Beyond Leadership Statements: Why culture is defined by everyday actions

This article was first published in the latest edition of People Matters Perspectives. 

Your team is watching the moments you think don’t matter

A few years ago, I was part of a team preparing for an important presentation. We had spent days working on it, making changes until the final few hours and checking every detail we believed could go wrong.

Just before the presentation, a young colleague noticed an error in the final deck. It was fixable, but the discovery came at the worst possible time, when the room was already tense, and everyone was working against the clock.

The first response from the manager was, “Who made this mistake?”

The question may have been natural in that moment, but it immediately changed the energy in the room. People stopped thinking about the solution and began thinking about how to distance themselves from the problem. The colleague who had raised the concern looked as though they regretted speaking up.

Years later, I witnessed a similar situation. The pressure was just as real, the mistake was equally avoidable, and the consequences could have been far more serious. This time, however, the leader responded differently: “Good that we caught it. Let us correct it first and then understand how it happened.”

The issue was fixed, and the team later had an honest conversation about what had gone wrong. Accountability was not diluted, but neither was anyone humiliated in the process.

When I think about these two incidents now, the difference was never simply in the words the managers used. It was in what those words taught the people in the room.

One response taught the team to protect itself when something went wrong. The other taught people that they could raise a concern early, help solve it and still be treated fairly afterwards.

Neither moment featured in a culture presentation or leadership case study. Yet both revealed more about the workplaces involved than any purpose statement could have done.

Culture is understood through experience

Over the years, across newsrooms, meetings, conference corridors and fast-moving projects, I have become more attentive to these ordinary exchanges. A leader makes space for a quieter colleague to finish a thought. A manager takes responsibility publicly and offers corrective feedback privately. Someone shares credit with the people who did the less visible work.

These actions may appear small, but they shape whether people feel respected, trusted and confident enough to contribute fully.

Most organisations can articulate the values they want to represent. Integrity, empathy, respect, inclusion and collaboration feature prominently in leadership conversations, company documents and office spaces.

The more revealing question is whether employees can recognise those values during an ordinary working day, especially when pressure is high, timelines are tight and patience is beginning to wear thin.

I have learnt that culture becomes clearest at precisely these moments. It can be seen in how a first-time mistake is handled, whether disagreement is welcomed from someone junior, who receives recognition and which behaviours are excused because the person delivering results is considered too valuable to challenge.

An organisation may speak about openness, but when difficult questions are consistently met with defensiveness, people eventually learn to remain silent. A leader may promote collaboration, but when credit moves upwards while accountability travels downwards, the team understands the actual arrangement.

Leadership statements communicate intent, while everyday actions tell people whether that intent can be trusted.

What I noticed then, and understand better now

Earlier in my career, I often associated culture with the more visible parts of an organisation: how teams celebrated, how leaders communicated and what values appeared in official documents.

With time, I began to notice what happened between those visible moments.

Culture was also present in the tone of an email sent during a difficult week, in the few minutes after an uncomfortable meeting and in whether someone followed up after casually saying, “Let us discuss this.” It showed up when a leader remembered a promise after the urgency had passed, or took the time to explain a decision even when the outcome could not be changed.

I also began to understand the difference between being managed and being seen.

Being seen does not mean receiving constant praise or being protected from accountability. It means knowing that the person leading you recognises the effort behind the output and will treat you with dignity even when the conversation is difficult.

A single considerate gesture can make someone feel good for a day, but trust is built when people experience that consideration consistently. It matters most on the days when deadlines are slipping, business priorities are changing and extending patience requires a conscious effort.

Culture eventually becomes the memory people carry of how an organisation treated them when the stakes were real.

The energy of care is not softness

Care is sometimes treated as a softer quality that sits at the edges of leadership. My experiences have increasingly convinced me that it is one of its most practical and demanding capabilities.

The “energy of care” is the attention a leader brings into a room: the willingness to notice what has not been said, understand the context behind a situation and consider how a decision will affect the people expected to carry it forward.

Care does not mean avoiding difficult decisions, lowering standards or agreeing with everyone. Leaders will still need to offer candid feedback, address poor performance and balance individual circumstances with organisational needs.

What care changes is not the responsibility of leadership, but the way that responsibility is exercised.

It allows a leader to be honest without being needlessly harsh, to listen before reaching a conclusion and to explain rather than merely instruct. It also recognises that treating everyone identically is not always the same as treating everyone fairly, because people may arrive at the same workplace carrying very different realities.

Employees may not agree with every decision, but they can usually sense whether it was made thoughtfully and whether their dignity remained part of the consideration. Even when an outcome is difficult, the way it is handled can preserve trust.

Every interaction leaves a cultural signal

Leadership is usually associated with visible moments such as a major speech, a new strategy or a high-stakes decision. Yet some of its most lasting effects emerge from what leaders do when they do not believe the moment is particularly important.

When a leader invites someone back into a conversation after they have been interrupted, the room notices. When a manager defends the team publicly and offers honest feedback privately, people remember. When someone checks in again after the immediate personal crisis has passed, that concern carries more meaning than a formal message about employee wellbeing.

Care tends to travel quietly. People who feel respected are more likely to extend that respect to others, just as anxiety and indifference can spread through a team when they are repeatedly modelled from the top.

Every interaction leaves a cultural signal about whether speaking honestly is safe, effort will be acknowledged and the organisation’s stated values can be relied upon in practice.

The question I now try to carry with me

We often ask whether employees understand an organisation’s culture. My experiences have led me to turn that question around:

What did my actions teach people about the culture today?

Did I create clarity or add to someone’s uncertainty? Did I acknowledge the person behind the output? Did I listen with the intention of understanding, or simply wait for my opportunity to respond? When pressure tested my patience, did my behaviour still reflect the values I expect others to uphold?

Culture is shaped by every person in a workplace, but authority amplifies behaviour. The more influence we carry, the further the effects of our everyday choices can travel.

People may forget the exact wording of a leadership statement, but they are far more likely to remember who stood beside them when something went wrong, who gave them credit when it mattered and who offered honesty without taking away their dignity.

Looking back at those two presentation rooms, the mistakes were eventually corrected and soon forgotten. What stayed with me was the way each leader responded, the atmosphere that response created and the lesson it left behind.

That is where culture becomes real: in the ordinary moments when people discover whether the values an organisation speaks about are also being practised with consistency, fairness and care.

A single small action from a leader can shape how you experience an entire workplace.