Leadership: Culture Is Built From Habits, Not Announcements

Part Two of this series examined communication as the connective tissue of workplace culture. Part Three turns to leadership and habits that drive change. A leader cannot announce culture into existence. Actions make the difference.

Culture Follows Habits, Not Mandates

Joe Coulombe, founder of the grocery chain Trader Joe’s, built the following leadership approach on an idea from management theorist Peter Drucker. An organization’s culture cannot be changed directly, but the habits of the people within it can be, and culture follows (Coulombe, 2021). Coulombe’s own leadership style put this idea into practice. He built specific habits into the company to protect its culture. Every full-time employee was interviewed every six months to surface and address grievances before they festered. Coulombe learned at Stanford that “employees never organize because of money: they organize because of un-listened-to grievances,” and he credited frequent full-time employee interviews with keeping turnover close to zero for thirty years (Coulombe, 2021, Ch. 3).

Culture Is Also Carried by Leaders Nobody Calls Founders

Trader Joe’s culture is often attributed to Coulombe himself, but his own account resists that simplification. Describing a longtime store supervisor, Frank Kono, who died suddenly in 1985, Coulombe (2021) wrote that “so much of the ‘culture’ of Trader Joe’s stemmed from Frank’s personality. People loved to work for him; he was a great trainer” (p. 193). Kono was not the founder. He trained people with evident care.

Kono’s performance at Trader Joe’s mattered because his personality fostered culture-building well below the executive suite, in consistent daily conduct. A regional manager, shift supervisor, or team lead who trains new staff with genuine attention isn’t a minor contributor to culture. By Coulombe’s (2021) own account, that kind of leader may shape an organization more than the person whose name is on the door.

When Leadership Habits Become Rigid: A Cautionary Case

Habits that once served an organization well can become a liability when circumstances change, and the habits do not. In the final hours before Germany entered the First World War, Kaiser Wilhelm II believed he had found a way to avoid a two-front war: mobilize against Russia only and leave the French border quiet. He presented this to his chief of staff, General Helmuth von Moltke, expecting agreement. Moltke’s mobilization plan, refined for the better part of a decade, moved two million men, their equipment, and their transport on a fixed schedule, and Moltke refused the Kaiser’s order outright (Tuchman, 1962).

The deployment was not physically impossible to alter. It became psychologically impossible to alter because the habit of committing to a single fixed plan had hardened over a decade into an identity the leadership could no longer question. An entire national leadership apparatus, confronted with new information that might have changed the outcome, found itself unable to act on it, not for lack of options, but for lack of a habit of reconsidering them. For an organization far removed from questions of war and mobilization, this transferable caution holds: a leadership habit rigid enough to resist pausing, questioning, or reversal when new information arrives has stopped serving the people who rely on it (Tuchman, 1962).

Practical Habits for Leaders

1. Treat culture change as a habit change. Start by identifying one or two specific, repeatable behaviors to practice.
2. Set direction clearly and decisively, then support the people carrying it out. Coulombe (2021) modeled this directly, pairing centralized decision-making with visible reliance on the people carrying out his decisions. Stay present. Help your people thrive.
3. Don’t forget to train the trainer. Invest in training for everyone within your organization. Culture is often influenced by whoever trains new hires and what the trainees do with the knowledge gained.
4. Build a checkpoint into any plan significant enough to be hard to reverse, so leadership can adapt when new information arrives, before, rather than after, the point of no return.