Culture is not the carefully curated phrases on the office walls. Nor is it the uplifting paragraphs in the joining-the-company manual. Culture is what people do when no one is watching—and especially when the pressure is on.

More precisely: culture are values that are agreed company-wide and what leadership at all levels emulates. 

In a risk-critical engineering company I worked with, the official culture prioritised “safety first.” But after a few weeks on-site, I witnessed near-misses brushed off with “get on with it.” Safety briefings were token gestures. The stated value and the permitted norm were at odds.

The result? An anxious, defensive culture. Not because anyone designed it that way—but because the system rewarded speed and ignored “operational excellence” and safety signals. The system generated the culture, and no poster campaign could undo it.

The real culture of an organisation is not found in the company brochure or given by the CEO during a keynote address. It’s revealed and lived daily:

•  When someone interrupts a junior colleague—do they get away with it?
•  When a mistake is made—who gets protected, who gets blamed?
•  When someone challenges the status quo—do they get a hearing or are they punished?

In a global tech organisation the official value was “open dialogue.” But the quiet joke in the corridors was: “You’re free to speak. Once.” I helped the leadership team understand that their silence after internal challenges wasn’t neutral—it was complicity.

Think of culture as the feedback loop of your leadership behaviour. If feedback goes nowhere, transparency withers. If mediocrity is tolerated, excellence becomes optional. If cynicism isn’t addressed, hope decays. Employees stop being innovative and act restrained.

Culture is not your aspiration. It’s your default. It is the character of the organisation. Its DNA. It’s what survives under pressure. And if you’re not shaping it intentionally, it is shaping you—quietly, and perhaps destructively.

To lead culture well is not to design a perfect value statement. It’s to engineer the system so that values become inevitable.

Smart Questions to think about:

Prompt 1: If your goal were to build a resilient, values-aligned culture that could outlast your leadership, what behaviours must be explicitly reinforced, and which ones must be systemically eliminated—starting now?

Prompt 2: How would you initiate it company-wide?