Every company has a set of values. Most of them were written in a workshop that served very good sandwiches and an infinite ocean of coffee from very expensive machines. The values are typically some variation of integrity, innovation, and collaboration, which are so universal as to be almost meaningless. No company has 'mediocrity', 'rampant narcissism' or 'mild dishonesty' on their list — which tells you everything you need to know about the diagnostic value of a company's 'values'. They describe the company that very few people think they are. They don't describe the company that shows up on a difficult Tuesday when a material deadline is pressing down on them like a tombstone.
Culture isn't what you say in the all-hands meeting. Culture is what you do when the deadline moves, when the budget gets cut, when a team member makes a mistake in public, when someone junior says the uncomfortable thing in the meeting and the quiet in the room becomes deafening. It lives entirely in the edits: what gets approved, what gets killed, what gets praised, and what happens to the person who told the truth that nobody (particularly the management) wanted to hear. Watch those things for a month in any organisation and you'll know more about its culture than anything an extensive internal communications team would be able tell you.
On both agency and client-side I have led and worked with marketing teams across very different sectors, and the variable that predicted team performance more reliably than any other wasn't strategy, or budget, nor talent density. It was whether people felt safe enough to say what they actually thought. Not comfortable. Safe. There is a difference. Comfortable teams avoid friction. Safe teams bring up the uncomfortable thing early on — when addressing it won't come at an even more uncomfortable cost. That safety is built, or destroyed, in small decisions made every day by whoever is in charge. Not in retreats or in team-building exercises that involve falling backwards into someone's arms.
The edit that builds culture is the one where you take a piece of work that is technically correct but not quite right, and instead of approving it because you are hangry or because the meeting is overrunning, you sit down with the person and work through the 'why'. That normally takes no more than half an hour. But that's half an hour that most leaders feel they don't have. And it demonstrates something that a values paragraph cannot: that the standard is real, that it applies to everyone, and that the support to reach a better direction or conclusion is genuine. People remember those half-hours for years. They forget the offsite by the following Friday.
The inverse is also true. The edit that immeasurably damages a company's culture is the one where the leader approves work they know is not good enough because challenging it feels like too much effort, or because the person who produced it is too senior to hear it, or because the deadline makes honesty inconvenient. That decision takes thirty seconds. It tells the team everything about what the standard actually is, regardless of what the values deck says. And it's the type of behaviour that has had catastrophic results for aviation and resulted in wholesale changes across an entire industry.
There's also the question of who gets to be right. In high-performing teams, being right is not correlated with seniority. The best idea is the best idea, and the person who finds it is celebrated regardless of where they sit. That sounds so stupidly obvious. Yet it's more of a rarity than you might think. Most organisations, when you watch them honestly, reward the confidence with which an idea is delivered, more than the quality of the idea itself. Leaders who correct for that bias, consistently and visibly, build something genuinely different.
If you want to know what a team actually values, don't bother reading their mission statement. Watch what they do at 4pm on a Friday when no one senior is in the room. Watch how they talk about the work when the client or the bosses aren't listening. Watch who gets listened to when it matters. That's the culture. The list of values and paragraph explaining them is what the culture aspires to be, on a good day, when the food ordered in is from a nice cafe and the coffee is abundant. Everything else is the actual job.
