Leading Is Creating
by Pamela Coleman
July 2025
All leaders create: products and services, customer networks, operational processes, approaches to attract top talent, marketing strategies, and engineering solutions. Sometimes, leaders take existing building blocks and rearrange them, using their expertise to get better outcomes. Leaders activate their organizations with solutions rooted in their technical backgrounds. At the same time, they create cultural standards that define who an organization is and how it operates.
Leaders’ actions, behaviors, and decisions serve as a roadmap for employees. This roadmap is an essential part of organizational learning. Significant changes in how an organization functions, like Musk’s Twitter takeover or Zuckerberg’s recent Meta announcement, show how leaders’ choices impact the entire team. In both cases, the decision to remove third-party content moderation rippled through the organizations. It signaled to the team how their behavior must adjust to the new operational direction. Decisions trigger action and reaction across networks, and they create...
Leaders establish the operating norms that shape culture. With a clear cultural blueprint, leaders have standards within which to create. This is like any field that relies on constructs, such as various engineering disciplines. These constructs set the boundaries of the sandbox and facilitate creativity. Without a cultural framework, each leader is ‘free’ to determine what culture best suits their area. There are no limits on the behavioral sandbox, and this absence can lead to major conflicts within an organization.
The cultural coherence model walks leaders and organizations through the process of defining their culture’s organizing framework. The model requires the CEO and others to define a cultural vision, which energizes the strategic mission and vision. Without this initial step, other cultural initiatives become less effective and vulnerable to business stressors.
To create a culture’s organizing framework, the team must first agree on what culture is. Culture is not free ice cream in the café or a fancy coffee bar. These are perks – but they do not define culture. Culture is determined by how well you uphold the things you claim to stand for. Leaders create and reinforce culture through their actions and decisions.
Every day, leaders create. They solve, prioritize, brainstorm, innovate, and plan. Culture is part of what leaders are creating. Employees follow their leaders, adding to cultural alchemy. If leaders act independently, assuming they understand the cultural direction, each team ends up with a culture unique to it. Will differing and disconnected cultural pockets serve as rocket fuel for your organization’s culture?
What are you creating today?
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