The most influential culture is the culture closest to you.

(Reminder: Culture is not bean bag chairs and free lunch. Culture is a group’s collective behaviors, attitudes, expectations, and artifacts that create pressures to influence an individual’s decision-making and well-being.)

Imagine culture as a sphere. You are always in the middle of that sphere, right in the core.

The core is small and it is close to you. It’s all around you. This core could be your project team, it could be your department at the firm. For small firms, the core may be the whole firm. Whatever cultural elements make up that core are the most influential.

The cultural core is not static though. A shift happens when you get home from work, for instance. You naturally embed into the culture of your family or close friends. It happens when you leave a project team for another team, or when you join a department at another firm.

Here’s why this matters for firm leaders:

Your lived experience of the work culture and the firm’s employees’ lived experience of the work culture may be completely different and yet completely accurate.

You may think it’s great and they think it’s terrible. You’re both right.

You may think it’s robust, they are cynical. You’re both right.

Or, they may be having the best time and you think it needs work. You’re both right.

How can this be?

Because the most influential culture is the closest culture. Our understanding of the firm’s culture is actually our experience of the closest culture. Leaders of people at any level within a firm always create micro-cultures, intentionally or unintentionally. Micro-cultures create the overall experience of the firm in the minds of the team members.

So, what’s the best thing we can do as firm leaders?

Make sure we are constantly embedding the core values, the norms, the practices, the attitudes, and the behaviors we want to see into our leaders of people. This is a process that takes more time, more attention, and more skill than you think. Transmission of cultural architecture, though, is the most important investment you can make as a senior leader.