A CEO stands in front of a large boardroom. The company values are on the screen behind her and they include trust, innovation, respect and excellence. She shares how the executive has worked hard to re-confirm, re-define and re-commit to these values and they are all proud that these will be the values the company will be continuing to champion moving forward. And to celebrate there’s a new poster going up in the break room and everyone is getting a notebook with these values printed on the first page.
Fast forward to the next week and the regular Tuesday executive meeting. At this meeting a manager talks over a fellow manager mid-sentence; and nobody says anything. Over the course of the meeting that manager talks over people three more times, and in all cases the room stays quiet including the CEO. The only thing that did happen is that the meeting became more and more quiet as it went on.
The next Tuesday the same executive again speaks over someone, and again nothing happens. And any lingering integrity and respect are lost.
The real launch of the company values didn’t happen at the boardroom event. It is everything that has happened before that date (history matters) and then in the following two weeks that told everyone nothing has changed and what to expect. Let’s be clear, the relaunch of the values by CEO was an opportunity to begin a transformation – an evolution into a new company culture. But that transformation needed to start immediately.
This is a part many culture initiatives get wrong. Culture isn’t declared. It’s built, one moment at a time.
Culture Is a Habit, Not a Campaign
Culture is the sum of what leaders tolerate, model, and repeat every single day and in experiences too small to put on a poster. It’s built because of a thoughtful pause you took before you responded to a missed deadline. It’s built from poor behaviour that is ignored because you don’t want that person to feel uncomfortable – even though everyone else is uncomfortable.
Culture is also built by protecting your team from a new project request when they’re already working over 110% to meet an important launch or end-of-year deadline.
Your culture is being built up or destroyed every minute of every day. And, as with most things, it’s easier to destroy than to build.
Leadership thinkers have been exploring the idea that culture is a habit not a campaign for years. Simon Sinek’s work on trust and cooperation makes a similar point: the temperature of a culture is set by what leaders visibly protect and visibly allow, not by what they say in a keynote. Adam Grant’s research on psychological safety follows a similar conclusion, that employees don’t believe they’re safe to speak up because a leader announced an open-door policy. They believe they are safe (or not), because they watched what happened the last time someone took the risk if they were dismissed (or worse) they know not to bother.
You can diagnose culture the same way you’d size up a store from its window display. Walk past a shop with piled-high, no-frills shelving and you already know what kind of service to expect before you step inside. Your team does the same thing to you. They don’t need your mission statement to know what your team culture is. They are trusting exactly what they are experiencing from your daily behavior.
How Do You Know Where Your Company Culture Is Broken?
You will know something is broken. Your employee engagement survey results will tell you that trust and psychological safety are low. You will also see performance, productivity and, not surprisingly, employee loyalty decline. People may still show up to work and attend the meetings, but they’ll contribute less, speak up less, take fewer risks and quietly decide how much of themselves it is safe to bring into the room.
If your company was a bucket, you would see holes with water pouring out. But you are not a bucket, so how do you know where the holes are? You look for the places where energy is leaking. You look at the meetings where everyone agrees in the room and disagrees in the hallway. You look at the projects that keep slowing down because people are afraid to make a decision without protection. You look at the leaders everyone works around instead of with. You look at the teams where the best people have stopped offering ideas, not because they are out of ideas, but because they have learned their ideas are inconvenient, ignored or invite attack.
One quick way to know where your company culture is broken is to pay attention to three very practical tells: what leaders tolerate, what leaders model and what leaders repeat. These three behaviours reveal the real culture faster than any poster, policy or presentation ever will.
The First Tell: What You Tolerate
Here’s an uncomfortable but useful question, “What’s the last thing you let slide?”
Let’s not look for the big, dramatic event, let’s look for the small one. The interruption you didn’t address. The passive-aggressive comment you let pass because calling it out felt like more energy than it was worth. The deadline that quietly moved without anyone naming why.
Each of those moments is a statement about your culture. And, it’s more honest than anything on your values slide, because it’s evidence, not advertising.
But not tolerating a missed date does not have to be conflict. When we hold someone accountable and do it in a respectful way, it gives that person the opportunity and the choice to change – to do better – to learn and perhaps most importantly, to not be saddled with a poor reputation without having that choice to change.
The Second Tell: What You Model
Teams don’t learn what’s acceptable from a policy. They learn it by watching what you say and do when things go right and when things go wrong.
Picture a new leader stepping into an established team. The team is naturally cautious… and curious. They don’t yet know if mistakes will be treated as learning opportunities or as career-limiting events. But proof comes quickly. A few days as the new leader and a small working group misses a deadline. Here comes the proof.
