How I Coach Leaders to Create Healthier, Higher-Performing Cultures
A client once joined our call from the front seat of her car, parked in the garage beneath her office. The engine was off, but I could hear the low hum of the ventilation system in the background and the occasional echo of a door slamming somewhere down the concrete corridor. She had arrived early for her next meeting and, as she put it, needed “five minutes to breathe before I go back upstairs.”
Her team was stretched thin. Two key people had left in the same quarter. A board presentation was coming up. Slack had become a stream of late-night pings, and every new message seemed to carry one more problem that needed her attention. She told me she felt like the emotional barometer for the whole organization: if she showed strain, people got nervous; if she acted too calm, they assumed she was missing the seriousness of the moment. Then she looked out through the windshield and said, “I can’t fix everything. But I also know people are looking to me for something.”
This has stayed with me because it captures the reality many leaders are living in right now. Things feel stressful and unsettled, and most leaders are carrying far more than what shows up on their calendars. I’m sure you know this, but you can’t personally change everything that’s wrong in the world.
But if you’re a leader, you do have real influence over the culture inside your organization. You can help create an environment where people feel respected, supported, clear on expectations, and able to do their best work. In times like these, this is a leadership responsibility.
In my coaching work, I often remind leaders that culture is not a side initiative, a branding exercise, or a set of aspirational values hanging on a wall. Culture is how people experience the organization every day and it shows up in how decisions are made, how conflict is handled, who gets heard, what gets rewarded, and whether people leave conversations feeling energized or quietly depleted.
As I’m sure we’ve all experienced, stress has a way of making culture more visible. When trust is low, uncertainty amplifies it and when communication is inconsistent, people fill in the gaps with assumptions. When leaders avoid difficult conversations, the cost gets paid across the organization in disengagement, politics, confusion, and silence. That is why so much of my work with leaders focuses on strengthening culture through behavior, clarity, and accountability rather than slogans alone.
Culture work begins with leadership behavior
When leaders tell me they want to improve culture, they often start by asking what program they should launch, what values language they should refresh, or what message they should send to the organization. I understand the instinct, but I usually begin somewhere else. Before culture can improve in a durable way, leaders have to examine how they themselves are showing up.
Culture is shaped less by intention than by repetition. People pay attention to what leaders consistently do, especially under pressure. If a senior team says it values transparency but communicates selectively, employees notice. If an organization says it wants candor but punishes dissent, people learn very quickly that silence is safer. If leaders say they care about leadership development but reward only output and endurance, that becomes the real culture regardless of what appears on the website or at the annual offsite.
So in coaching, we get concrete. We look at how a leader shows up in high-stakes meetings, how they respond when challenged, how clearly they set expectations, and whether they create more trust or more guardedness in the people around them. These are not abstract leadership questions. They shape retention, collaboration, execution, and the overall emotional tone of the workplace.
Gallup’s research has consistently shown that managers have an outsized impact on employee engagement, which is one reason culture and leadership development are inseparable. A healthier culture does not emerge by accident. It is built, reinforced, and sometimes undermined by leader behavior every day.
I help leaders make culture observable
One of the first things I help leaders do is define culture in behavioral terms. Many organizations say they want more trust, accountability, inclusion, innovation, or candor, but those words can remain frustratingly vague unless they are translated into behaviors people can actually see and practice.
If a team says it values candor, does that mean people can respectfully disagree with a senior executive without being penalized? If accountability matters, are missed commitments and harmful behavior addressed consistently, even when the person involved is influential or high-performing? If inclusion is a priority, whose ideas are still being interrupted, ignored, or filtered out of the conversation?
Culture improves when leaders can answer those questions honestly. It also improves when they are willing to identify not only the behaviors they want more of, but the behaviors they will no longer tolerate. In that sense, culture work is both aspirational and corrective. It is about building something stronger, but it is also about interrupting the patterns that quietly erode trust.
This is where coaching becomes especially practical. I help leaders identify the patterns getting in the way and translate broad cultural goals into day-to-day leadership behavioral norms their teams can recognize and respond to.
I help leaders name what others are avoiding
A surprising amount of culture damage comes from prolonged avoidance. A toxic high performer is protected because they deliver results. Or a leadership team avoids productive conflict and calls it alignment. Burnout goes unaddressed because everyone is too busy to stop and confront what is no longer sustainable.
Communication stays muddy because no one wants to create discomfort.
In coaching, I help leaders strengthen the capacity to name these dynamics directly and skillfully. That does not mean becoming harsher. It means becoming clearer, steadier, and more willing to say what needs to be said. In many organizations, culture begins to improve the moment a leader addresses an issue that everyone else has been privately accommodating.
This is closely tied to psychological safety, which is one of the most important ingredients in a healthy workplace culture. Amy Edmondson’s research has shown that psychological safety supports learning, performance, and speaking up, especially in complex environments where information needs to move quickly and honestly. In my own work, I have seen repeatedly that transformation only happens in a space where people feel safe enough to tell the truth. That safety is not automatic; it must be earned through consistency, listening, and leadership behavior that makes candor possible.
I coach leaders to align culture with business reality
One of the biggest misconceptions about culture work is that it sits apart from performance. In reality, the strongest cultures support better execution because they reduce friction, surface issues earlier, and make it easier for people to work through tension without shutting down.
The goal is not to create a workplace where nobody is ever uncomfortable. The goal is to create an environment where people can perform at a high level without unnecessary dysfunction, fear, or confusion. That is a very different standard, and one I return to often with clients.
In our coaching conversations, we connect culture to real business questions. How are decisions made, and how clear is that process to others? How is feedback delivered, especially when the message is hard to hear? What happens when someone misses the mark? Are leaders building trust across functions, or are they reinforcing silos and politics? Does the team know what good looks like, and do they experience leadership behavior that supports that standard?
Why this work matters to me
This work has been a through-line in my career because I have seen firsthand how much leaders shape the daily experience of work for other people. I have also seen the cost when culture is neglected or treated as a talking point rather than a leadership discipline. Teams become guarded. Communication deteriorates. Conflict turns unproductive or goes underground. Strong people disengage, and organizations pay for it in ways that are both human and operational.
On the other hand, when leaders get culture right, the benefits extend far beyond morale. Teams collaborate more effectively. Difficult conversations happen sooner. Trust deepens. Performance becomes more sustainable. People are better able to contribute because they are not spending as much energy navigating avoidable dysfunction.
I was honored to be recognized by Global Gurus as the #8 expert in the world on organizational culture, and I see that recognition as an affirmation of work I care deeply about: helping leaders create workplaces where people can thrive and organizations can perform.
Final thought
If you’re leading through uncertainty right now, you may not be able to change every external condition creating stress. But you can influence the culture your people experience under your leadership. You can create more clarity, model more respect, address unhealthy patterns sooner, and make it safer for people to speak honestly. You can build a workplace that is both high-performing and human, and that is no small thing.
