What is organizational culture?
Culture is not values on a wall. It is the behaviour that is rewarded, tolerated and repeated.
Organizational culture is the sum of behaviours that an organization rewards, tolerates and repeats. It is visible in how decisions are made, how disagreement is handled and what happens when someone raises a difficult topic.
Written values describe intention. Culture describes practice. The distance between the two is what people notice most, and it is where cynicism usually starts.
For leadership, this means culture is not a communications project. It is the accumulated result of everyday management decisions: who gets promoted, which behaviour goes uncorrected, and how information moves.