That moment is the real test. If the leader acts quickly to discover what happened and responds with curiosity to explore what went well, what did we learn, how can I help, two important things happen. First, teammates learn that due dates are important. Second, the team learns that safety and curiosity are the leaders’ approach to challenges, not accusations and blame. When leaders lead with positivity and curiosity something important takes root. Not because the leader gave a speech about psychological safety, but because everyone in the room just watched what actually happens when things don’t go perfectly.
This is the muscle Adam Grant points to when he talks about rethinking under pressure: teams that have already practiced staying curious instead of defensive adapt faster, because curiosity is a habit they’ve rehearsed, not a value they’ve memorized.
The Third Tell: What You Repeat
Culture isn’t one grand gesture. It’s a system of small, repeated behaviors that accumulate into an identify and reputation – a brand promise.
This is why a values statement, on its own, rarely changes anything. Values only become culture when they’re used… repeatedly and visibly to guide real decisions in real moments, every day. A values document that sits in a shared drive isn’t a culture. Culture does happen when a leader consistently references to those values, out loud, whether making a strategic decision or providing constructive feedback is the leader building a productive microculture.
Repetition is the point. It takes far more small, consistent moments to build trust than it takes to destroy it. This means that culture-as-habit is slower and less glamorous than culture-as-campaign, but it’s also the only version that holds.
Why This Matters When The Ground Is Shifting
Here’s the part that makes this urgent instead of just true: in this era of AI leaders today don’t get to wait for stability before they start building the organization or team culture they want.
Trust in institutions is sitting near historic lows, and the pace of disruption like generative AI is shifting expectations about work. And none of this is slowing down long enough for anyone to catch their breath. Christie Smith and Kelly Monahan, in their book Essential, make the case that leadership now has to supply clarity and courage in the middle of that disruption, not after it settles. Waiting for certainty is no longer a strategy, it’s an abdication.
That’s the connection most culture conversations miss: a values-based habit isn’t just good for morale, it’s what lets a team move forward when the ground is shifting. Leaders who treat change as a normal condition rather than an emergency give their teams something steady to hold onto. The habit itself becomes the stability, even when nothing else is stable.
That’s the shift. Culture-as-campaign gives you a poster. Culture-as-habit gives you a team that can move with confidence through uncertainty, because they’ve already seen, over and over, how their leader behaves when things get hard.
A Habit, Not an Event
You don’t need a rebrand to change your culture. You need habits you’re willing to repeat on the days no one is watching.
A few places to start this week:
- Talk about your vision, values and moral commitments. This gives the team a clear sense of direction and purpose and provides a shared foundation and litmus test on what is important when making decisions. This also builds trust, alignment, and accountability.
- Name it out loud. The next time you make a call that reflects a value, say so. Say, “I’m doing this because it matters to us that…” Repetition is what turns a value into a norm.
- Create a fun, casual, unexpected moment. Some surprises are memorable, and low-pressure team events can be a great way to create memories, get to know your teammates and build community. Bringing in a few tubs of ice-cream and having an impromptu afternoon ice-cream party could be a start.
- Let your team know you are there for them. They need to know you have their back and are there to help them improve / evolve to the next level, even if that next level might be somewhere else. This demonstrates growth mindset and teamwork.
- Respond to the next small failure with curiosity, not blame. Your people are watching… and wanting to trust you.
- Ask yourself the uncomfortable question. “What’s the recurring behaviour of mine that quietly teaches people to protect themselves instead of contributing?”
- Repeat it. Once isn’t a habit. Culture is what survives the tenth time, not the first.
Progress in today’s workplaces doesn’t need to be perfect and it almost never is or even can be. Our world is shifting far too quickly for perfect – sometimes all we can hold onto is ‘really good’, knowing that things are likely going to change again in a month or so anyway.
But any leader who treats culture as a daily habit rather than a quarterly initiative builds something a poster never will. They will build a team that trusts what is going to happen next, even when they don’t know what’s coming. Why? Because they trust their organization, their leader and each other.
This connects to something worth sitting with: the opposite of trust isn’t distrust. It’s fear. And fear isn’t destroyed in one dramatic moment any more than trust is built in one. Both are the product of many small, repeated interactions that quietly teach people whether it’s safe to be honest around you.
So the diagnostic question isn’t “does my team trust me?” It’s more specific, and more useful: “what recurring habits or behaviours do I have that make others feel they need to protect themselves?”
That’s not a comfortable question. It’s also the most important one a leader can ask if they’re serious about culture rather than just talking about it.
Culture Isn’t a Campaign. It’s a Leadership Habit. is one of my newest keynote presentations, exploring how culture is built in small, daily moments and the norms leaders tolerate, model, and repeat every day. Audiences leave with a practical way to turn uncertainty into momentum, even when the ground keeps shifting.
Contact me anytime to bring this keynote to your team or conference.