What Does Your Organizational Culture Reveal About Your Leadership?

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The world deserves better leaders. Leadership is much more of a daily practice than a title or a role. Leadership is more of a verb than a noun. Leadership is lived out and expressed in real time through one's presence and one's voice. Therefore, leadership is experienced through thousands of conversations, decisions, and timely interactions.

Good leadership always has a moral compass. Regardless of short-term effectiveness, truly influential leadership is only sustainable and effective if the leader is growing in virtuous character. Ultimately, who a leader is becoming matters more than what a leader is doing or accomplishing. In my leadership development practice, I care most about the interior life of the leader and the interior life of the organization. That means I often focus on leadership self-awareness in my coaching and organizational culture in my consulting.

Let's talk about organizational culture for a minute. Edgar Schein is often considered the modern father of organizational culture thinking. He defines organizational culture according to four core pillars.

First, it is learned behavior. Culture is not born organically or imposed overnight. It is cultivated through a group's shared history and experiences.

Second, culture has a dual focus — external adaptation and internal integration. The external part is how an organization survives, competes, and grows in the market. The internal part is how teams and groups within an organization integrate, coexist, communicate, and work together.

The third pillar is that the desired culture must prove valid. A behavior or mindset does not become part of the culture until it consistently works. Success validates the practice.

And finally, the fourth pillar is that true culture dictates perception. Culture ultimately functions as an invisible filter, instructing new hires not just on what to do — but on the correct way to interpret, feel about, and mentally process workplace challenges.

For Schein, culture has three levels: Artifacts, Espoused Values, and Basic Underlying Assumptions. These levels show how culture is expressed in and through the organization.

Artifacts are the visible, tangible, and audible elements of an organization. Examples might include the office physical layout, a prescribed or assumed dress code, tech tools, and official branding. These are easy to see but hard to decipher from the outside.

Espoused Values are the public stated strategies, goals, slogans, and philosophies. This is what the organization says it stands for and how it will behave. These values may show up as phrases like "customer first", "move fast", or "

Basic Underlying Assumptions are the unwritten, unconscious, and deeply embedded beliefs that actually drive employee behavior. This is the true foundation of the culture, determining how group members actually perceive, think, and feel. Schein would also say that organizational culture directly reflects leadership and is a prime driver of performance.

A mentor of mine who does a lot of cultural work with many different types of organizations says that there are three types of culture: intentional, accidental, and hypocritical. She also says that it doesn't take long to find out which type of culture leaders are allowing or choosing by intent.

In my experience, significant organizational changes, whether chosen internally or imposed from the outside, often reveal an organization's true culture. You will clearly begin to see whether leadership has intentionally cultivated a culture over time that sustains the organization and even helps it grow through change. Or you might see that an organization has been living out an accidental culture that begins to crack under the pressure of change. Or, worst of all, when change hits, does it become abundantly clear that the organization has a hypocritical culture? This means an organization espouses one thing, but something else is the true lived experience for its members and employees. If an organization has an accidental or hypocritical culture, you often see a significant exodus of leaders and employees when major change takes place. The culture is not there to sustain the change.

There are always two questions I seek answers to when an organization takes on a significant change process. First, what does that change process reveal about the organization's current culture? And, second, what type of leaders does the new reality attract and produce? It may take a few years to see the answers--or the answers may arrive much more quickly. But one way or the other, you will know if the change was managed and executed well.

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