Every Organization Has Two Cultures: The One It Declares and the One It Permits

What happens when leadership isn't in the room? What does that reveal about your culture?

There is the culture we say we have. And then there is the culture revealed when no one from leadership is in the room.

I've spent much of my professional life helping leaders close the distance between the two. And it isn't lost on me that the journey that led me to this work began at the very institution now at the center of a global conversation about culture: Cornell University.

I am a proud graduate of Cornell's School of Hotel Administration. What I learned there helped shape the way I understand hospitality, organizations, leadership and, most importantly, the people who bring them to life. That education began a professional journey that, decades later, has evolved into helping multi-unit hospitality organizations intentionally cultivate cultures capable of scaling across locations, brands, states and thousands of people.

And now, painfully, that journey has brought me full circle.

The young woman at the center of the Cornell Seven case was also a student at the Hotel School. That detail has stayed with me. I can't help but imagine her walking through the same buildings I walked through, sitting in the same classrooms where I began learning about this industry, preparing for her own future in hospitality.

And as I've watched her story unfold, I've found myself thinking about the young woman I was when I walked that same campus decades ago.

I remember largely avoiding fraternity houses and parties because, even then, young women understood there were environments in which we needed to be careful. Looking back, what strikes me now isn't that I made that calculation. It's that I had learned to accept having to make it at all.

Why should a young woman ever have to calculate whether she will be safe simply because she accepts an invitation, enters a room or trusts someone she believes is a friend?

She shouldn't.

We should be able to expect safety from one another—and when that trust is violated, we should be able to trust the institutions responsible for our community to protect us, take us seriously and uphold their values through meaningful accountability.

Perhaps that's what feels most unsettling to me now: recognizing how easily we can normalize the responsibility of navigating an unhealthy culture rather than asking why we have allowed that culture to exist in the first place.

What has emerged from the Cornell Seven case is reprehensible and heartbreaking. But as I've watched this conversation unfold, I've found myself looking at it through the lens of the work Cornell ultimately helped prepare me to do.

Because as painful as it is for me to see my alma mater at the center of this conversation, this is not simply a Cornell problem. If it were, it would almost be easier.

This did not emerge in a vacuum.

Fraternities do not exist outside the culture that surrounds them. Universities do not exist outside it. Neither do businesses, governments, families or any other collection of human beings.

Misogyny, entitlement and the abuse of power become systemic in precisely the same way every other cultural norm does: behaviors are modeled, repeated, rewarded, excused or left unchallenged until eventually, a group learns what is acceptable.

That's how culture works. And that's why leadership matters.

Culture Is What Happens When Leadership Isn't in the Room

The truest test of an organization's culture isn't what people say when the CEO walks through the door. It's what people believe they're permitted to do when the CEO isn't there.

It's what happens behind closed doors: what people laugh at, what they challenge, what they ignore, what they report, what they protect, who they protect, and what they're willing to risk their own belonging to stand against.

Leadership cannot control every decision every person makes. But leadership can establish what a community stands for. It can define the values that govern behavior, model and reinforce them, develop leaders capable of protecting them, reward behavior that reflects them, and make unmistakably clear what happens when someone violates them.

Because every exception becomes instruction.

When status excuses behavior, the culture learns that status matters more than standards. When performance excuses behavior, the culture learns that results matter more than values. When belonging requires silence, the culture learns that protecting the group matters more than protecting one another. When reputation becomes more important than accountability, the culture learns that appearances matter more than integrity.

But the opposite is equally true.

When someone challenges behavior that violates the group's values, even when doing so is uncomfortable, the culture learns. When a leader holds a high performer accountable, even when losing that person will hurt, the culture learns. When someone with less power is protected rather than silenced, the culture learns. And when leadership chooses its values even when living them is costly, inconvenient or painful, the culture learns then, too.

Everything teaches culture.

Core Values Aren't Words. They're Guardrails.

