (Adhocracy): Flexible + External = a start-up, innovation-driven, fast-moving culture. Here, leadership is visionary, risk-taking is applauded, and HR is a catalyst for change.
- Bottom right (Market): Stable + External = results, metrics, achievement. A place where performance rules and leaders are competitive. HR is strategic and performance-driven.
- Bottom left (Hierarchy): Stable + Internal = bureaucracy, process, control. Leadership is formal and structured. HR operates as compliance and consistency guardians.
Each culture is valid, depending on what your business needs to succeed.
The trouble begins when your strategy screams “Let’s scale like a start-up!” but your culture whispers “Let’s just keep things safe.”
Deep Dive – OCAI Dimensions for Leaders & HR for Real Business Impact
Now let’s deepen this.
The OCAI—the Organisational Culture Assessment Instrument—is the diagnostic tool connected to the CVF.
It measures your culture across six critical dimensions.
This isn’t about vibes or values written on a wall. It’s about real behaviours:
- Dominant characteristics – What’s the overall feel? Do people say “We’re like a family”? Or is it more “We’re goal-driven”?
- Leadership style – Are leaders mentors, entrepreneurs, coordinators, or competitors?
- Management of employees – Do we empower people or micromanage them?
- Organisational glue – What holds us together: loyalty, innovation, policies or targets?
- Strategic emphases – Are we aiming to grow through innovation, efficiency, people, or results?
- Success criteria – What do we celebrate: new ideas, team spirit, cost-control or market dominance?
For business leaders and HR, this insight is gold.
Let me paint a picture:
If you’re in a scale-up phase, your strategy demands flexibility, external orientation, and speed. That’s Adhocracy.
- Scale-up (Adhocracy → Market): Needs HR who recruit trailblazers, risk-takers, storytellers
- Cost-efficient (Hierarchy → Market): HR must hire process-driven, compliance-focussed leaders with high execution IQ
Your HR team should be risk-tolerant, fast thinkers, proactive trailblazers and storytellers.
Hiring messages should celebrate innovation, courage, boldness.
Flip that.
If you’re a cost-efficient, mature company under pressure to deliver stable margins, Hierarchy or Market culture might be a better fit.
You’ll be hiring people who want stability, not chaos.
Recruiters here should value detail, consistency, reliability. Performance goals aren’t about failing fast—they’re about avoiding failure altogether.
“Think of OCAI like your culture compass—it shows you what you are vs what you want to be.”
Diagnosing Culture Code Fit with Business Strategy
Here’s where it gets juicy.
The OCAI doesn’t just tell you what you are—it tells you what you want to be.
There is a mini-assessment in my free PDF about Strategic Organization Culture. You can download it for free here:
In the quiz, you distribute 100 points across four statements per dimension—one for each culture type. You do it twice: once for your current state, once for your preferred state.
Then you compare.
You’ll often see a big gap. And that gap? That’s the story conflict.
That’s where your plot isn’t matching your scenes. It’s why your people are disengaged, your messaging feels off, your leaders are confused about how to lead and you may make hiring mistakes because you are hiring for the past, not for the future.
This moment is powerful.
It tells you exactly where to shift—not only your culture, but your leadership development, your entire people strategy, your performance indicators, your hiring criteria, your business values, customer promise, and your employer brand messages.
Translating Your Culture Code into HR & Talent Profiles
So let’s make this even more concrete for the HR and TA folks listening.
If you’re in a Clan (or Collaborative specialist) culture, your ideal talent profiles value community.
Recruitment should emphasize collaboration, flexibility, support.
Your best candidates will want connection, mentorship, internal mobility.
If you are hiring or promoting team leaders, their dominant leadership trait is that of a mentor’s who sees the organizational hierarchy upside down, with them at the bottom enabling the success of their team and individuals.
As the HR in a clan culture, you are the employee champion; recruiter of team players and the enabler of constant learning and development.
In Adhocracy (or Innovative Agile Culture), you want to hire innovators—people who thrive with autonomy, creativity and experimentation.
