How leadership shapes culture

We like to pretend culture is tone and perks and maybe a few lines on a website. In the early days, culture is really a set of repeated choices under pressure. The person at the top makes those choices first and most visibly. That is why leadership shapes culture long before a head of people shows up, and why a founder can accidentally teach a team the exact opposite of what they believe. You do not need a handbook to create culture. You just need to keep acting the same way and people will learn to copy it.

I have watched teams in Malaysia, Singapore, and Saudi build strong products and still struggle because what the founders said and what they did were not the same. They said family matters, then scheduled Sunday reviews. They said we trust owners, then rewrote pull requests at midnight. They said we hire adults, then added approvals for every line item over fifty dollars. None of these moves are evil. Under stress, many of us default to control. The problem is that teams learn from defaults. If control is the reflex, control becomes the culture.

The fastest way to see how leadership shapes culture is to look at one painful week. A customer threatens to churn. A big demo is moved forward. Cash is tighter than expected. In that week, what does the leader do with information, time, and blame. If the leader hoards updates, the team learns silence. If the leader extends the day every day, the team learns that personal boundaries are decorative. If the leader blames the newest person, the team learns to hide problems. After three weeks of this, you do not need a memo. You have a culture.

In one Saudi accelerator, I worked with a founder who prided himself on being decisive. His decisiveness showed up as daily pivots that landed on the team the moment he had a new thought in the car. He would say we value clarity, but his Slack messages taught something else. The lesson was that plans are disposable and the safest response is to wait for the nightly change. People stopped proposing roadmaps. They stopped owning outcomes. They became expert firefighters and poor builders. He did not mean to make chaos the culture. The chaos came from his strength, unbounded.

In Kuala Lumpur, I watched the opposite. A technical founder did not like conflict. She saw herself as a calm presence and a safe leader. She avoided direct correction even when a senior hire kept missing handoffs. She hoped kindness would guide improvement. The team learned a different lesson. They learned that performance issues drift for months and that trust is more important than delivery. Eventually the most reliable people left first. That is another way leadership shapes culture. Avoidance does as much shaping as intensity.

When founders ask how to build culture, I ask them to replay the moments when no one was watching. How did you respond to a missed metric. Did you ask what broke in the system, or did you ask who broke it. Did you invite your team into a problem early, or did you perform a hero sprint. Did you share the numbers and say here is what is real, or did you share a summary and say just focus on your tasks. This is not theory. People copy the script you model. They copy your language for risk. They copy your appetite for rest. They copy your respect for the boring parts of the work.

Here is the part that is hard to hear. Values do not become culture until the leader pays a cost to protect them. Anyone can say we do not cut corners when there is time and budget. Culture shows up when saying no to a shortcut means missing a shipment or calling a client to reset expectations. I once told a founder in Riyadh that his actual values were speed and image, not integrity and learning. He was offended. Then he looked at our last three releases and the way he had rewarded teams for last minute pushes while ignoring postmortems. His team was not stubborn. They were loyal to the rewards he created.

Leadership shapes culture through what it refuses to ignore. If quality matters, quality gets time and money. If work life balance matters, calendars reflect that with daylight between meetings and predictable shutdowns. If ownership matters, you remove bottlenecks that route every decision back to you. In Singapore, a team I advised changed one rule. No one could schedule a meeting after six without getting an explicit yes from the invitee by noon the day before. The rule looked small. The signal was huge. People believed the letters on the wall for the first time because the leader took a hit in convenience to protect the value.

There is another quiet lever. Boundaries. Many founders think being always available is leadership. Early teams read the constant availability as the standard to meet. The standard becomes stay late, reply faster, be on even when you are sick. That is a culture too. It burns bright and then burns people. In one Malaysian company, the CEO started leaving the office at five two days a week and told the team why. School pickup. He said if I am here after five on those days, it means I failed to design my work. A year later, retention improved, and the team still shipped faster. They designed around boundaries instead of pretending they did not exist.

People also ask whether regional context changes the rule. It does not change the rule that leadership shapes culture, but it does change the inputs. In Saudi, teams often look for explicit permission to break with hierarchy even when leaders think they are being approachable. If you want initiative, you have to script the first step and praise it publicly, not just say my door is open. In Singapore, teams may default to polished delivery and quietly avoid upward feedback. If you want truth early, you have to model unvarnished updates and show that bad news gets resources, not punishment. In Malaysia, where many startups are family influenced, leaders must over communicate the difference between family loyalty and professional accountability, or else teams will see performance feedback as betrayal. None of this is about slogans. It is about the leader being brave enough to go first in the culture they say they want.

Here is a simple way to work on this without a big program. Pick the next decision that will cost you something. Tell the team the value at stake. Make the decision in favor of the value. Explain the cost. Repeat this three times in one quarter. People will change how they behave because they will finally trust that the value is not a mood. When you do this, be boring about it. Do not wrap it in a big campaign. Culture scales through repetition, not inspiration.

Hiring amplifies all of this. If your culture depends on you personally coaching every new person to do the right thing, it will collapse at twenty people. Write down the three behaviors that make your team good. Make them part of interviews with concrete examples. Teach managers to correct to those behaviors. Reward them when they do it. In Jeddah, a portfolio company made one change in interviews. Every candidate had to walk through a time they shipped late and what they changed the next time. They were testing for ownership and learning. The team got better at shipping, not because they added pressure, but because they added a habit of honest review at the door.

You may be wondering where to start if the culture already feels off. Start with one truthful sentence you can say to your team this week. Here is something I did that taught the wrong lesson. Here is what I will do differently. Then choose one ritual you will stop or start to match the sentence. If you micromanage code reviews, stop doing any reviews on Fridays and tell your leads they own Friday merges. If you flood Slack after midnight, schedule messages for morning and tell people why. If your one on ones drift, set an agenda that begins with what you need from me to be successful. Do not expect applause. Expect a few weeks of confusion. Keep going. The repetition is the point.

Founders sometimes ask for the quick playbook for how leadership shapes culture. There is no quick playbook because culture is not a project. It is maintenance. It is the hundreds of small choices that either raise trust or leak it. It is whether you close the loop when people raise a concern. It is whether you celebrate someone who prevented a fire as much as someone who fought one. It is the tone you use when you ask for an update. It is whether you tell the truth about money. It is whether you take a holiday and actually log off. Your people are measuring what you do. They set their own limits and effort by watching yours.

If you are leading a young team, remember this. The job is not to be perfect. The job is to be consistent enough that people can predict you on the things that matter. When you mess up, say it early. When a value costs you, pay it publicly. When someone acts in line with the culture you want, reward it even if the metric is not perfect. Over time the team stops looking at you for the script and starts performing it on their own. That is when culture becomes infrastructure, not theater.

I am not interested in leaders who can write beautiful value statements. I am interested in leaders who will protect a junior engineer who told the truth about a delay, who will refuse a toxic client even when the number looks shiny, who will take a hit to keep a boundary intact, who will change their own habits before asking the team to change theirs. That is how leadership shapes culture. Not with words. With costs paid, publicly and consistently.

If you are building in Southeast Asia or the Gulf, the stakes are simple. Talent moves toward places where the story and the lived reality match. You do not need a ping pong table. You need to make one decision this week that proves you meant what you said last week. Do that again next week. Then again. Culture will follow, because people follow credibility. And credibility is leadership, repeated.