Culture isn’t handed down from the top. It grows from the bottom up. It lives in the hallway conversations, the decisions made when no one senior is watching, the way a team responds when things go wrong at 4pm on a Friday. Leaders don’t build that. People do.
So why do we keep telling leaders they’re responsible for culture?
Partly because it’s tidier. Accountability needs somewhere to land. And partly because there’s a multi-million-pound industry built around leadership development that has a vested interest in making leaders feel like the most important variable in every equation.
But the evidence tells a different story.
The Figurehead Problem
A figurehead matters. Don’t misread this. What a leader models, tolerates, and rewards shapes what becomes normal. If a senior leader consistently interrupts people in meetings, that behaviour spreads. If they praise output over honesty, they get compliance, not candour. That’s real, and it’s consequential.
"Culture is what happens when the leader leaves the room. It's the habits, beliefs and behaviours of everyone. If it only exists when leaders are watching, it isn't culture it's theatre."
But there’s a difference between influencing culture and driving it. A figurehead sets the tone and marks the boundaries. They don’t control what happens inside them.
The actual drivers of culture are the people closest to the work. Team leads. Supervisors. The person who’s been in the department for twelve years and knows where every body is buried. They set the unwritten rules. They decide what gets said and what stays unsaid. They model the real behaviours — the ones that shape how new starters learn to operate.
If those people aren’t on board, no leadership culture initiative stands a chance. Not a values workshop. Not an away day. Not a glossy new strategy document with “psychological safety” in the introduction.
The Cascade Myth
There’s a popular model of culture change that goes something like this: get the senior leadership team aligned, cascade the message down through middle management, and watch it take root in the wider organisation.
It sounds logical. It rarely works.
Because by the time the message reaches the people doing the actual work, it’s been filtered, reinterpreted, quietly subverted, or simply ignored. Middle managers are busy. They’re managing up and managing down simultaneously. And if the culture initiative doesn’t make their job easier, if it adds process without reducing pressure, it will get deprioritised. Fast.
I’ve worked with organisations where the leadership team genuinely believed they had a high-trust culture. Walk into the operational teams, and what you actually found was a group of people who had learned to perform trust for senior visitors. That gap between what leaders think the culture is and what the culture actually is is where most change programmes quietly die.
What Leaders Actually Control
Less than they think. More than they sometimes act like.
Leaders control the conditions. They control what gets resourced, what gets measured and what gets recognised. They control who gets promoted and on what basis. They control whether the organisation invests in developing people’s actual skills, or whether it sends everyone to an awareness session and calls the problem solved.
That last one matters more than most leaders realise. Culture isn’t changed by information. People generally know what good looks like. They can articulate it in a workshop without difficulty. The gap isn’t knowledge. Its capability under pressure is the ability to act differently when it costs something to do so.
If you want a different culture, you need people who have genuinely different skills. Not people who have attended a session about different skills.
"The gap isn't between knowing and not knowing. It's between knowing and doing it when it's hard."
So What Should Leaders Actually Do?
Stop trying to drive culture from the front. Start building the conditions that allow it to develop from within.
That means being honest about what the culture actually is right now, not what the last engagement survey said it was, but what people experience day to day. It means investing in the skills of the people who are closest to the work, because they are the real cultural infrastructure of the organisation. And it means accepting that culture change is slow, imperfect, and can’t be project-managed.
It also means tolerating a certain loss of control. Genuinely healthy cultures are those where people feel safe to push back, name problems and disagree with the person above them in the hierarchy. That is profoundly uncomfortable for leaders who’ve built their identity around being the one with the answers.
The best leaders I’ve worked with in the military, in financial services, in healthcare have all understood something that takes most people a long time to accept: their job isn’t to lead from the front. It’s to make it possible for everyone else to lead well in their own lane.
So...
Culture is a collective phenomenon. It belongs to everyone in the organisation, not just the people at the top. Leaders can shape it, accelerate it, and if they’re not careful, quietly poison it. But they can’t own it.
The moment a leader starts treating culture as their personal project, they’ve already lost the plot. Culture isn’t a leadership deliverable. It’s the residue of thousands of daily interactions, decisions, and behaviours, most of which happen nowhere near the boardroom.
Be the figurehead. Set the standard. But stop mistaking the flag for the wind.
