The Leader You Are Becomes the Culture You Create

Culture is one of those mysterious forces that exists everywhere—in families gathered around the dinner table, in small startup teams huddled in conference rooms, in executive leadership teams making decisions that affect thousands. You can feel it when you walk into a room, sense it in how people interact, hear it in what's said and what's conspicuously left unsaid. And when you step into a new leadership role, you become the single most powerful force shaping that culture, whether you realize it or not.

The moment you accept that new position, all eyes, ears, and feelings turn toward you. Your team is watching, assessing, asking themselves one fundamental question: "What's in it for me?" Also known as their WIIFM.

They're observing how you run meetings, what time you send emails, whether you ask for input or issue directives, how you respond when someone makes a mistake. They're talking about you in the hallways, in Slack channels, over coffee. They're noticing every change—big and small—and wondering what it means for them.

This isn't about becoming paranoid over every comment or trying to please everyone. That's impossible and exhausting. But it is about being profoundly cognizant of the impact you're having. You are, quite literally, affecting people's lives. The culture you create shapes whether they go home energized or depleted, whether they speak up or stay silent, whether they innovate or simply comply.

Understanding the Culture You've Inherited

Before you make a single change, ask yourself: What was the culture before I arrived? This isn't just a nice-to-have question—it's essential. Every team, every organization has established norms, rhythms, and unwritten rules. Some are healthy. Some need to evolve. But all of them matter to the people who've been living with them.

Consider something as simple as weekend emails. You might be someone who processes thoughts on Saturday mornings with a cup of coffee, firing off ideas for Monday. Harmless, right? But what if the operating norm of your new team has been that work ends at 5 PM on Fridays and resumes Monday at 8 AM, and weekends are sacred? Suddenly, your Saturday brainstorm becomes a cultural earthquake. People see those emails and wonder: Does our new leader expect us to work weekends? Is the old way of working no longer valued? Am I going to fall behind if I don't respond?

You might not intend any of those messages, but impact doesn't require intent.

The Research Is Clear: Leadership Drives Performance

The evidence about leadership's impact on culture and performance is overwhelming. Companies with highly engaged employees—employees who feel their leaders create the right environment—see a 17% increase in productivity and a 21% boost in profitability (Gallup meta-analysis of 456 research studies across 276 organizations in 54 industries and 96 countries). Perhaps even more telling, they experience a 59% reduction in voluntary turnover. People don't leave cultures where they feel valued and understood.

[Source: This is directly from Gallup's 10th meta-analysis on the Q12 (2020), which is one of the most cited and credible employee engagement studies globally.]

But here's where it gets interesting: there's often a significant gap between how leaders think they're showing up and how their teams actually experience them. According to a Gallup 2024 study, 59% of managers say they regularly give recognition, yet only only 35% of employees feel recognized. In another Gallup study, 50% of managers believe they provide weekly, high-quality feedback, yet only 20% of employees agree. These are significant perception gaps percentages.

The difference comes down to psychological safety, a concept Google's research team identified as the single most important factor distinguishing high-performing teams from average ones. Psychological safety is the shared belief that you can speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes, or challenge ideas without fear of embarrassment, punishment, or retribution. It's not about being nice or avoiding conflict. It's about creating an environment where people can be honest, take interpersonal risks, and focus on learning rather than self-protection.

Google's Project Aristotle study (analyzing 180+ teams) found that psychological safety was the #1 factor distinguishing high-performing teams from average ones. Sales teams with high psychological safety ratings exceeded their sales targets by 17%, while teams with low psychological safety fell short. Teams with high psychological safety demonstrated 19% higher productivity and 27% lower turnover rates.

[Source: Google's Project Aristotle research and Google re:Work documentation]

The Questions That Define Your Leadership

So how do you become the kind of leader who creates a culture where people thrive? It starts with self-awareness and a willingness to examine your own behavior with brutal honesty.

Do you encourage open dialogue, or do people tell you what they think you want to hear? If everyone always agrees with you in meetings, that's not harmony—that's fear. High-performing teams, research shows, talk about mistakes more than average teams. Not because they make more mistakes, but because they feel safe enough to acknowledge them and learn from them.

Do people feel comfortable asking questions? When someone asks for clarification, do you view it as engagement or as a sign they weren't paying attention? Your response to questions—whether you invite them enthusiastically or answer them with barely concealed impatience—sends a powerful signal about psychological safety on your team.

