Culture and leadership are inextricably linked but who really owns the culture?
Is culture the product of leadership behaviours and the people who live them every day, or do leaders find themselves shaped by the culture they inherit?
The truth is, it’s both and the tension between the two is where many organisations stumble. Leaders may want to be more empowering, but if the prevailing culture rewards control, those behaviours rarely stick.
Equally, a strong organisational culture can outlast a leader, anchoring the business in shared values while leadership evolves. We often see these dynamics play out at the senior level in the work we do: when leadership, culture and people are aligned, organisations thrive; when they pull against one another, patterns of resistance, underperformance, and conflict can take root.
When senior leaders face underperformance, resistance, or recurring conflict, the instinct is often to zero in on an individual. “If only this person could change, everything would run more smoothly.”
But we’ve seen time and again that the issue rarely lives inside one person. It lives in the relationship between the culture and the people operating within it.
Leaders and teams both shape, and are shaped by, the culture around them. A capable director may appear resistant, not because they lack ability, but because the system rewards caution over experimentation. A senior manager may stall, not from laziness, but because unclear priorities or competing pressures pull them in too many directions.
In other words: when culture and leadership patterns evolve, people and teams are better able to thrive. And when people bring new behaviours, they can shift culture in return. It’s not about changing one or the other, but about nurturing the interplay between them.
Why ripple effects matter more than quick fixes
Organisations are dynamic systems. Leadership behaviours ripple outward. The ripple effect isn’t something we’ve invented at Mind Values Leadership, it’s a well-documented phenomenon, sometimes called the butterfly effect. Small shifts in how senior leaders lead can generate significant transformations across the business.
Research suggests the influence of a leader can extend up to three degrees of separation. ‘Three degrees of influence’, a term coined by Christakis & Fowler, shows how behaviours can ripple through a network, not just from a leader to their direct reports, but even two or three layers removed.
In organisational studies, Thomas Sy and colleagues demonstrated that when leaders display a positive mood, it spreads through the team, uplifting morale, coordination and effort across the group. These are empirically grounded signposts of what happens when leadership shifts align with cultural norms and people’s lived experiences.
It’s not hard to see, therefore, that how an executive shows up doesn’t just affect their direct reports, but can shape the climate of the organisation, for colleagues, cross-functional peers, and even the teams two or three layers below.
There’s also evidence of behavioural contagion. If a leader is renowned for managing relationships well, their senior colleagues and direct reports are more likely to excel in the same area. Behaviours don’t just stay put. They cascade.
This is why focusing on the evolving relationship between culture, people and leadership patterns rather than trying to fix individuals is so powerful. Culture is shaped, whether consciously or not, at the level of senior leadership and it continues to evolve through the people who bring it to life.
From fire-fighting to transformation
Too often, organisations call in coaches and leadership development consultants when tensions flare: board-level misalignment, a leadership team caught in unproductive dynamics, or recurring underperformance among senior managers. While we can (and do) help in the moment, the deeper value comes from stepping back to ask:
- What’s really driving this behaviour?
- What patterns of leadership have we unconsciously reinforced?
- How does the system of leadership need to evolve to deliver our strategy?
By looking at the whole picture, we uncover the real blockers. Instead of fire-fighting, senior leaders can focus their energy on reshaping culture, strategy, and ways of working to unlock trust, innovation, and performance across the organisation.
It’s at this point that we often see something bigger start to happen. True, sustained shifts in senior leadership behaviours don’t stay in the boardroom, they ripple outward into the culture, influencing how managers lead, how decisions are made, and how people experience the organisation day to day.
This is why we talk about leadership as a lever for cultural transformation. Change in one leader doesn’t stop there. It radiates, reshaping relationships, ways of working, and ultimately the organisation’s long-term performance and resilience.
If you’re facing recurring issues in your senior leadership or management layers, pause before focusing on the individual. Instead, ask what the ripple effect of leadership is telling you about the dynamic between your people and your culture.
At Mind Values Leadership, we work with senior leaders to reveal these patterns and nurture them into new ways of leading. Through organisational development and leadership team effectiveness work, our role is to help you see the invisible currents shaping your culture and harness them for lasting impact.
Because when leadership behaviours evolve and people and culture evolve with them, the ripple effect can be transformative.