Why Most Leaders Don’t "Get" Culture

Culture has become everyone's business and, somehow, no one's burden.

It is one of the last strategic levers leaders consider and one of the first to break under pressure.

We post values on walls, recite them during onboarding, and print them on coffee mugs. Yet when asked about the real culture, employees exchange knowing glances or tell stories that contradict the carefully crafted slogans.

From an anthropological perspective, this disconnect isn’t surprising. Culture, as a system of meaning, is shaped not only by what we do, but by what we believe, value, expect, and reward, often without realizing it.

Its invisible influence is one of the most powerful levers for driving or derailing strategy.

The Hidden Power Source

Like the bewildered young fish in David Foster Wallace's parable who asks, "What the hell is water?" while swimming in it, we often fail to notice the cultural currents shaping how we work, lead, and make decisions. This is why leaders instinctively reach for familiar tools such as strategic plans, organizational charts, and budget spreadsheets, without realizing that a more subtle force determines whether any of them will succeed: culture.

Culture breathes life into your vision or quietly suffocates it.

Despite this truth, most leadership programs barely acknowledge culture's importance. Scan through prestigious MBA curricula and you'll find it relegated to HR courses, dismissed as too "soft" for serious consideration.

Culture isn't something an organization possesses. It's what an organization is, revealed in every interaction, decision, and contradiction. It's not an asset to be managed but a living reality that demands authentic leadership. As a leader, you shape culture with every word and gesture.

The question isn't whether you're influencing culture but how consciously you're shaping it.

Three Culture Illusions That Trap Organizations

The Slogan Trap

“We are one big family!” “We work hard and play hard!” “Customer obsessed!”

These phrases sound inspiring on posters and employer branding kits but ring hollow when they clash with employees' lived experiences. What companies say about their culture often doesn’t match what really happens there.

Like Wallace’s fish, employees get used to how things actually work: who gets promoted, which rules matter, and what behaviors are really valued, and they stop noticing the gap between the values on the wall and the unwritten rules everyone actually follows. When words and reality diverge, culture transforms from strength to liability.

What's missing is nuance. Culture manifests differently across teams, departments, and hierarchies. While executives crave uniformity, authentic culture resembles a mosaic of micro-cultures connected by shared purpose. Pretending otherwise only deepens cynicism.

The Observer’s Trap

In our measurement-obsessed world, we treat culture as something external. An object to be observed, quantified, and adjusted from a distance.

Culture exists on three levels: visible artifacts, espoused values, and underlying assumptions.

The values and assumptions are often hidden beneath the surface. They shape everything teams do while remaining largely invisible to those swimming within them every day.

Every meeting you conduct, decision you make, and contradiction you embody either reinforces or reshapes the cultural waters. As a leader, you're never neutral. You model cultural norms whether you intend to or not.

Delegating culture to HR, addressing it quarterly, or measuring it annually fails to grasp its ever-present nature.

The Commodity Trap

Somewhere along the way, culture became a selling point. We flaunt it on LinkedIn, pitch it to new recruits, and hope it is sticky enough to keep people engaged.

We reduced culture to a consumer benefit rather than a shared creation.

Yet true engagement, innovation, and adaptability only emerge when people feel they belong and matter.

The solution? Replace consumption with membership.

Like citizenship, membership implies rights and responsibilities. You don’t just get the culture given to you but you contribute to it, challenge it, and grow with it.

The Path of Authentic Cultural Leadership

Authentic cultural leaders create environments where organizations can acknowledge complexity, embrace diverse micro-cultures, and recognize everyone's role in cultural creation.

When leaders stop delegating culture and start embodying it, they:

• Embrace Complexity: They abandon simplistic slogans and seek to understand the varied experiences across their organization.
• Practice Reflexivity: Before decisions, they ask: "How will this shape our culture? What message am I sending?"
• Narrate Culture Consistently: They tell stories that connect values to actions, especially when living those values proves challenging.
• Cultivate Membership: They establish clear expectations about working together, balancing rights with responsibilities, and making culture a shared endeavor.
  
  

The Essential Truth About Culture

You don’t need to manage culture. You need to model it.

Leaders who outsource culture, oversimplify it, or reduce it to a commodity will always fall short.

But those who recognize culture as a shared, evolving reality and lead accordingly get to unlock the transformative potential that no strategy, structure, or budget could achieve alone.

In the end, culture remains both everywhere and nowhere… visible only to those who learn to see the water in which they swim.