People learn the rules, whether you explain them or not

I have come to think of culture less as something an organisation has and more as something people are continually creating together, often without realising it.

We are constantly reading it — noticing what gets rewarded, tolerated, challenged or admired — while at the same time shaping it through our own behaviour, choices and reactions.

In that sense, culture is never really static. It is continually being reinforced, adjusted and renegotiated through thousands of small interactions.

But we do not all have equal influence over what gets created.

Leaders clearly have particular influence. So do people with status, long-standing insiders, people whose judgement is highly respected and people whose contribution is especially valued. Their reactions can carry more weight. Their behaviour may be watched more closely. Their approval, silence or tolerance can send stronger signals than the same response from someone with less influence.

Culture is interactive, but the power to shape it is unevenly distributed.

And all the while, people are trying to work out:

What really counts around here?

We are learning how to succeed — and how to belong

When somebody joins an organisation, they are not simply learning how to do the job.

They are learning how to be a member of the group.

What am I expected to deliver? What does good look like? How do decisions get made? Who do I need to involve?

But another set of questions sits alongside those.

How do people behave here? How much can I challenge? Who can I disagree with? What happens if I admit I don’t know? What earns respect? What produces the raised eyebrow? How do I become someone people trust and want around?

We rarely spell those things out.

Often, I suspect, we are barely conscious of them ourselves.

But people absorb them.

Most of us want to do well. And most of us want to belong.

So we pay attention.

Much of culture is taught sideways

Leaders teach culture, but they are certainly not the only teachers.

A colleague’s raised eyebrow can teach you something.

So can the comment that produces an awkward silence. The idea that is quietly ignored. The person everyone turns to when something difficult happens. The colleague whose judgement seems to carry disproportionate weight. The person others seek out, listen to or want on their team.

People gradually work out who seems to have worked the place out.

And it is not necessarily the most senior person.

We notice people who appear to be respected, influential, successful or sought out by others. We notice what they do and how people respond to them.

We don’t simply copy them.

We watch. We compare. We test things for ourselves.

And, over time, we learn not only what the rules seem to be, but who those rules seem to apply to.

Difference is not the same as exemption

This is where things become particularly interesting.

Some people build enormous credibility through what they contribute.

They may be extraordinarily creative, technically brilliant or unusually valuable to the organisation. They may also be quirky, unconventional or simply very different from the people around them.

That can be a very good thing.

A healthy culture should have room for difference. We do not want to sand everybody down until they all think and behave in precisely the same way.

But there is an important distinction between allowing someone to be different and allowing exceptional performance to purchase exemption from reasonable standards of behaviour.

People notice that too.

They notice whose bluntness is described as refreshing and whose is labelled rude.

Whose challenge is admired and whose earns an eye-roll.

Who can ignore a process because “that’s just how they are”, and who would be pulled up immediately for doing the same thing.

At the extreme, this is how an organisation can find itself accommodating the so-called brilliant jerk — somebody whose contribution is so highly valued that behaviour which would not be accepted from somebody else is repeatedly excused.

The organisation may think it is making a pragmatic exception for one particularly valuable person.

Everyone else may be learning something broader:

Results buy you behavioural credit here.

That is culture too.

And then there are our values

Most organisations have them.

Respect. Integrity. Collaboration. Courage. Innovation. Inclusion.

Often they are thoughtful, sincerely intended and beautifully expressed.

And I think values matter.

But a values statement is only one source of information about what an organisation really values.

People also look at the evidence.

If we say collaboration matters but consistently reward individual heroics, that teaches something.

If we say we want people to speak up but become defensive when they challenge us, that teaches something.

If we say respect matters but repeatedly excuse someone who diminishes colleagues because their results are exceptional, that teaches something too.

People compare what we say with what they see.

And people will generally believe the evidence.

That does not necessarily mean leaders are being hypocritical.

Often I think the inconsistency is much less conscious than that.

We may simply not realise how much information other people are taking from our small reactions, our silences, our exceptions, the people we praise, the people we promote, or the things we decide are not worth addressing.

And of course leaders are not the only people sending those signals.

Peers reinforce culture too. Teams develop their own patterns. People encourage some behaviours and quietly discourage others.

We are all participating in the culture we experience.

Just not with equal power to shape it.

This can matter for wellbeing too

There is a psychosocial-risk dimension to this as well.

If the unwritten rules tell people that asking for help is a sign of weakness, that challenging poor behaviour carries a cost, that some people are effectively untouchable, or that standards are applied unpredictably, those signals can shape much more than engagement.

They can influence whether people feel supported and fairly treated, whether they feel able to speak up, and whether uncertainty or interpersonal friction becomes something they simply have to absorb.

Again, nobody needs to have formally announced any of those rules.

People learn them from what happens.

So what?

I don’t think the answer is to prescribe everybody’s personality or produce a longer list of approved behaviours.

Nor do I think leaders can control every aspect of culture. They cannot. Culture is created through interaction and belongs to the group.

But leaders do have disproportionate influence over the conditions in which those interactions occur — and over many of the signals people use to interpret them.

What they notice.

What they reward.

What they question.

What they tolerate.

Who they listen to.

Where they make exceptions.

And how they themselves behave when things become difficult.

If leaders believe particular behaviours really matter, they need to be able to say what those behaviours are and, importantly, why they matter.

And when what is actually happening seems inconsistent with that, it should be possible to talk about it.

Not necessarily to reprimand or penalise.

Sometimes simply to be curious.

I noticed what happened in that meeting. What was going on?

We say we want people to challenge ideas here. Do you think we made that easy today?

We say this matters to us. Are our actions telling people the same thing?

That isn’t about policing culture.

It is about being awake to it.

Because people will keep watching.

They will notice what succeeds, what earns respect, what gets challenged and what gets quietly tolerated. They will notice who belongs, who has influence and who seems to get a different set of rules.

They will compare what we say we value with what they see us actually value.

And through their own responses, choices and behaviour, they will contribute to what happens next.

That is why I think culture is better understood as something living and continually evolving than as something an organisation simply “has”.

Culture is happening anyway. Leaders should be awake to their part in creating it.

And, as luck would have it, there is research behind this too

These observations come from my own experience of working with people and organisations over many years. I arrived at them through watching, listening and trying to understand what was happening in workplaces — not through academic research.

It was reassuring to discover later that several well-established areas of research strongly echo what I had been seeing.

Baumeister, R. F. & Leary, M. R. (1995), The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation, Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529.
A landmark review supporting the idea that the desire to form and maintain social bonds is a powerful human motivation. PubMed

Bauer, T. N., Erdogan, B., Ellis, A. M., Truxillo, D. M., Brady, G. M. & Bodner, T. (2025), New Horizons for Newcomer Organizational Socialization: A Review, Meta-Analysis, and Future Research Directions, Journal of Management, 51(1), 344–382.
A major review and meta-analysis of organisational socialisation and newcomer adjustment, including role clarity, task mastery and social acceptance. Sage Journals

Jiménez, Á. V. & Mesoudi, A. (2019), Prestige-biased social learning: current evidence and outstanding questions, Palgrave Communications, 5, 20.
A review of evidence about how people use cues such as competence, success, respect and the attention of others when deciding from whom it may be useful to learn. Nature

Kluemper, D. H., Taylor, S. G., Bowler, W. M., Bing, M. N. & Halbesleben, J. R. B. (2019), How leaders perceive employee deviance: Blaming victims while excusing favorites, Journal of Applied Psychology, 104(7), 946–964.
Among its findings, leaders were less likely to perceive rude employees negatively when those employees were seen as high performers or had strong relationships with the leader.