Company Culture: Shaping an Invisible Success Metric
- Mohammed Malki
- Aug 3, 2023
- 2 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
No culture can flourish without the enthusiastic participation of its leader.
No matter how well designed, carefully programmed, and insistently enforced your cultural elements are, inconsistent behavior by the person in charge will blow the whole thing up.
Let that sink in..
In an era where frameworks, handbooks, and onboarding decks abound, we sometimes forget that culture is not what’s written — it’s what’s lived.
People don’t follow mission statements. They follow behavior. And the most watched behavior is that of the person at the top.
If a leader insists on “work-life balance” but sends 2 AM Slack messages, that’s the culture — no matter what’s printed on the wall.
Wanna know your true culture?
Don’t ask your senior management. Watch your new hires.
The best way to understand your culture is not through what managers tell you, but through how new employees behave. What behaviors do they perceive will help them fit in, survive, and succeed?
That’s your company’s culture. Not the one in the all-hands presentation — the one in action.
New employees are like sponges. In their first 30 days, they’re not just learning tasks. They’re absorbing signals:
Who gets praised in meetings?
What behavior is quietly rewarded — or punished?
Are people encouraged to speak up, or do they get sidelined?
Whatever behaviors your new joiners adopt to “survive and thrive” — that is your culture.
Here’s the truth
Culture is a strategic investment in the company doing things the right way when you are not looking.
It’s what protects your business from chaos, ego, and shortcuts. It’s the invisible operating system that determines how decisions are made, how people treat each other, and how resilient your team will be under pressure.
You can’t enforce culture top-down. You earn it through consistency, clarity, and example.
So ask yourself
Are you behaving in a way that reflects the values you claim to uphold?
Are your team’s whispered assumptions aligned with your loudest announcements?
Are you building a culture that outlasts your presence in the room?
Because in the end, culture isn’t what you say it is —
It’s what people do when you’re not looking.
This perspective was deeply inspired by The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz — a book that doesn’t romanticize leadership, but instead dives headfirst into its brutal realities. It reminded me that culture isn’t built on posters or perks. It’s forged in hard decisions, quiet consistency, and the behavior leaders model when no one’s watching.