The importance of leadership in fostering positive workplace cultures

A positive workplace culture rarely appears by accident. It is the result of thousands of small, deliberate decisions that leaders make about who gets heard, what gets rewarded, and how the company learns. I have sat with founders in Kuala Lumpur boardrooms and Riyadh coworking spaces and the pattern is the same. The companies that keep talent, ship through chaos, and protect customer experience are the ones that treat culture as an operating system, not an HR slogan.

Here is the tension most teams do not name early enough. Engagement is not attendance. People can show up for town halls and still feel invisible. Inclusivity is not a campaign. People can memorize the values and still hesitate to speak. Trust is not a motivational talk. It is built when leaders follow through, especially when it is inconvenient. When these pieces are aligned, the rest moves faster and with less friction.

Recent SHRM work puts numbers around what founders already feel in their gut. In healthy cultures, the majority of people rate their environment as good or excellent, and motivation tracks that confidence. In struggling cultures, the numbers fall off a cliff. That gap shows up every day in customer experience, cycle time, handoffs, and rework. You do not need a complicated dashboard to notice it. You can hear it in the silence on a call and see it in the quality of decisions after 5 p.m.

Service businesses make this painfully obvious. Travel + Leisure Co. talks about four steady competencies for their leaders: transparency, empowerment, decision making, and customer centricity. Strip away the corporate phrasing and you get real-world rules that any startup can use. Tell people the truth early. Push authority to the edge where the customer lives. Decide once, then support the team that carries the decision. Keep the guest at the center of every tradeoff. These are not slogans. They are habits that scale.

If you want a simple test for building a positive workplace culture, try this. Take a normal workday, not a launch day. Ask three people at different levels to describe what success looks like this week, what they can decide without asking permission, and what will happen if they miss by 20 percent. If their answers match, you are building alignment. If their answers conflict, you are building accidental politics. Culture starts to erode wherever there is confusion about authority, protection for honest feedback, or consequences for gaming the system.

Founders often tell me, “We promote psychological safety.” Then I ask how they respond when a frontline person challenges a product call on Slack. Do they get a thoughtful reply on the record, or a private message that changes the tone? Safety does not exist if the only safe place is a side channel. Safety exists when people can be open and honest in public threads and still be recognized for the intent behind the challenge. When that happens, ideas improve, risks surface earlier, and the team learns faster. The SHRM data is not surprising. People who feel safe and included bring more energy, more care, and more patience to difficult work. Customers feel that.

Measurement matters because memory is selective. Healthy cultures use simple feedback loops that leaders actually read. An annual survey gives you the baseline. Quarterly pulse checks let you correct course without drama. Add two more instruments that many teams ignore. First, close the loop with service and experience scores from the customer side. Your culture is only as strong as the handoff between what you say internally and what the world feels externally. Second, track the time it takes to turn feedback into action. Slow response kills trust faster than a bad score.

Communication is where culture either compounds or decays. Storytelling without proof is noise. Proof without storytelling is a spreadsheet. Use both. Tie recognition to the specific behaviors you want to see repeated, and say the quiet parts out loud when tradeoffs hurt. If you postpone a feature to protect your team’s sleep, name it. If you push a deadline because a customer escalation matters more than a roadmap promise, name that too. The consistency of these decisions becomes your real values statement.

Inclusivity is not a Western import. It is a performance advantage in any market that serves a diverse customer. In Malaysia and Singapore, that means designing rituals and communication that work across languages and time zones, not just for the most vocal team. In Saudi, where hierarchy can be strong, empowerment needs explicit permission and visible sponsorship. The principle is the same regardless of context. People share more, and risk better, when they see their leaders model the behavior and protect them after they do.

Early-stage founders usually push back here. They say culture can wait until Series B. It cannot. Culture is cheaper to design than to repair. If you are still under 30 people, start with three non-negotiables. First, clarity about who decides. Write decision rights next to roles, and update them each quarter. Second, a simple, shared format for feedback. Short, regular, and safe. Third, a visible habit for learning. Hold a short retro after moments that matter, not just after failures. Make the learning public so it becomes part of the company’s story.

During mergers, restructures, or leadership changes, culture becomes the hidden balance sheet. When values and goals actually align, integration moves. When they do not, high performers vote with their feet. SHRM’s findings around retention in positive cultures are not theoretical. Retention during change is the outcome of trust earned long before the announcement. That is why many acquisitions stumble. The acquiring company tries to paste values onto the new team without giving them voice, ownership, or the same rules that incumbents enjoy.

Data cannot carry this alone. Leaders still have to show up with energy across silos, coach in the open, and take responsibility for the standard. Your job is to keep the system honest. That includes the parts that do not flatter you. If the engagement trend dips in a single unit, go there. Sit with the manager. Listen to the people who run the front edge of the operation. Remove one barrier immediately. Show the team what power looks like when it is used for them, not against them.

Here is a practical way to bring this to life without turning your week into a meeting maze. Start every Monday by stating one cultural behavior that will matter most for the work ahead. For example, “We will trade perfect for progress on the mobile onboarding flow, and we will document our decisions in the issue tracker by end of day.” Midweek, share one example of that behavior found in the wild. Friday, close the loop. Recognize the team, log what you learned, and make one small rule change that reduces friction next time. That rhythm builds muscle memory, not just moments.

Coaching and development are the evergreen manager skills that no platform will automate away. The difference between a strong culture and a brittle one is how managers are trained to convert values into daily practice. That is why programs that sharpen people leadership, allyship, and inclusive communication matter. They give managers a shared language and a set of moves they can use when the room gets tense. The point is not certificates. The point is consistency. When managers across functions coach in the same way and escalate in the same way, your culture becomes predictable. Predictability lowers anxiety, and lower anxiety lifts performance.

If you are a founder reading this and thinking it sounds like extra work, you are right. It is work. The good news is that it is the kind of work that removes future work. Clear decision rights cut meetings. Safe feedback reveals risks before they turn into rework. Recognition tied to values keeps your best people a little longer. All of that shows up in speed, quality, and customer sentiment. That is what building a positive workplace culture actually buys you.

The path forward is not a rebrand of your values page. It is a sequence. Align goals and values so people can choose well without waiting for you. Train managers to coach with the same playbook so people grow where they stand. Measure what matters on a predictable cadence and act on it fast. Communicate decisions with the story and the evidence side by side so trust can keep up with change. Do this long enough and you will not need a pep talk. People will feel the difference in how their day runs, and customers will feel it in how your product shows up.

Leadership shapes culture in the quiet choices it makes every day. Protect the conditions for honesty. Reward the work you say you value. Keep your loops short. If your culture depends on your presence, it is not culture. It is dependency.