Grow Organizational Culture and Leadership at Work

If your organization is like most in the 21st century, you likely have a stated company culture: a set of values on the website, a culture deck, or a mission statement designed to show team members and others what they can expect and the values your organization embraces. You may also have noticed that an organization’s stated culture and the culture experienced by employees are often not the same thing. 

The disconnect or gap between declared values and actual behavior is at its foundation a leadership problem. Organizational culture and leadership are inseparable, since culture is shaped and reinforced (or undermined) by what leaders do and say in their everyday interactions.

As organizations grow, a coherent culture becomes harder to maintain consistently across teams, regions, and levels of hierarchy. This article covers how the relationship between culture and leadership works, explains the mechanisms leaders use to embed culture, and provides strategies for leading culture change that actually sticks.

What is organizational culture?

Organizational culture is the shared set of values, beliefs, behaviors, and norms that shape how people in an organization work, make decisions, and interact with each other. Note that company, business, or organizational culture is not what an organization says it values. Rather, it’s what behavior the organization actually exhibits, rewards, tolerates, and punishes.

It’s useful here to quickly elaborate the three levels of an organization’s culture, paraphrasing psychologist and business thought leader Edgar Schein’s iconic framework:

• Artifacts. The top level of this culture pyramid is its visible surface and components, which Schein calls artifacts. This includes the office layout and architecture, meeting rituals, technology, dress code, communication style, company jargon, and how decisions get announced.
• Espoused values. These are found in the organization’s explicitly stated culture, usually found in the mission statement, published leadership principles, and/or company values.
• Underlying assumptions. The bottom layer of the pyramid are the deep, unconscious, often unspoken beliefs and habits that actually drive behavior among members of the organization. 

The pyramid shape of this hierarchy is not accidental. When attempting to build a great team culture, efforts that only address top-level artifacts or mid-level, stated values rarely have any meaningful impact on underlying assumptions, beliefs, and behaviors. It’s the foundational assumptions that drive behavior and reinforce culture by filtering decisions, setting expectations for what counts as acceptable conduct, and signaling to employees what gets rewarded.

The relationship between leadership and organizational culture

Organizational culture is created and sustained by leadership, for good or for bad. Culture doesn’t come from a values document or mission statement. It’s created by what leaders do and say, but mostly by what they do. This signals what actually matters. Leaders communicate organizational priorities through their use of time, their attention, decisions, and reactions, and employees are constantly observing all of it.

For example, when a company’s leaders preach collaboration but dominate every meeting, the culture that forms is fundamentally not collaborative, it’s performative. In this case, the lived experience overrides the stated values. 

The importance of this “walk the walk” behavior for top leaders is magnified by the cascading effect as their behaviors, values, and norms are telegraphed down the organizational hierarchy. Senior leaders set behavioral norms, and middle managers may either amplify or dilute those norms. Frontline employees or those “in the trenches” are much more likely to internalize the behaviors and values they observe in their direct managers, not from the C-suite. This makes it even more vital that leaders exemplify the values and behaviors they want to foster via company culture.

It’s worth noting that there is a bidirectional relationship here: leaders certainly shape culture, but culture also shapes what behaviors are accepted from leaders. For example, incoming leaders who clash with an established culture often fail, even when their individual approach is strong.

Employee engagement is a downstream outcome of this relationship. When leadership behavior aligns with stated values, improved engagement follows as a natural consequence, since employees trust their leaders more, and feel more justified in their loyalty and dedication to the organization.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”

This oft-cited business maxim is commonly attributed to Peter Drucker, though the exact source is debated. What it means in practice is that organizations may design excellent strategies using clear goals, sound logic, and smart resource allocation, but will still fail to execute them if the prevailing culture resists the behaviors the strategy requires. Some basic examples of strategy-culture misalignment might include:

• A cost-reduction strategy in a culture that has never scrutinized spending will be ignored or routed around.
• A collaboration initiative in a culture built on individual competition will struggle to take hold, no matter how well-funded or hyped it is.
• Digital transformation in an organization where “legacy-style” leadership hierarchy slows decisions will stall because the culture doesn’t allow the speed the strategy requires.
• Efforts to create and sustain a more positive work environment will be hamstrung if a culture of backbiting, non-constructive criticism of leaders or high performers, or negative chat is consciously or unconsciously encouraged.