These candidates need to feel excited about constant change and the freedom to try new things. Their focus is on the market and wanting to contribute to something the market hasn’t experienced before.
Your leaders must be visionary and storytell what the amazing future looks like for your customers, employees and the company exciting everyone with the opportunity to have a major impact.
Your HR operates as a change agent and recognizes free-thinkers and creatives from afar. All marketing communication for customers, candidates and employees must sound creative and visionary, and the best way to achieve this is through storytelling.
A Market (or Results-Driven Compete) culture requires high performers. Candidates who want to WIN. They look for roles where they can beat KPIs, get promoted fast, and be rewarded for results. Status is important for them, that’s why your business and employer brand are key to your business success.
Your HR must step up as a strategic business partner and focus on hiring high-performers and sales dynamos. Ultimate customer satisfaction is the strategic priority for your employees and business.
In Hierarchy (or a Process-oriented Control culture), you need structure lovers who enjoy the safety and security of lack of change. Your ideal employees and leaders are methodical people who get joy from ticking off boxes, following protocol, and maintaining order. Compliance, accuracy, and fairness drive their engagement.
Your HR is the operations enforcer who knows how to hire process and protocol first, detailed doers with no interest in looking outside the box and experimenting with anything. You want your people and process all emulate efficiency and effectiveness but also high-quality.
Same job title. Totally different personality fits depending on culture.
In simple terms: a scale-up needs bold recruiters; a cost-efficient biz needs meticulous ones.
Putting a procedure junkie into a startup? That’s like giving a librarian a fire extinguisher—useless in an open-mic night.
Understanding Cultural Evolution
Cultures evolve—and they should, as businesses evolve, too.
But they rarely do without friction.
Startups often begin as Adhocracies—risk-taking, bold, informal. As they grow, they crave Clan energy to stabilise their internal dynamics.
Then comes the need for Hierarchy—systems, rules, HR policies, and consistency.
Finally, as scale and profit dominate, the shift to Market occurs.
But here’s the trap: if your people fall in love with the Adhocracy, they might resist the structure. Or if your leaders crave Market aggression but haven’t built the process muscle from Hierarchy—you get burnout, chaos, turnover.
To sum it up, this is the typical lifecycle:
- Startups → Adhocracy
- Growing → shift toward Clan (family-building)
- Maturing → need Hierarchy for structure
- Scaling → evolve into Market for competitive advantage and growth
Each transition demands new leadership, personality traits, recruitment language.
“Culture inertia is culture death. You can’t scale if your culture stays stuck.”
Understanding this lifecycle helps you build a company and lead with empathy AND strategy.
Integrating Your Culture Code with the Magnetic Employer Branding Method™
This is where the Magnetic Employer Branding Method™ shines.
We take the diagnosed culture—and the strategy behind it—and translate that into a narrative framework:
- Internal storytelling brings the culture to life. It turns abstract values into real, repeatable behaviours.
- Recruitment content reflects not just what a job is—but who thrives in that environment.
- Leadership communication mirrors the culture quadrant: mentors in Clan, visionaries in Adhocracy, competitors in Market, coordinators in Hierarchy.
- Tone of voice becomes consistent, recognisable, and magnetic—because it matches your true culture, not a copycat version of Google or Spotify.
This method helps you shift culture when needed—because stories not only reflect culture, they change it.
Now, here’s your culture-to-strategy challenge:
Rate where your company culture is now and where you want it to be. Then reflect: does your strategy match this culture? Or are you filming a documentary with a romcom cast?
Share your quadrant in the comments on LinkedIn. Let’s open the conversation about strategy-aligned culture—and story-driven business.
And in next week’s episode, we’ll go even deeper. I’ll show you how to build a storytelling structure that doesn’t just describe your culture—but helps you evolve it. Through narrative, empathy, and magnetic clarity.
Until then—stay magnetic.
Learn more about the Competing Values Framework
Quinn’s Competing Values Framework
An Introduction to Competing Values Framework
Check out also last week’s episode “From Employer Brand to Business Strategy Positioning”