This is one of the reasons I have become so passionate about the role core values play in the organizations we help build. Values should never be words chosen for a wall. They are behavioral infrastructure.

Purpose answers why we're here. Vision answers where we're going. Core values answer how we've agreed to behave on the way there.

And leadership is responsible for protecting those agreements.

In the organizations my team and I support, we spend significant time establishing this foundation because sustainable scalability depends upon it. When an organization has ten people, a founder can influence almost every interaction. At one hundred people, that's harder. At one thousand, it's impossible.

Across dozens or hundreds of locations, perhaps several brands and multiple states or countries, culture can no longer depend upon proximity to the founder. It has to live in the people.

The purpose has to live in them. The vision has to live in them. The values have to influence their decisions. And leaders at every level have to know how to cultivate and protect that culture in others.

That's when values stop being statements and become a system. That's when culture becomes scalable.

And that's when you know you've cultivated something real: people protect the culture even when no one is watching.

The Culture We Declare vs. The Culture We Permit

Every organization has both.

There is the culture described in the mission statement, the employee handbook, the university code, the annual meeting and the beautifully produced values presentation. And then there is the culture people actually experience.

Sometimes the two are beautifully aligned. Sometimes there is a devastating distance between them.

That distance is where leadership has work to do, because culture isn't defined only by the behavior we encourage. It's also defined by the behavior we're willing to confront.

And this is why what is happening at Cornell should matter far beyond Cornell.

As painful as it is to see my university occupying the headlines, Cornell is not uniquely capable of producing a cultural crisis. The institution under the microscope today could have been another university. The specific human system could have been another fraternity. The broader failures we're being forced to examine do not begin or end on a college campus.

They exist wherever power, belonging, status and silence are allowed to become more important than the values a group claims to hold.

Cornell happens to be under the microscope right now.

The rest of us should resist the temptation to simply point at it. We should use the microscope.

What would it reveal inside our own organizations?

Leadership Creates the Conditions

We talk a great deal about culture as though it simply happens. It doesn't. Culture is cultivated—sometimes intentionally, sometimes accidentally, sometimes beautifully and sometimes destructively—but always through repeated human behavior.

Leadership has an outsized influence over which behaviors take root.

That's true inside a restaurant group. It's true inside a hotel company. It's true inside a university. It's true inside a fraternity. And, at a vastly greater and more complicated scale, it's true inside a society.

Every human system communicates what it values through what its leaders model, reward, punish, excuse and permit. Poor leadership doesn't merely fail to correct an unhealthy culture. Over time, it can normalize it.

Strong leadership, however, isn't simply about articulating the right values. It's about having the courage to uphold them when doing so costs something.

Values are easy when they aren't being tested.

They become culture when maintaining them requires courage.

The Question Every Leader Should Be Asking

There is something profoundly full-circle for me about writing this.

Cornell helped begin my professional journey. I once sat in those Hotel School classrooms preparing for a career in hospitality without any idea that the path ahead would eventually lead me here—to work centered on helping leaders intentionally cultivate cultures capable of uniting people around a shared purpose, vision and set of values.

And now, decades later, another young woman from that same school has unintentionally helped ignite a global conversation about the very question my career ultimately led me to study:

How do we create human systems in which our stated values actually govern our behavior?

There is no mission statement powerful enough to do that for us. No poster, handbook, training module or beautifully articulated list of values can create culture on its own.

It requires leadership.

It requires reinforcement and accountability. It requires leaders willing to uphold the standard when doing so is uncomfortable. And eventually, if we've done our job well, it requires a community of people who have internalized those values deeply enough to protect them themselves.

So perhaps every leader—whether responsible for a company, university, team, institution or community—should be asking two questions:

What are the values we say define us?

And then the much harder one:

What would our people say they're actually permitted to do when we're not in the room?

The distance between those two answers is your culture.

And closing that distance may be one of leadership's greatest responsibilities.

Emily Freemond, Founder & Chief Branding Officer I thecultureagency.co