Farida Abjani is CEO and cofounder of Aging Gracefully, helping redefine home healthcare through compassionate leadership and innovation.
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There is a phrase leaders use often: “That’s not who we are.”
I’ve heard it after an employee treated someone poorly. After communication broke down. After a team member behaved in a way that contradicted everything an organization claimed to value. But I’ve come to believe that who we say we are matters far less than what we repeatedly allow.
Culture is not the mission statement hanging on a wall. It is not the values listed on a website or the words repeated during orientation. Culture is what happens on an ordinary Tuesday when no one thinks leadership is watching.
It is how people speak to one another when they are frustrated. It is whether someone takes responsibility after making a mistake. It is what happens when an employee is overwhelmed, when a customer is difficult or when doing the right thing becomes inconvenient. And perhaps most importantly, culture is what leadership chooses to address—and what it chooses to ignore.
Leaders teach people what matters.
Leadership is often described as setting expectations. I think it goes further than that: Leadership teaches people which expectations are real.
If we say respect matters but tolerate disrespect from our highest performer, employees know which message to believe. If we say people come first but consistently reward results obtained at their expense, they notice that too. And if we say accountability matters and demonstrate it ourselves, that lesson travels farther than any policy ever could. People pay attention to what leaders reward, what they correct, what they overlook and what they model. That becomes culture.
Leaders sometimes avoid addressing behavior because the person involved is talented, productive or difficult to replace. We tell ourselves the issue is small. We don’t want to overreact. We hope it will resolve itself. Meanwhile, everyone else is watching.
When a high performer repeatedly behaves poorly without consequence, the organization notices. When disrespect is excused because someone produces results, when stated values disappear the moment they become inconvenient, the organization learns something. Not from what leadership said, but from what leadership allowed. Every exception quietly redraws the boundary of acceptable behavior.
Performance and character cannot be separated.
One of the biggest mistakes organizations make is treating performance and behavior as two separate conversations. But someone can be exceptional at producing numbers and still damage the organization. A person who consistently undermines colleagues, creates fear or refuses accountability may look successful on a spreadsheet while creating costs that never appear on one.
Those costs show up elsewhere: good employees leaving, people becoming reluctant to speak honestly, collaboration deteriorating and leaders spending increasing amounts of time managing conflict. Eventually, the organization pays for behavior it shouldn’t have tolerated.
How results are achieved matters just as much as the results themselves.
Kindness and accountability can coexist.
One misconception about people-centered leadership is that protecting culture means keeping everyone comfortable. It doesn’t. Some of the most respectful conversations a leader can have are also the most difficult or uncomfortable ones.
Accountability does not require humiliation, and kindness does not require lowering standards. We can tell someone that their behavior is unacceptable while still treating them with dignity. We can address poor performance without attacking the person. We can listen to circumstances without allowing circumstances to become permanent excuses.
In fact, avoiding a necessary conversation often isn’t kindness at all. It simply transfers the consequences of one person’s behavior to everyone around them. Strong cultures make room for grace, but they also make expectations clear.
Culture is built before the crisis.
Organizations often discover the strength of their culture when something goes wrong, but culture isn’t created during the crisis. It is revealed by it.
The trust required for someone to raise a concern was built—or damaged—months earlier. The willingness to admit a mistake was shaped by what happened the last time someone admitted one. The instinct to help a colleague came from hundreds of small interactions that occurred long before anyone needed help urgently.
Culture cannot simply be repaired when there is a problem. It has to be protected every day.
Some of the strongest cultures I have seen are not built through dramatic initiatives but through consistency. A leader apologizes when they are wrong. Someone receives credit for work they actually did. A difficult conversation happens privately and respectfully. A mistake becomes an opportunity to improve rather than an opportunity to humiliate someone. A person without a powerful title is treated with the same respect as someone who has one.
These moments may seem insignificant individually, but collectively, they tell people what kind of organization they belong to.
Three Questions Leaders Should Ask
When I think about culture, I come back to three questions:
1. What are we rewarding?
People quickly learn what actually earns recognition, advancement and influence.
2. What are we tolerating?
The behaviors leadership repeatedly overlooks eventually become unofficial policy.
3. What are we modeling?
Employees will remember how leaders behave under pressure far longer than they will remember what was written in an employee handbook.
If the answers don’t match the values an organization claims to hold, the problem isn’t necessarily the values. It may be the leadership behavior surrounding them.
The standard starts with us.
As leaders, it is easy to look outward when discussing culture. What are employees doing? Why aren’t they communicating? Why aren’t they taking ownership? Why doesn’t the team behave the way we expect?
Sometimes the more useful question is much closer to home: What have we taught them is acceptable through our behavior, our decisions and the moments when speaking up would have been uncomfortable and we chose not to do it?
Ultimately, the culture of an organization isn’t simply what its leaders believe. It is what they are willing to protect.
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