What Are We Teaching Without Knowing It?
Last week, I became a grandfather.
I’ve always carried a long view of time: families, systems, organizations, careers, and the consequences they create over years rather than weeks. But the arrival of a new life is now pulling that view forward with unusual clarity. And it is sharpening a question that was already there:
What are we teaching, without even knowing it?
Not what we intend to teach, and not what we say we value, but what people actually learn by watching how we behave when things are unclear, uncomfortable, or go wrong.
That question applies to families, of course. It applies just as powerfully to organizations. Organizations are not families and shouldn’t pretend to be. Yet they are more revealing because the stakes are clearer, the pressure is explicit, and incentives are often misaligned with stated values.
I’ve come to believe that leadership is less about instruction and more about inheritance.
The Difference Between Instruction and Inheritance
Most leaders spend a great deal of time on instruction. We write principles, publish values, and hold town halls and all-hands meetings. We try to explain what “good” looks like by giving explicit and deliberate instructions.
This is usually well-intentioned.
But inheritance is something else entirely.
Inheritance is what people absorb without being told. It is the behavior they mirror, the risks they avoid, the shortcuts they learn, and the ambiguity they interpret. It is the lessons that remain when no one is watching, or rather, when no one thinks anyone is watching.
Both children and teams learn from this tacit leadership inheritance, and they often internalize the lessons in ways that they can’t express or verbalize clearly.
And, in both families and organizations, leaders often underestimate how much is being learned outside of formal teaching moments.
Everyone Is Always Watching (Especially When You Don’t Notice)
One of the most persistent illusions of leadership is that people are paying attention primarily when you are speaking. They are not.
They are paying attention when:
A mistake is made
A deadline is missed
A customer is unhappy
Pressure rises
Blame is available
Those are the moments when culture is revealed, not described. They are the moments when the leadership inheritance is forged.
In senior roles at Amazon, Warner Bros. Discovery, and elsewhere, I watched leaders who were brilliant communicators but poor teachers. Not because they lacked intelligence or intent, but because their behavior under stress conveyed something very different from what their words said.
They would speak eloquently about trust and ownership, and then publicly reprimand someone for a failure.
They would claim to value learning, and then punish mistakes in front of an audience.
They believed they were teaching accountability, but what they were actually teaching was fear.
Fear Is a Very Effective Teacher
Fear works.
Fear sharpens attention. It increases compliance.
But it also reduces experimentation and discourages risk.
If your goal is short-term error reduction, fear can be remarkably effective, but it will come with a long-term cost.
I encountered leaders who encouraged public reprimands as a deliberate tactic. The justification was usually some version of:
“If we make an example of this, others won’t repeat the mistake.”
And in the narrowest sense, they are right. But what is actually being taught in these moments?
It’s not how to do the work better or how to surface risk earlier. It’s not how to recover intelligently when things go wrong.
What is being taught is:
Don’t be the one who raises the issue
Don’t be the one associated with failure
Don’t speak until you’re certain
Don’t experiment unless success is guaranteed
Fear appears to eliminate mistakes, but it actually just drives them underground.
There are moments when public correction is required: when harm has occurred, when standards must be clarified, when accountability cannot remain private.
The question is not whether correction happens publicly.
The question is whether it is driven by clarity or by ego.
Public Blame Teaches Silence
One of the most damaging lessons a leader can teach is that silence is safer than contribution.
Almost no leader would teach this intentionally, but public blame teaches it very efficiently.
When a leader corrects someone publicly, the visible lesson is not “this behavior is unacceptable.” The lesson is:
“If you are associated with a problem, you will pay a social price.”
Others in the room are not learning the specifics of the error. They are learning how to protect themselves.
They learn:
To speak later, not sooner
To share less context, not more
To frame issues defensively
To wait until certainty replaces judgment
The Alternative: Reward in Public, Correct in Private
My own approach to correcting errors in my team evolved in conscious opposition to the fear-based patterns I observed.
I came to believe, and still do, that:
Rewards and praise should be public
Correction should be private
This is not about being “nice”; it is about being effective.
Public recognition teaches the team:
What the organization values
What good judgment looks like
What behaviors are safe to repeat
Private correction teaches:
That mistakes are survivable
That learning is expected
That dignity matters
If a correction has implications for the broader group, it is still possible, and far more effective, to discuss the issue publicly without attaching blame to a person.
Blame is easy and natural, but it is also lazy leadership.
What People Learned (Without It Being Taught)
Over the course of my career, I never held a class on “how to behave when things go wrong.” I never published a document outlining my philosophy of correction. And yet, people noticed.
They commented, unsolicited, on how I handled failures differently from other leaders. They observed how I reacted when projects slipped, when systems failed, and when judgment calls proved imperfect.
What they learned was not my stated philosophy; it was my default posture.
They learned:
That speaking early was safer than speaking late
That problems were to be surfaced, not hidden
That effort and intent mattered, even when outcomes fell short
They learned this not because I told them, but because I showed them.
And as a senior leader, it is important to accept a simple truth: They are always watching you.
Culture Is What Survives the Leader
The most revealing test of leadership is not what happens while you are present, but what continues after you leave the room, the role, or the organization.
If your influence requires constant reinforcement, it is fragile, and if your values collapse without your presence, they were never embedded.
Culture is not what you enforce; it is what persists. It is what people learn and keep with them after you are gone.
This is shaped much more by inheritance than instruction.
The Cost of Unexamined Teaching
The most dangerous lessons leaders teach are not malicious. They are unconscious.
They often include:
Tolerating poor behavior from high performers
Rewarding urgency over judgment
Praising results without examining processes
Ignoring risk until it materializes
Each of these teaches something powerful, and they are not the lessons we would choose to teach consciously.
A Question Worth Sitting With
So here is the question I find myself returning to. It was relevant long before last week when my grandchild was born, but it is more intense now:
What are we teaching without knowing it?
What lessons are being absorbed, replicated, and passed on quietly?
Those are the lessons that last.
And whether we examine them or not, they are the inheritance we leave behind.