Is there a fear-based environment where people "get into trouble"? The language matters here. If people talk about getting in trouble rather than learning from missteps, you've created a parent-child dynamic rather than a professional partnership. Fear drives compliance, not innovation. And compliance only gets you what people think you want, not what's actually possible.

How do you respond when someone brings you bad news or challenges your thinking? Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson identifies this as one of the three critical leadership behaviors for building psychological safety. Instead of "How did this happen?" try "Thanks for that insight. How can we help?" The first question closes conversation. The second opens it.

Creating Culture Through Daily Choices

Every leader is different, and that's actually a good thing. There's no single blueprint for effective leadership. But there are patterns that separate leaders who build healthy, productive cultures from those who don't.

The best leaders frame work as learning opportunities rather than tests of competence. When facing a new challenge, they say, "We've never done this before, and we'll need everyone's input to get it right," not "I expect you to figure this out." This simple reframing changes the psychological contract. It makes space for experimentation, questions, and honest assessment of what's working and what isn't.

They invite participation deliberately and consistently, asking questions like "Who has a different perspective?" or "What am I missing?" These aren't throwaway lines—they're genuine invitations for people to challenge assumptions and contribute their unique viewpoint. And they wait for answers, creating space for the less assertive voices to speak up.

They balance psychological safety with high standards. This is crucial. Psychological safety without accountability becomes mediocrity with good vibes. High standards without safety creates anxiety and hypercompetition. You need both. When you create an environment where people can speak truth and make mistakes in service of excellence, performance soars.

The Culture You're Creating Right Now

Here's the reality: you're already creating culture. You've been creating it since the moment you stepped into your role. The question isn't whether you'll shape your team's culture—you will. The question is whether you're doing it consciously and intentionally, or whether it's happening by accident.

Are you aware of your leadership style? Do you know how you show up when you're stressed, when you're excited, when you're disappointed? Have you asked your team for honest feedback about how they experience your leadership? These aren't comfortable questions, but they're necessary ones.

Because at the end of the day, leadership isn't about your intentions. It's about your impact. It's about whether people leave meetings feeling energized or deflated, whether they speak truth to you or tell you what you want to hear, whether they see challenges as opportunities to learn or threats to avoid.

You're impacting people's lives—their stress levels, their career development, their sense of purpose, even their physical and mental health. Research from Great Place to Work's 2025 Fortune 100 Best Companies shows that at high-trust workplaces, 81% of employees described their workplace as psychologically and emotionally healthy, compared to just 45% at typical U.S. workplaces - representing a 36-point difference in how employees experience their workplace. The difference isn't abstract—it's lived daily in whether someone dreads Monday morning or approaches it with energy.

Where to Start

If you're newly stepping into a leadership role, or even if you've been leading for years, start here:

Observe before you change. Spend your first weeks understanding the existing culture. What are the formal and informal norms? When do people do their best work? What energizes them? What drains them? You can't improve what you don't understand.

Ask genuine questions. Not leading questions designed to get people to your preferred answer, but real questions that come from curiosity. "Help me understand how this process evolved" reveals more than "Why are we doing it this way?" One seeks understanding. The other implies judgment.

Watch your communication patterns. What time are you sending emails? When are you scheduling meetings? Are you creating space for people to think, or expecting immediate responses? Are you modeling the work-life boundaries you say you value?

Invite feedback on your leadership. This takes courage, but the teams that thrive are the ones where leaders model vulnerability. Ask your team how you can better support them.

Really listen to the answers. Don't defend or explain—just absorb and consider.

Be intentional about the first response. When someone brings you a problem, a mistake, or a challenge to your thinking, that first response sets a precedent that will reverberate.

Respond with curiosity and appreciation, not judgment or frustration, and you begin to build the psychological safety that high performance requires.

The Choice Is Yours

Culture isn't something that happens to you. It's something you create, every day, through hundreds of small choices about how you interact, what you reward, what you tolerate, and what you model. The leader you choose to be becomes the culture your team experiences.

So choose consciously. Because whether you're leading five people or five thousand, from the moment you stepped into that role, you became not just a manager or an executive—you became a culture creator. The only question is: what culture are you creating?

Deborah Newman brings almost three decades of Fortune-level executive experience to her work as an advisor to leaders navigating major transformations. Through Newman Leadership Group, she helps executives solve the leadership challenges that accompany organizational change.