Your Culture Is Teaching People How to Behave
Most organizations have a set of values somewhere. They may appear on the website, be included in the employee handbook, or be printed on the wall of a conference room. But in my experience, those words are not what ultimately teach people how to behave at work.
People pay attention to what happens around them. They notice how leaders respond when someone makes a mistake, whether they address disrespectful behavior, and who gets recognized or promoted. Over time, those experiences tell employees far more about the culture than a values statement ever could.
Throughout my career, I have worked in and with organizations that genuinely cared about creating a good culture. The leaders weren't necessarily being disingenuous when they talked about respect, teamwork, accountability, or trust. In many cases, I believe they meant every word. The problem was that the day-to-day experience of working there didn't always reinforce what they said they valued.
An organization can say it values teamwork while consistently making excuses for a perceived high performer who operates almost entirely as an individual contributor. They show up late, miss meetings, fail to keep colleagues informed, or leave others to fill in the gaps. Their results may look good on paper, but the rest of the team learns something from the exceptions made for them.
They are learning that teamwork matters until someone is considered too valuable to hold accountable. They are also learning that individual output carries more weight than reliability, collaboration, or the effect someone has on the people around them. That may not be the message leadership intends to send, but it is still the message the organization is sending.
This is one reason I am careful about how we define a high performer. If we only measure what someone produces, we may miss the disruption, frustration, and extra work their behavior creates for everyone else. A person can be very good at one part of their job while making it harder for the rest of the team to do theirs.
The same pattern can show up in other ways. An organization may say it values open communication, but employees learn that raising a concern comes with consequences. Leaders may talk about accountability while repeatedly avoiding difficult conversations with influential people. The organization may promote collaboration, but reward the person who moves fastest, takes the most credit, or gets results without considering what was left behind.
None of this requires a leader to stand in front of the team and announce that the values don't really matter. The lesson is taught through repetition. People see which behaviors are addressed, which ones are overlooked, and which ones seem to help someone get ahead.
That is why I keep coming back to three questions when I think about workplace culture. What do leaders model? What does the organization tolerate? What does the organization reward?
What leaders model matters because people take cues from those with authority and influence. If leaders ask for honest feedback but become defensive when they receive it, employees learn to be careful about what they say. If leaders talk about balance but regularly send late-night messages and expect immediate responses, employees learn that availability may matter more than the boundaries everyone agreed to respect.
What an organization tolerates matters because silence is rarely neutral. There may be good reasons why a situation hasn't been addressed yet, and leaders may be working through circumstances employees cannot see. Still, when the same behavior continues without any visible response, people begin to make their own assumptions about what is acceptable.
What an organization rewards may be the clearest lesson of all. Recognition, promotions, access, opportunities, and even who receives the benefit of the doubt tell people what the organization values in practice. If someone is rewarded for results while their impact on others is consistently ignored, employees learn that how the work gets done matters less than whether the numbers look good at the end.
This is also why I don't believe lasting culture change can rest on training alone. Training can give people language, tools, and a chance to practice different ways of communicating or leading. I believe deeply in its value. But even the best training has limits when people return to an environment that keeps reinforcing the behaviors the organization says it wants to change.
We can teach people how to have difficult conversations, but those skills will be hard to use if the organization punishes honesty. We can talk about emotional intelligence, but it will be difficult to sustain if leaders don't model self-awareness or accountability. We can ask employees to collaborate, but that request will eventually ring hollow if people who consistently undermine teamwork keep getting special treatment.
The environment doesn't have to be perfect before people can grow. Culture change is rarely that neat, and organizations are made up of human beings who will occasionally get it wrong. What matters is whether the broader message is becoming more consistent and whether people can see that the organization is willing to examine the gap between what it values and what it reinforces.
That belief is part of what sits underneath The Civility Code™. Civility isn't simply about asking individuals to be nicer to one another. It is about creating a workplace where dignity, respect, accountability, and trust are supported by how people lead and how the organization operates.
For leaders who want to understand what their culture may be teaching, the three questions offer a useful place to begin. What are we modeling? What are we tolerating? What are we rewarding? The purpose isn't to assign blame or assume that every inconsistency reflects bad intent. It is to notice where the organization's daily signals may be telling a different story than the values everyone wants to believe.