I have spent decades with leaders who believe culture is a slogan on a wall, a set of values printed on a lanyard, or something HR “does.” It isn’t.
Culture is how we believe we are expected to work in a particular environment or organisation.
Culture Is the Unwritten Instruction Manual
It is the unwritten instruction manual every person absorbs within their first weeks in a role, and it is far more powerful than any strategy document, because it tells people what will actually get them rewarded, and what will quietly get them punished.
Let me start with what culture is not.
Culture is not climate. Climate is how we feel about work on any given day or in any given quarter. It moves with a bad quarter, a restructure, a popular new leader, a run of wins. Climate is weather.
Culture is geology. It is laid down over time, compressed under pressure, and it does not shift because someone had a good town hall.
Confusing the two is one of the most common and costly mistakes I see leadership teams make. They survey engagement, see the numbers lift, and declare culture “fixed.” It isn’t. They’ve changed the weather. The bedrock is untouched.
Here is the first thing every leader needs to sit with: culture is evident, and it is largely unconsciously acquired. Nobody hands a new employee a manual that says “here is how conflict is really handled here” or “here is what we actually think of customers when the doors are closed.” They learn it by watching, and they learn it in the gap between what is said in the induction and what is modelled in the corridor. And they learn it fast, because the reward and punishment systems of culture are also unconscious.
If you fit, you fit — you will feel it, almost like being welcomed into a family. I said “almost”. Although families have a culture too.
If you don’t fit, you will notice that too, often before anyone says a word to you. Nobody needs to formally sanction you. The culture does it for them, quietly, through who gets included in the important conversations and who doesn’t.
This is precisely why culture is so hard to build and so easy to damage.
It is the culmination of multiple generations of leadership – not one CEO’s tenure, but the accumulated decisions, tone, and behaviour of everyone who has led before them, layered like sediment. You do not build that in a workshop.
You build it, brick by brick, over years of consistent behaviour that people can trust and predict. And then, and this is the part that keeps me up at night on behalf of the leaders I work with, it can be damaged in a moment by leadership that is unwitting and unaware.
I watch it happen again and again. A new leader reinvents the values without consultation, because they want to make their mark. Purpose gets “refreshed” with no sensitivity for the history and the people who built what came before.
Leadership becomes inconsistent over the very significant time periods, about three to five years, that culture actually requires to hold its shape. Each of these is fundamentally a credibility issue. People are watching to see whether what leadership says matches what leadership does, over years, not months. Break that thread once too often and the trust that culture depends on does not come back quickly. It has to be earned all over again, generation by generation.
Now here is the piece I most want leaders to hear: culture is by design.
Culture Must Be Led, Not Left to Chance
It is not something that simply happens to an organisation while leadership focuses on “the real work” of strategy and operations. The greatest imperative for refreshing a culture is the strategic context you find yourself in – and I mean the real strategic context, viewed over at least a five-year timeframe.
What kind of organisation do you need to be in five years, given where your market, your technology, your people, and your world are heading?
That question, honestly answered, tells you exactly how your culture needs to evolve, and by how much.
But you cannot design your way from where you want to be if you do not know, with brutal clarity, where you actually are. To evolve culture from its current state, you first have to assess its current state properly.
And that assessment can only be done meaningfully by asking a series of key questions to the people who actually work within the organisation. Not just leadership. Not just the People and Culture function, sitting in its own echo chamber, interpreting the business to itself. Everyone. The frontline, the middle, the edges of the organisation where the real truth tends to live.
This is what I call honesty auditing.
Honesty Auditing and the Courage to Listen
I chose that term deliberately, because I want to be clear about its purpose. This is not about intimidating people, catching leaders out, or building a case against anyone. It exists to say one simple thing: if you do not hear the truth, you will never actually know what culture is at work in your organisation.
You will only know the culture you hope is there, or the one you’ve been telling yourself exists in board papers. Honesty auditing asks the uncomfortable questions, gathers the answers from every level, and hands leadership something rare and valuable – an accurate map of where they actually stand.
That is where real culture work begins.
Not with a values refresh. Not with a poster. With the courage to ask, to listen, and then to lead — consistently, visibly, and for years — in a way that is worthy of the trust culture demands. Because culture will be built whether you design it or not.
The only choice leaders truly have is whether they shape it deliberately, or leave it to be shaped by accident, unwitting decisions, and the slow erosion of credibility. I know which one I’d choose.Ready to take an honest look at your culture?
Culture is already shaping how decisions are made, how people work together, and what gets rewarded in your organisation. The question is whether it’s happening by design or by default.
If you’d like to understand the culture that’s really at work in your organisation, talk to Dattner Group about culture assessment, leadership development, and creating the conditions for sustainable organisational performance.
