When Your Culture Says One Thing and Your Leaders Do Another

We were conducting an employee survey for a company with multiple locations when something caught our attention. One location’s scores were significantly lower than those at every other site, particularly in the leadership section. The HR director was surprised. The company had invested heavily in its culture. The values were clearly stated. Leadership development had been a priority. So why was this location so different?

When we sat down with the employees, the answer came quickly. Their leader regularly talked about the company’s values. He referenced standards in team meetings. He was vocal about what the culture stood for. And then he showed up late to work almost every day.

It had become a running joke among the team. When someone was heading out the door in the morning, a coworker would call after them, “Don’t be late,” and they would both laugh. Seems harmless, but it was the way the employees processed their frustration over the situation – a leader who expected standards of them but couldn’t hold himself to them. That leader had lost his team’s respect, and he had no idea.

This is not an uncommon finding in our survey work. Culture problems rarely show up uniformly across an entire organization. They show up in pockets, in specific departments or locations, and when we trace them back to their source, they almost always lead to a single leader whose behavior has created a gap between what the organization says it stands for and what employees actually experience every day.

The gap is rarely dramatic. It doesn’t usually start with a leader who openly defies the values. It starts with smaller contradictions. A leader who talks about accountability but never holds anyone to a standard. One who champions collaboration in all-hands meetings but hoards information and operates in silos. One who emphasizes respect but interrupts, dismisses, and speaks over people in their own team meetings. Each of these contradictions sends a message louder than any value statement on a wall ever could.

Culture is not what leaders say. It is what leaders model, and the moment a leader stops living up to the standards they expect of others, those standards begin to lose their meaning for everyone watching. Employees are perceptive. They notice the gap quickly, and once they do, cynicism sets in. The most engaged employees, the ones with the highest standards for themselves and the lowest tolerance for double standards, are usually the first to leave. What remains is a team that has learned to go through the motions, say the right things in the right settings, and quietly disengage from any real investment in the culture they no longer believe in.

The most important thing leaders at every level need to understand is this: you do not get to choose your team’s culture. You get the culture you model, value, and reward. If you are late, lateness becomes acceptable. If you avoid accountability, your team learns that accountability is optional. If you operate in silos while preaching collaboration, your team will collaborate only when someone is watching.

Walking the talk is not a leadership nicety. It is the foundation on which everything else is built. No culture initiative, no values workshop, and no engagement survey follow-through will close the gap between what a leader says and what a leader does. Only the leader’s own behavior can do that.

The employees at that location didn’t need a new culture program. They needed a leader who showed up on time – who walked the talk.

Dusty Tockstein is a senior consultant at Peter Barron Stark Companies. Dusty works with clients to improve their corporate culture through a variety of tools, including Employee Engagement Surveys, 360 Leadership Development Assessments, Leadership Coaching, and Organizational Assessments.