Nobody reads the poster on the wall and decides how to behave.

They watch. They notice what gets rewarded, what gets ignored, who gets held to account and who gets a pass. Then, consciously or not, they calibrate. They absorb the environment around them and let it shape how they operate.

This is how culture actually works. Not through declarations. Through behaviour. And it's never neutral. Every environment is already teaching the people inside it something. The only question is whether you're shaping that deliberately or letting it drift.

Think about the parts of a city that thrive with identity. The neighbourhoods where the food, music, energy, and sense of belonging are unmistakable. Nobody designed that from the top down. It emerged because people with shared values lived their culture openly. They expressed it in everything they did and showed others what it meant to belong there. Over time, the culture attracted more of the right people and filtered out those who didn't fit.

Teams work the same way.

When values are translated into specific, observable behaviours (not abstractions, but actions) they stop belonging to the leader and start belonging to the group. New members absorb standards through observation, not orientation slides.

People self-select. Those who belong stay. Those who don't, move on. The culture sustains itself because it's lived, not just led.

The challenge is in the translation. Saying "we respect each other's time" means nothing on its own. But defining what respect looks like at 9am on a Monday? What accountability sounds like in a difficult conversation? That's where a value becomes a standard. It makes the invisible visible. It gives the group a shared reference point. It removes ambiguity.

If you can't answer those questions with concrete actions, you don't have a culture. You have a slogan.

And this is where culture becomes a genuine competitive advantage. High-performing people want to be around other high-performing people. They want environments where standards are real, where the behaviours match the words. A culture that is genuinely lived becomes magnetic. It attracts the best players, the best staff, the best minds. Like those thriving city neighbourhoods, it builds its own gravity.

The work, then, is environmental design. Defining the behaviours. Building the rituals. Creating the feedback loops that let the group reinforce its own standards. And constantly auditing whether the signals in the environment are congruent with the culture you're building.

Because your standard is never what you preach. Your standard is what you're prepared to walk past.

The people around you are watching. Make sure what they see is what you intend.