The Quiet Power Behind Culture
Part three of the CEO mindset series: Why culture is the most overlooked (and powerful) lever for Chiefs of Staff.
This is the third post in my CEO Mindset series designed to help Chiefs of Staff operate at the level of their principal. If you missed the earlier ones, you can catch up here:
The CEO Mindset for Chiefs of Staff (Set the Vision)
How CEOs Build the Executive Team (Build the Team)
This week, we’re focused on something every CEO owns whether they want to or not: company culture.
Culture follows the leader
I still think about my first job out of college—FOX Architects in the early 2000s. It wasn’t flashy, but the culture? You felt it. I still talk about it.
We said “work hard / play hard,” and we meant it. Teams pushed hard to win the work and harder to deliver it. People stayed late, helped each other improve and rallied around high standards. I remember senior leaders coaching me on my first client presentation. They gave me talking points when I was nervous and stayed until I felt confident. We had each other’s backs.
That atmosphere didn’t happen by accident. Bob Fox, Sabret Flocos and Jim Allegro shaped it. Bob constantly told me to think bigger and meant it. One year I dressed the three of them in socks for a cheeky marketing campaign and they played along without hesitation. They didn’t take themselves too seriously so neither did we. But we always did the work. They handed out real responsibility and protected the team’s energy like it was sacred. You were expected to take your work seriously but not yourself.
None of that culture was written down. But it showed up in the day-to-day—who got celebrated after a win, who got a second chance when they messed up, who got pulled aside early when something was off. That’s what culture really is: the invisible system behind how decisions get made when no one’s quoting values or mission statements.
Years later, after running my own firm, I realized how rare (and how hard) it is to build that kind of culture. And how easy it is to let the wrong one take shape by accident. Like most founders, I had to learn the hard way: culture isn’t what you say. It’s what you allow. It’s behavior.
That’s why Ben Horowitz’s book What You Do Is Who You Are makes so much sense to me.
What Happens When You’re Not There
Ben Horowitz says it best: “Culture is what your people do when you’re not there.”
Culture is a behavioral system. It’s shaped by what leaders consistently reward, tolerate or correct day after day, moment by moment. It shows up in how people behave under pressure, how they treat one another and how they interpret silence from the top.
See clip here → Ben Horowitz on company culture
In What You Do Is Who You Are, Horowitz drives home that culture is built through example, not intention. He shares memorable stories from prison reform to samurai warriors to Silicon Valley boardrooms, to show how leaders define culture through their actions, not just their aspirations.
What stood out most to me as I re-listened (love a book on tape):
Culture requires constant fine-tuning. It never ends up exactly as you intend
What you think your culture is often isn’t what your team experiences
The clearest view of culture comes from watching new employees then asking them directly about it
Onboarding is where culture either comes to life or falls apart
Most CEOs don’t think about culture until it’s already broken
And maybe the most freeing takeaway of all:
“You don’t have to be perfect, just better than you were yesterday.”
If you only listen to a few chapters, I recommend the following:
Chapter 2: Toussaint Louverture Applied – how to turn principles into actions
Create rules that are memorable and symbolic—big enough to matter, strange enough to stick (shocking rules)
Chapter 5: Shaka Senghor Applied – leading through chaos
First impressions matter. The onboarding process is critical to culture.
Chapter 8: Be Yourself, Design Your Culture
Your culture has to come from who you are, not who you think you should be
Culture can shift faster than you think (good or bad) with actions
Horowitz doesn’t offer slogans. He provides a lens. And if you’re a Chief of Staff, it’s one worth borrowing.
Billy Beane and the Culture of Standards
I’ve always wanted to work a baseball analogy into one of my articles! Here’s my big moment.
Billy Beane had a shocking rule (according to folklore and Hollywood): if you didn’t take the game seriously, you were out. No matter how talented you were. No matter how good your stats looked. If your behavior sent the wrong signal to the team, he’d move you. That’s culture.
In Moneyball, the film based on Beane’s real-life transformation of the Oakland A’s, we see this play out with Jeremy Giambi. Giambi was hitting well. But he was also goofing off in the clubhouse after the team lost. Beane saw that and shut it down. No conversation. No warnings. Just a trade.
See the clip here → Cleaning House (Moneyball scene)
He didn’t do it to punish Giambi. He did it to protect the standard of the A’s. The behavior didn’t align with the culture he was trying to build, so he made a move.
That one decision said more than any all-hands ever could. It made the culture visible. Performance mattered, but mindset mattered more. That’s leadership through action. Not in statements. In behavior.
Where Chiefs of Staff Make Their Mark
Of all the CEO responsibilities, shaping culture is one of the places where a Chief of Staff can make the biggest impact.
Why? Because we see what the CEO doesn’t.
We’re in the rooms they’re not in. We hear the side comments, the hallway chatter, the throwaway Slacks. We see how the CEO’s words get interpreted and how that interpretation drifts over time.
The CEO sees what people want them to see. The Chief of Staff sees what actually happens.
We’re not culture owners but we are culture enablers. We connect the dots between intention and behavior. We help the CEO act in ways that reinforce the culture they want to build, and we help the team stay aligned when the message starts to blur.
This is subtle work. But it’s some of the most important work we do.
What great Chiefs do:
Call out the cracks. They surface misaligned behavior early and directly
Reinforce what’s working. When people show up the right way, they make sure it doesn’t go unnoticed
Tell the truth upstream. They give the CEO a clear picture of what’s really happening, not the polished version
Translate culture into action. They help teams understand what the CEO expects and what that looks like day to day
Protect the tone. They watch the details, the tone in meetings, the hallway vibe, the Slack undercurrent, and steer it back when it slips
Culture isn’t declared. It’s enforced.
The CEO sets the tone. The Chief of Staff ensures it echoes.