A few weeks ago, I wrote about the difference between instruction and inheritance in leadership. The response told me the idea landed, but I realized I’d written the principled version of this idea, not the honest one. This is the honest one.
I once worked for a leader who gave excellent speeches about trust.
He talked about psychological safety in all-hands meetings and referenced all the best research. He told teams they could disagree openly, that failure was part of learning, and that no one would be punished for taking smart risks.
Then, in a staff meeting the following week, a director flagged a concern about an upcoming launch: a real concern, grounded in data. The response was swift. Not angry, exactly, but more like dismissive. There was a tightening of the jaw and a pivot to the next topic. Then, a follow-up Slack message to someone else asking whether that director “was on board.”
No one was fired or publicly corrected, but a lesson was delivered... and everyone in that room absorbed it instantly.
The lesson was: Don’t be the one who slows things down.
That director never raised another flag in a group setting. Neither did anyone else.
Here is the question I keep returning to, the one I believe sits at the center of what it means to lead:
What are we teaching... without realizing it?
Not what we say in our vision documents, what we put on slides, or what we tell ourselves about how we lead.
But what are people actually learning from watching us?
Most leadership development focuses on instruction: How to give feedback, how to run a meeting, how to communicate a strategy, etc. These are skills, and they matter. But instruction is the surface layer of leadership, while beneath it is something far more durable: Inheritance.
People don’t primarily learn from what leaders tell them to do. They learn from what leaders tolerate, reward, and ignore. They learn from how leaders respond under pressure and behave when no spotlight is present.
This is cultural inheritance, and it has an effect whether you manage it or not.
For example, a leader who checks their phone during one-on-ones is teaching something about attention, regardless of what their open-door policy says.
And a leader who praises bold ideas in public but funds only safe ones in private is teaching something about risk, regardless of the innovation strategy deck.
And a leader who says “bring me problems early”, but visibly tightens when someone does, is teaching something about honesty, regardless of their stated values.
These signals are small in the moment, but they compound relentlessly over time. They become culture.
I spent years at Amazon, which is an organization that thinks carefully about culture. The Leadership Principles are embedded in hiring, promotion, performance reviews, and daily decision-making. They aren’t just performative. Truly embedding company principles is rare, and when it works, it is genuinely powerful.
But even within that system, the lived culture of any given team was shaped less by the published principles and more by the specific humans leading that team. Two organizations with identical LPs on the wall could feel entirely different to work in because the leaders modeled different things through their daily behavior.
I saw the same pattern at Warner Bros. Discovery, at Eurosport, and at MotorTrend. The stated culture and the inherited culture were often two different things. Not because anyone was lying, but because what we teach unconsciously almost always overwhelms what we teach on purpose.
I want to be specific about how this happens.
Over the course of my career, I worked alongside several senior leaders at Amazon, WBD, and elsewhere who were articulate, strategic, and who genuinely believed they were building cultures of trust. They said the right things in town halls and skip-level meetings, and they were compelling.
But in the rooms that mattered… the business-as-usual staff meetings and operating reviews… the gap between what they preached and what they practiced was tangible.
One would advocate for candor in every public setting, then privately freeze out anyone who delivered a message he didn’t want to hear. Another talked constantly about empowerment but reversed decisions without explanation, teaching the team that autonomy was provisional; granted until it became inconvenient.
The teams around these leaders learned fast. People stopped raising concerns and started managing up instead of managing the work. They optimized for what the leader rewarded, not what drove the best outcomes. They defaulted to alignment rather than honesty. The culture became a performance of the stated values rather than a practice of them.
This hypocrisy was never dramatic. There were no blowups or firings over dissent. It was quieter than that. It was a pattern of micro-signals, repeated hundreds of times, until the team’s behavior fully adapted to what the leader actually valued instead of what they claimed to care about.
I watched this happen a lot, and I felt its effect on teams I cared about. Eventually, I had to ask a hard question: Was I doing some version of this myself?
The honest answer was that I didn’t fully know. That’s the nature of unconscious teaching. The parts of your leadership that most powerfully shape culture are often the parts you can’t see. They are the places where your behavior diverges from your intent. They are, almost by definition, invisible to you.
This realization wasn’t a clean epiphany. It arrived slowly, over the years, as I started paying closer attention to what my teams did when I wasn’t directing them, and asking myself whether what I saw reflected what I thought I’d built.
This is uncomfortable territory for most leaders, because it implies that the culture problems on your team might be the product of your problems.
Not structural issues; not “organizational challenges.” Your issues. Your problems.
If your team avoids conflict, it may be because you once reacted poorly to disagreement…and the team learned.
If your team waits for permission before acting, it may be because you once second-guessed a decision that was within their authority... and the team learned.
If your team over-indexes on optics, it may be because you once rewarded a polished presentation over an honest assessment... and the team learned.
These moments don’t feel like teaching, but they accumulate into a posture that the team adopts as its own.
This posture is inherited while explicit instruction is forgotten. This posture becomes the culture.
There is a version of this idea that slides into blame: that every cultural dysfunction is the leader’s fault. I don’t think that’s quite right either. Organizations are complex systems, and history, incentives, market pressure, and individual personalities all play a role.
But I do think leaders underestimate the degree to which they are the primary signal.
Especially quiet leaders.
Here’s the paradox: quiet leaders tend to believe their restraint speaks for itself. That by not micromanaging, they’re teaching autonomy. Or that by not reacting emotionally, they’re teaching steadiness. Or that by staying out of the spotlight, they’re teaching humility.
Sometimes, that’s exactly what the team learns. But other times the team learns something else entirely. They learn that the leader is disengaged, or that silence means disapproval, or that the absence of visible direction means there is no direction at all.
Quiet restraint only teaches what you intend it to teach when the team has enough context to interpret it correctly. Without that context, your silence is a blank screen, and people will project their own anxieties onto it.
So what do you do with this?
I don’t have a clean guide or framework, because I don’t think this challenge resolves that cleanly. But there are some things I’ve found useful over thirty years of leading teams.
Pay attention to what persists after you speak.
If you’ve communicated something clearly and the team still behaves as though they didn’t hear it, the problem isn’t communication. The problem is that your behavior is sending a different message than your words. Find the gap.
Watch what people do when you’re not in the room.
Not surveillance; observation. When your team makes a decision without you, what do they optimize for? Speed? Safety? Consensus? Optics? Whatever it is, that’s your culture.
Ask yourself the hard version of the question.
Not “what am I teaching?” but “what might someone learn from watching me that I would not want them to learn?” The answer is usually more revealing than any 360 review.
Accept that this is ongoing, not solvable.
Cultural inheritance isn’t a problem to fix; it’s a condition to manage. You will always be teaching something. The only question is whether you’re consistently paying attention to what.
I think about the leaders I described earlier in this essay. I don’t think they knew what they were teaching. They believed that they valued honesty and trust. I think they would have been surprised, or even hurt, to learn what they were actually teaching their teams.
That’s the nature of unconscious teaching. It doesn’t require intent. It only requires an audience. And as a leader, you always have one.
The question I’d leave you with is the one I keep asking myself:
If your team described your leadership, not by what you’ve told them, but by what they’ve absorbed from watching you, what would they say?
And would you recognize it?
