Culture Unveiled
A CEO once told me, “We need a better culture.” I bit and asked, “Better how?”
They paused, then said, “I want people to take more initiative. Speak up. Stop waiting for permission.”
That moment stuck with me because beneath the vague language was a very specific problem: people were unclear on what was expected, what was safe, and what was rewarded.
That was their culture.
So what is culture, really?
Culture isn’t a slide deck. It’s not your mission statement. And it definitely isn’t what gets said at the town hall.
Culture is how people behave when no one is watching. It’s what gets rewarded. What gets tolerated. What gets quietly ignored or subtly encouraged.
It forms in every meeting, every decision, every leadership interaction. Culture is a system and a reflection of what the organization truly values, not what it says it values.
And yes, culture is the manifestation of strategy. If your strategy says one thing, but your culture enables another, then culture wins every time.
Culture Doesn’t Just Happen. It Accumulates.
Every time a manager interrupts a junior colleague without consequence. Every time a decision gets made in the shadows. Every time someone takes a risk and gets quietly punished for it, culture is being shaped.
It’s not just top-down or grassroots. Culture is built in loops through feedback, habits, stories, and unspoken rules. It emerges either by design or by default. If you’re not actively shaping it, you’re still building one but probably not the one you want.
What the Board Needs to Understand
Culture is not a “management issue.” It’s a governance issue. Boards are not passengers in the culture journey. They’re co-pilots with both formal and informal roles in shaping, monitoring, and influencing culture.
Formally:
Boards set tone through CEO selection, performance criteria, and succession planning.
They oversee talent strategies, ethical frameworks, and whistleblower systems.
They track leading indicators of culture including engagement data, exit interviews, anonymous feedback, retention patterns.
Informally:
Directors reinforce norms with how they show up, ask questions, and engage with management.
A board that listens carefully, challenges respectfully, and encourages dissent sets a cultural tone.
Conversely, a board that tolerates bravado, exclusion, or avoidance becomes complicit in those dynamics, whether it means to or not.
Culture Requires Systems Thinking
You can’t fix culture with a poster campaign or a one-day offsite. Culture is a system, and systems thinking is essential.
To shift culture, you need to explore:
What’s reinforcing the current behaviour?
Where are the feedback loops?
What are the unintended consequences of well-meaning policies?
Where are people making sense of what’s safe or risky?
A CEO who wants a “better culture” needs to think like a gardener, not an architect, creating the conditions for different behaviours to take root.
Final Thought:
Boards can’t dictate culture but they absolutely influence it.
They model it through their behaviour, reinforce it through their oversight, and shape it through the expectations they set for leadership. A board that asks meaningful questions about values, decision-making, and lived experience in the organization sends a clear signal: culture matters here.
But boards must also know their lane.
They’re not culture architects or internal influencers. They shouldn’t micromanage tone or script behaviour. Their power lies in what they notice, what they name, and what they hold accountable.
And a board that’s paying attention knows exactly where to listen.