The implication for leaders is clear: before launching any major initiative, the first diagnostic question should be, “Does our culture make the desired behavior easy or difficult?” If it makes it difficult, a solid cultural groundwork must be laid first. For today’s more-informed organizations, culture and leadership are viewed and prioritized as a fundamental strategic lever, not just a “people issue.”

Leadership mechanisms that embed culture

A healthy organizational culture doesn’t happen by accident. It’s shaped by specific, repeatable leadership actions. Let’s look at the four primary ones.

Modeling behavior

Leaders are always broadcasting their values and establishing culture, whether intentionally or not. Every meeting interaction, every response to conflict, every decision under pressure is observed and interpreted by the people around them. 

Consistent behavior over time (not one-time gestures or statements) is what builds trust and defines the real organizational culture. When a leader publicly acknowledges a mistake, it normalizes intellectual honesty. When a leader protects and even rewards people who raise genuine problems, it normalizes psychological safety and encourages a company-wide culture of improvement. On the other hand, if a leader deflects blame or isn’t forthcoming about mistakes, it undermines any attempt to establish a culture of personal responsibility and transparency.

What leaders measure and reward

The most honest signal of cultural priorities is what the organization measures, recognizes, and promotes. If the stated value is “customer obsession” but promotions regularly go to people who hit revenue targets regardless of customer outcomes, the culture signals that revenue, not the customer, is what actually matters. Performance management systems, recognition programs, and promotion criteria are inherently culture-reinforcing mechanisms and they should be designed intentionally as such.

Communication patterns and rituals

How information flows in an organization reflects and reinforces cultural values. Open communication conveys trust and transparency, while information hoarding signals inherent hierarchy and controlling behavior. 

Company rituals also build and strengthen shared identity and culture over time. Every all-hands meeting, team retrospective, recognition moment, and even the way leaders open and close key conversations, all reinforce the culture for good or bad. So, a robust and well-considered internal communications strategy is not merely a support function but is a primary culture-building avenue.

Hiring, onboarding, and talent decisions

Every hiring decision is a publicly viewed culture vote. Who gets through the door signals what behaviors and mindsets the organization values. 

Onboarding is the most powerful culture transmission moment. What new employees learn about “how things really work here” in their first 90 days is retained longer than any training. Hiring and firing decisions are also strong cultural signals. When leaders choose to part ways with high performers who violate stated values, or choose to keep people who damage team cohesion, it speaks louder than any culture statement.

Leading culture change and organizational transformation

Culture is one of the most durable forces in an organization. It resists change. This is beneficial in that it creates stability, predictability, and shared norms, but may also partly be a liability where an unhealthy culture resists improvement due to inertia.

There are times when culture change becomes necessary, and not just due to an ineffective or even toxic organizational culture. Mergers and acquisitions, strategic pivots, leadership transitions, rapid growth, and digital transformation all can surface culture misalignment. Culture becomes the variable that helps determine whether this necessary transformation succeeds.

The most effective sequence for leading a culture change is:

• Leaders visibly adopt the new behaviors first, before communicating that others should.
• Communication follows, and includes a clear articulation of why the culture is changing, what will be different, and what will stay the same.
• Systems and structures update last (measurement, incentives, processes) to lock in the new norms.

Why culture change efforts fail: most culture change efforts start with communications (“we’re becoming more agile”) without first changing and displaying the underlying leader behaviors and reward systems that sustain the old culture. 

In any culture growth or change initiative, transparency and robust communication tools play a vital role. Culture change at scale requires consistent, high-frequency communication across every level of the organization, including cross-functional and interdepartmental messaging, not just top-down announcements. Open channels, visible leadership presence, and shared workspaces reduce information silos that reinforce old cultural patterns. This requires enterprise-wide tools that make leadership behavior visible and enable collaborative alignment with improvement strategies.  The ways leaders communicate in open channels, how recognition is shared, and how decisions are explained all establish cultural signals across distributed teams.

Grow organizational culture and leadership with Slack’s Enterprise Grid

Slack Enterprise Grid gives leaders the tools to communicate consistently, build shared rituals across distributed teams, and make cultural priorities visible at every level of the organization, from the C-suite to frontline managers. Get started with Enterprise Grid.

Organizational culture and leadership FAQs