Culture and Leadership Development: The Hidden Link Most Organizations Miss
Culture doesn’t live in a slogan. It lives in the behavior of your leaders.
When I ask senior executives to describe their organizational culture, they often respond with confident, well-worn phrases:
“We’re a performance culture.”
“We’re all about the patient.”
“We like to have fun, we’re kind of quirky around here.”
These statements may be well-intentioned, but they often reflect a surface-level understanding of what culture really is and how it’s shaped.
Culture isn’t just internal mood or external branding. It’s the shared beliefs, norms, and behaviors that shape every interaction. It determines how decisions are made, how power is used, how conflict is handled, and how quickly the organization adapts to external threats.
Most importantly, culture is shaped by leadership and sustained through leadership development.
🧠 What Culture Really Means
Strong cultures aren’t built by accident. They’re the result of thousands of micro-decisions, made consistently over time, by people in positions of influence.
Culture isn’t just about internal harmony; it’s also about external readiness.
How fast can your organization respond to disruption?
How aligned are people when strategy shifts?
How much trust exists when the pressure is on?
Some organizations are highly attuned to this. They intentionally nurture culture as both an internal operating system and an external resilience strategy. They talk openly about values, use data to track alignment, and invest in reinforcing the behaviors they want to scale.
Other organizations… drift.
They struggle to describe their culture. Or worse, they assume it’s irrelevant. They don’t connect how their teams operate to how their strategy succeeds (or doesn’t). Over time, culture becomes a silent risk—something that will eventually show up in turnover, disengagement, customer dissatisfaction, or strategic stagnation.
⚖️ The Gap Between What We Say and What We Do
When organizations talk about culture, they often describe the culture they aspire to have, not the one they actually live. That gap is dangerous.
During Orientation, new hires might hear lofty values:
We care deeply about our employees.
We believe in diversity and transparency.
We treat everyone with respect.
But after a few months, the tacit culture—the one people really live—emerges. It’s shaped by:
Which behaviors get rewarded
The way we treat each other in both good and bad times
Which values get referenced and adhered to (and which ones get ignored)
Who gets promoted (and why)
How leaders handle pressure, conflict, and failure
The larger the gap between the stated and lived culture, the more disillusioned employees become. People don’t trust what you say—they trust what you do.
🧱 What Edgar Schein Taught Us
Edgar Schein, one of the foremost thinkers on organizational culture, described culture as evolving when three elements align:
Shared assumptions – the invisible beliefs about “how things really work”
Shared values – the stated ideals that guide behavior
Shared interpretations of artifacts – the meaning behind the organization’s structures, symbols, rituals, and stories
When those three pieces are out of sync, culture weakens. When they align, culture becomes a powerful force for clarity, accountability, and performance.
🔁 So How Do You Actually Shift Culture?
Some organizations try with branding. Others use artwork, space design, or new policies. Those things help—but they’re insufficient on their own.
The real culture-shifter?
Leadership development.
Why? Because leaders are the daily interpreters of culture.
They model values in action
They reinforce (or contradict) messages from the top
They create micro-cultures on their teams that scale behavior—up or down
Leadership development creates space for:
Reflecting on personal values and behavioral gaps
Exploring how culture is experienced across levels
Examining blind spots and biases
Learning how to close the distance between intention and impact
Every coaching session, peer learning conversation, or facilitated retreat is a cultural intervention—if it’s done right.
🚪 Closing Thought: The Culture You Want Begins With the Leaders You Build
You can’t fake culture—not for long. You can’t declare it into existence or hope it "trickles down" from a single executive.
Culture is lived. Modeled. Practiced. Taught.
And that means the real work of culture change isn’t posters or slogans—it’s developing leaders who are aligned, equipped, and trusted to carry it forward.
So before you draft new values or hang another banner, ask yourself:
What are your leaders modeling—every day—and is it the culture you want to grow?