Leadership and Culture Shaping
Or: You set the culture whether you mean to or not
Exploring the topic of leadership further, I want to touch on the aspect of shaping organizational culture. It is hopefully not surprising that shaping culture is not an exercise in motivational posters and heavily repeated slogans in internal corporate communications but is instead shaped by daily behaviors and even small moments of interactions and communication.
Due to their positioning within an organization, the behavior and communication of leaders has an outsized effect on shaping culture. It may not be exclusively their responsibility to affect organizational culture but their impact is disproportionate due to their visibility and the resulting reach.
If we accept this premise that leadership has a significant impact on culture, the question now is no longer whether leaders are influencing it but whether they do so intentionally and with purpose.
After all employees look to leadership behavior to understand what is actually acceptable, regardless of what is officially documented in policy. When leaders cut corners, skip meetings, avoid hard conversations, or communicate in disrespectful manners, they signal that this is acceptable behavior. On the flip side treating team members with respect, using inclusive language, acknowledging one’s own mistakes helps to establish a positive work culture. A good example for what this can look like is the work by Amy Edmondson around psychological safety. In it she calls out a leader's responsibility in modeling certain desired behaviors, such as admitting one's own mistakes and vulnerably asking for feedback.
This points to the necessity to focus on the everyday choices that may feel inconsequential but inevitably broadcast cultural values at a certain scale. Think of moments like:
- giving credit in meetings
- the timing of sending emails - e.g. outside of core working hours
- addressing mistakes and failures
- tone in everyday conversation
An important thing to keep in mind is the difficulty of objectively assessing one's impact on team culture. Proximity bias, stress-driven behavior under pressure, and the absence of honest upward feedback can all contribute to a lack of signal that modeled behavior is going awry.
I have witnessed both positive and negative examples of this and have made my fair share of contributions in both directions, too. Some of the advice I received from mentors and kind, candid peers that I wish to share thus are:
- Check your reaction pattern. Look at how you respond to failure or bad news, or especially stressful situations. Your reactions in such moments set the tone and train the team's candor.
- Solicit feedback actively from trusted sources. Choose people who will give you honest feedback and won’t hold back if you truly mess up.
- Name your values in real decisions. Not in a memo, but in the moment. Point out why you are making decisions. This helps teams understand the otherwise implicit criteria and also trains your own awareness.
Shaping culture and modeling behavior are not projects, they don’t have deliverables or end dates. They are ongoing, living responsibilities. This cannot be a one time effort.
May you create the environments that enable the best in your peers.