What most leaders get wrong about culture
Culture isn't a slogan you hang in the break room. It's what happens when no one's watching.
Culture isn't a slogan you hang in the break room.
It's the collection of behaviors your organization actually tolerates, rewards, and repeats—day after day, decision after decision. The gap between the values you declare and the ones you enact is what your people experience as "the real culture here."
How honest is your team about the gap between stated and lived culture?
Tap an option to vote — you'll see the room.
The slogan trap
Most leaders know this intellectually. They've read the books. They've been through the workshops. And yet, almost every organization I work with has the same problem: the stated values and the lived ones are pointing in different directions.
The reason isn't cynicism. It's that leaders underestimate how much culture is a system rather than a stance.
You can't change culture by changing the words on the wall. You change it by changing what you reward, what you tolerate, and what you refuse to let slide.
Culture lives in the small decisions
When a senior leader sends emails at 11pm and replies to them at 6am—that's a cultural signal. Not the one they intended, perhaps. But it's the one people receive.
When a project fails and the post-mortem focuses on blame rather than learning—that's culture. When a high-performer is allowed to treat colleagues badly because the numbers look good—that's culture.
The aggregation of small decisions is the culture. Not the offsite. Not the values poster.
What to do instead
Three questions worth asking your leadership team:
1. What behavior do we say we don't tolerate—but actually do?
2. What do we reward in practice that we'd never put in a job description?
3. If a new employee watched us for one week, what would they conclude our real values are?
The answers are uncomfortable. That's the point.
Culture change starts with honest diagnosis, not better messaging.
Was this honest enough to be useful?
Ben Owden
Speaker, moderator, facilitator. I work with leaders on culture, decision making, and the art of running rooms that actually decide things.
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