Why is leadership culture important?

I used to think culture was the playlist at the offsite and a list of values framed on the pantry wall. Then a key engineer in our Kuala Lumpur office resigned after a sprint that ran hot for six weeks. He said the code was not the problem. It was the silence between decisions. Work kept moving, yet no one knew who set the bar or who could change it. That week forced a simple truth on me. People do not quit work. They quit unclear leadership.

Founders like to say we hire adults. We also like to say we move fast. Speed without clarity is not speed. It is drag. In the first year, your company is a series of bets. You stitch a product together, you sell it to anyone who will listen, you try to keep morale alive when a demo crashes. Under stress, the team watches how leaders decide, how we change our minds, how we treat the one person who raises an awkward point. All of that builds a pattern. That pattern is leadership culture, and it decides how much the team can carry when the market gets loud.

The most dangerous moment in an early team is not when a competitor raises a bigger round. It is when small disappointments start to feel normal. A late reply here. A postponed one on one there. A deadline that slides without a conversation. Leaders tell themselves we are protecting the team from worry. In reality we are teaching people that hard truths live in private. Once that lesson lands, your best talent will stop bringing you early signal. By the time you hear the real issue, you have already lost time and trust.

In Malaysia and Singapore, I meet many founders who grew up in systems where respect for hierarchy is strong. That is not a weakness. It can create focus and reduce noise. The cost shows up when hierarchy is used as a shield. A junior product manager points out that the analytics event names do not match the spec, but the lead dismisses it because a senior investor is visiting on Friday. In Riyadh, a brilliant designer told me she learned to stop offering critique because the founder would take it as a challenge to authority. She was not trying to win. She was trying to protect the customer experience. Leadership culture is tested right there. Do you reward the person who sees the crack, or do you reward the person who keeps the surface smooth.

I have also seen the opposite mistake. A founder in Jakarta told the team that everyone is a leader. It sounded empowering. It also meant no one owned hard calls. Meetings ran long. Decisions got revisited three times. People grew resentful because alignment had become a permanent project. In the name of empowerment, the company taught people to wait for a consensus that never arrived. Leadership culture is not everyone deciding everything. It is everyone knowing who decides what, how input is taken, and how a decision gets reviewed later without drama.

So what creates a healthy pattern. Start with ownership that can survive a bad week. If a decision is yours, it remains yours even when the founder has a new idea on Monday night. If the team needs to pivot, say it clearly and say why. When I finally learned to write a two line decision note after big calls, arguments dropped by half. One sentence on what changed. One sentence on what evidence would make us change again. People do not need constant certainty. They need to know how certainty is earned and how it will be updated.

Next, design your feedback rituals like you design your product. In our second company, we ran a simple Thursday loop across Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Jeddah. Each manager answered three short prompts before lunch. What decision did I make this week. What signal changed my mind. What is one uncomfortable risk I am watching. We read them without commentary. On Friday, we picked one item to unpack for twenty minutes. No slide deck. No blame. Within a month, junior managers stopped waiting for permission to share early data. Within a quarter, we were catching failure patterns before they reached customers. We did not invent a new tool. We built a habit that told the truth faster.

Founders ask me if leadership culture should be founder led or team led. My answer is both, but in sequence. In the earliest stage, the founder sets the first rules. Not just values, but enforcement. We will not launch without QA sign off. We will never discuss compensation in public channels. We will question decisions, not dignity. Later, the team should shape the rituals that keep those rules alive. In Saudi accelerators, I have seen teams write their own short list of non negotiables tied to local norms. Prayer times are respected. Family obligations are not an excuse, but they are a known variable in scheduling. This is not cosmetic. It is how you keep people whole without sacrificing delivery.

Another hard truth. Too many founders outsource leadership to tools. OKRs, stand ups, and Slack etiquette are useful, but they cannot carry the weight of trust. If your team does not understand your threshold for risk, no template will save you. If a crisis hits and your instinct is to go quiet, no dashboard will make people feel safe. In Southeast Asia, where cross border teams are now common, silence is misread quickly. A Singapore engineer may assume silence means approval. A Penang teammate may read it as polite disagreement. A Riyadh manager may see it as a signal to escalate privately. A leader’s job is to standardize the meaning of silence. If it means I am still deciding, say so. If it means no, say so.

There is also the small matter of role clarity. Young companies confuse function with ownership. The best salesperson becomes the sales lead, but no one defines what the lead owns that the salesperson did not. The founder still negotiates final discounts. Finance still edits quotas. Suddenly the new lead has a title with no authority and a calendar full of cleanup. Leadership culture cracks where authority is implied but not granted. When you promote someone, write down two sentences. What can this person now decide without asking. What must this person now escalate without delay. Do this in public. Ambiguity is the seed of politics.

Let us talk about accountability without theatrics. Many founders swing between two extremes. Either we avoid hard conversations because team harmony feels fragile, or we perform accountability in public to look strong. Neither builds a stable culture. The middle path is simple. Catch misses early, set a clear standard, and explain the cost of another miss. One Jakarta customer success lead taught me a gentle practice that worked. She would say, Here is the effect on the customer. Here is what I need from you next time. Then she would ask, What did I do that made this harder for you. The last question prevents blame from hardening. It reminds both sides that the system is shared.

Some readers will ask about hiring for culture. Yes, hire for it. But do not pretend you can detect it in a one hour interview. People can say the right words about ownership, yet fold under pressure if your environment punishes honesty. Others may look blunt in an interview, yet become your most loyal operators once they feel safe to push back. Hiring is fifty percent selection and fifty percent conditions. Build conditions that reward the behavior you want. A quiet person who documents decisions and keeps promises can become a pillar if the system values those habits.

Here is the moment of clarity I wish I had earlier. Culture is not a mood that emerges. It is a set of decisions you make visible and repeat. It shows up in who gets promoted, which edges you sand off for speed, and how you handle truth that arrives at an inconvenient time. The phrase leadership culture can sound soft. In reality it is hard math. It affects costs when rework becomes normal. It affects time to market when decisions cycle in private chats. It affects retention when your best people feel they must leave to protect their standards.

If you are a first time founder in Kuala Lumpur or Singapore, or a new GM taking over a team in Riyadh, start small and start today. Choose one decision area that creates friction. Pricing approvals. Incident response. Holiday scheduling. Write the rules. Who decides. What input is required. How to overturn a decision later without shame. Share it. Run it for four weeks. Review it with the team. Keep the parts that reduce drag and make people braver. Replace the parts that create side effects. You will feel the company breathe.

Leadership culture is important because it is the only thing that compounds faster than headcount. It turns random speed into repeatable velocity. It turns talented individuals into a team that can be trusted when you are not in the room. And it turns your values into working rules that survive a bad quarter. If your culture depends on your presence, it is not culture. It is dependency. Build something sturdier. Your future hires will thank you, and your current team will stop guessing what good looks like.