06th March 2026
Leadership and Workplace Culture: Why Actions Matter Most
Lisa Bodell argues that workplace culture is shaped by leaders’ daily actions, not corporate value statements. When leaders’ behaviours contradict their words, trust erodes and culture deteriorates. Using Uber and Microsoft as examples, she shows how lived values, not slogans, drive engagement, innovation, performance and long-term organisational success.
This article was written by Lisa Bodell and published in Fast Company.
I’ve read a lot of books on building a culture at work. A lot of the advice is well-intentioned but to me overly complex. A 20-step framework is a lot harder to live by than a simple operating principle. Culture is something people feel and live more than implement.
Venture capitalist Ben Horowitz wrote in his book What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture, “It’s not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say in company-wide meetings. It’s not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe. Who you are is what you do.”
For me, culture is created through actions. It’s the choices leaders make every day that shape how people experience their work. Words can motivate, but actions are what transform. I feel strongly that culture lives in daily behaviour, in the decisions that happen behind closed doors, and in the examples leaders set. When those actions don’t match the message, culture starts to crumble.
“At its core, culture is the outcome of how people treat one another. You can read an organisation’s culture in the everyday interactions between team members, customers, partners, and other stakeholders,” notes Dan Pontefract, a leadership strategist and award-winning author of six workplace culture books. “Good or bad, culture is contagious. When people observe respect and generosity, that behaviour spreads. But when they see apathy, ego, or petty power plays rewarded, the culture will inevitably corrode. Wherever you look, culture is an outcome, and it becomes the core of how that organisation operates.”
When Leaders Don’t Live Their Values
You probably remember when Uber experienced its explosive growth in the early 2010s. CEO Travis Kalanick was known for being bold and disruptive in more ways than one. The company’s “innovation at all costs” mantra fueled success, but behind the scenes, the culture was the opposite.
Despite all the values-based talking points emphasising “customer obsession” and “empowerment,” employees defined the culture as toxic, with high levels of burnout, ruthless competition, and ethical issues. People complained about long hours, fear-based leadership, and a lack of trust and accountability. In 2017, former engineer Susan Fowler went public with her experience, describing a workplace filled with harassment, fear, and silence.
Uber’s culture didn’t fail because it lacked values. In fact, it listed many of them on its website that sounded like ones you read about as “best practices” in Harvard Business Review. Actually, it failed because those values weren’t real because they weren’t practised. What leaders said and did were two totally different things. Eventually, Kalanick was fired and the company had to rebuild its culture from scratch.
When Leaders Do Live Their Values
Microsoft is a different story. When Satya Nadella took over as CEO in 2014, the company’s culture was competitive and closed off. It was struggling to innovate, and it was losing touch with its people, trying to operate in an industry that required constant change. Nadella knew that the strategy wasn’t the big issue; the culture was.
Instead of rolling out a new list of corporate values, as CEOs tend to do in grand fashion, he focused on improving behaviour. Uncharacteristic for a tech exec, he talked about empathy, curiosity, and growth, and then he modelled them. Nadella openly shared his own learning journey and encouraged people to learn from mistakes. He talked about taking the company from a “know it all” culture to a “learn it all” culture. He created space for collaboration and growth instead of competition and fear.
The shift is attributed to Microsoft’s dramatic increase in revenue and success in cloud computing and AI. Employee engagement improved, innovation returned, and Microsoft regained its energy and purpose. The company became known for its empathy-driven leadership and ability to adapt. Nadella didn’t just talk about culture, he lived it—and people followed.
Read this article in full here: The role of leadership in shaping workplace culture
