There is a question that gets asked in boardrooms, management offsites, and leadership programmes all over the country, and it almost always gets the wrong answer.
The question is: where does culture come from?
The wrong answer, the one you hear most often, is that culture is something you build from the bottom up. That it emerges organically from the people in the organisation if you just hire well, run a few workshops, and stick some values on the wall. That it belongs to HR.
The right answer is less comfortable. Culture comes from the top. It always has. And if the culture in your organisation is not what you want it to be, the place to look is not at your people. It is at your leaders.
The leader as thermostat, not thermometer
Edgar Schein, who spent decades studying how cultures form inside organisations, put it simply: leaders do not just influence culture, they create it. Every decision a leader makes, every behaviour they tolerate, every priority they signal through how they spend their time, all of it shapes what the people around them believe is acceptable, expected, and valued.
Think about that for a moment. Culture is not what you say it is. It is what you do. And what you do as a leader gets amplified through every layer of the organisation beneath you.
Jim Collins explored this in “Good to Great” through his concept of Level 5 Leadership. Collins and his research team studied companies that made the leap from good performance to sustained greatness, and found something unexpected. The leaders at the helm during those transformations were not the charismatic, larger-than-life figures you might expect. They were quiet, humble, even shy. But they had something else: a fierce, unwavering resolve to do whatever it took to make the organisation succeed.
The critical distinction Collins draws is between ambition for yourself and ambition for the cause. Level 5 leaders channel their ego into the organisation, not into their own reputation. They are the first to own up when things go wrong and the last to take credit when things go right. And that behaviour, that combination of humility and will, sets a cultural tone that reverberates through everything.
Collins found that every single company that made the leap from good to great had Level 5 leadership at the point of transition. And the companies that failed to make the leap? They consistently lacked it. Culture, it turns out, is not a nice-to-have that sits alongside strategy. It is the thing that determines whether strategy gets executed or dies in a slide deck.
What you tolerate is what you teach
Kevin Brownsey, who spent a decade working with companies like PWC, Henkel, and Kellogg on culture change, approaches this from a more practical angle. In “Cracking the Culture Code”, he argues that leaders often make the mistake of treating culture as something abstract, something that exists in the atmosphere. His approach is more forensic: use data to understand what the culture actually is (as opposed to what you think it is), and then work deliberately to shift it.
What Brownsey gets right is the gap between intention and reality. Most leaders genuinely believe their organisation’s culture reflects their values. But culture is not shaped by what leaders intend. It is shaped by what they do, what they reward, what they ignore, and critically, what they tolerate.
Every time a leader overlooks poor behaviour because someone hits their numbers, they are teaching the organisation something. Every time they say one thing and do another, they are teaching. Every time they prioritise short-term results over the values they claim to hold, the organisation learns. And it learns fast.
Leadership as service, not status
Simon Sinek frames this differently again, and it is worth sitting with his perspective for a moment. Sinek’s view, explored through his “Leaderful” platform and his broader body of work, is that leadership is not a rank. It is a responsibility. “Great leadership is not about being in charge,” he writes. “It is about taking care of those in your charge.”
This reframing matters because it changes the relationship between leaders and culture entirely. If leadership is about status, then culture is something that happens below you. Something for other people to worry about. But if leadership is about service, then culture is your primary output. It is the environment you create for the people you are responsible for, and the quality of that environment determines the quality of everything else.
Sinek’s argument is that the organisations with the strongest cultures are the ones where leaders see themselves as stewards, not rulers. Where the leader’s job is to make the people around them feel safe enough to take risks, speak honestly, and do their best work. That does not happen by accident. It happens because someone at the top decided it mattered and behaved accordingly, every single day.
Why this matters now
There is a reason this question of culture and leadership keeps coming back. We are in a period where organisations are under more pressure than ever to adapt, to adopt new technology, to restructure, to do more with less. And the temptation in those moments is to focus entirely on strategy, on the plan, on the numbers.
But here is what Collins, Brownsey, and Sinek all agree on, even though they come at it from different angles: strategy without culture is just a document. The plan only works if the people executing it believe in it, trust their leaders, and feel that the environment they are working in supports them to do their best.
SHRM research found that employees in positive organisational cultures are almost four times more likely to stay with their employer. Four times. That hits the bottom line directly, through every hiring budget, every project timeline, and every client relationship in the business.
Culture is not HR’s job. It is not something you can delegate to a working group or fix with an away day. It starts at the top, it flows downward through every decision and behaviour, and it either enables your strategy or quietly undermines it.
The leaders who understand this do not talk about culture as a project. They live it as a practice. And the organisations they build tend to be the ones that endure.
References: Jim Collins, “Good to Great” (2001); Kevin Brownsey, “Cracking the Culture Code” (2022); Simon Sinek, “Leaderful” (simonsinek.com/leaderful); Edgar Schein, “Organizational Culture and Leadership” (1992).
