David Brooks recently offered one of the most impactful descriptions of culture I’ve read in a long time.

He describes culture, in the broadest sense, as a shared way of life.

“Habits. Rituals. Stories. And everything that forms the subjective parts of a person: perceptions, values, emotions, opinions, goals, and desires. The assumptions they carry into every decision.”

Brooks calls it the shared water in which we swim.

Culture isn’t something people opt into. They absorb it — and are absorbed into it.

And in organizations, especially operational ones, that water is created by leadership behavior.

Not intentions. Not values statements. Not what is said.

Just behavior.

We often talk about poor or toxic leadership as if it damages culture. It doesn’t. It builds its own culture — just not a healthy one.

• Dominance-based leadership builds a culture of compliance, fear, and self-protection.

• Control-first leadership builds a culture where people strive for security instead of improvement.

• Certainty-driven leadership builds a culture where people stop bringing problems and start bringing the answers they think leaders want to hear.

Those are not cultural failures. They are cultural outcomes.

Leaders don’t get to decide whether they shape culture. They only decide what kind they shape — and who lives inside it.

People learn culture by watching:

• What happens when bad news is raised

• Whether data is used to learn or to assign blame

• How supervisors are treated when systems break

• Which behaviors are rewarded under pressure

• That’s what determines the temperature of the water.

Edmund Burke understood this long before modern organizations existed. He argued that culture — what he called “manners” — matters more than laws or formal authority because it operates constantly:

“The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in.”

That’s the kind of influence leadership exerts — quietly, continuously, and often unnoticed.

In operations, the culture leaders create doesn’t just shape how people work. It shapes how they show up everywhere else too.

At home. In their communities. In how they approach problems long after the shift ends.

People don’t leave culture at the door when they clock out. They carry it with them.

Which is why culture isn’t a “soft” topic.

It’s a responsibility.

Because leaders aren’t just accountable for results. They’re accountable for the human environment they create — the conditions people must operate within every day.

In our book, They Just Don’t Get It, we talk about the persistent gap between corporate expectations and shop-floor reality.

Strategy is full of goals, ambitions, targets, and intentions. It lives in presentations, dashboards, and quarterly reviews.

But strategy does not execute itself.

Culture is the mechanism that translates strategy into daily behavior.

And because leadership behavior designs that mechanism — intentionally or not — culture becomes one of the clearest reflections of leadership integrity.

• If the culture punishes bad news, strategy turns into theater.

• If the culture rewards heroics, strategy turns into burnout.

• If the culture values compliance over understanding, strategy turns into short-term number chasing.

That’s why the phrase “culture eats strategy for breakfast” always proves true. Not because strategy doesn’t matter, but because culture determines whether strategy ever reaches the floor intact.

The real question isn’t whether culture is shaping execution.

It always is.

The real question is: What kind of culture is translating your strategy into reality —and is that the one you want to live in?