In boardrooms and family firms, culture proves itself not in ease but in strain, say these business leaders

In annual reports and strategy decks, culture is often described in pastel words — inclusivity, collaboration, innovation — as though repeating the language is enough to conjure the reality. But culture is not visible in times of ease.

Culture reveals its proper form only under strain. It is the round of lay-offs that forces leaders to explain why some will stay and others must go. It is the boardroom fracture that slows strategy to a crawl.

It is the family business that has endured for four decades, but trembles at the moment of succession. In each case, the slogan falls away. What remains is the test of leadership.

Most cultural failures begin in the same place: at the top. Jean-Michel Wu, who left corporate search to found the consultancy Tripitakka, has spent his career observing the human weather of executive teams. His diagnosis is blunt: “One of the biggest cultural challenges I have seen is misalignment at the leadership level.”

The forms of misalignment vary, but their effects compound. Sometimes senior leaders avoid difficult conversations. Other times, a dominant figure fills the vacuum and drives decisions unilaterally. “That kind of unilateral momentum might feel exciting at first, but it often ends in breakdown,” Wu says.

The moment of truth

When crisis arrives — and it always does — the real culture emerges. Helen Snowball, chief people officer at PropertyGuru, has seen how transformation exposes everything that has been hiding beneath the surface. “Like many organisations, over the past couple of years, PropertyGuru has made the right but difficult decision to close operationally non-scalable and non-profitable businesses, impacting the employment of some Gurus,” she says.

The decision may have been sound, even necessary, but Snowball understands what others miss: execution under pressure is where values prove themselves real or fictional. “People will not remember the ‘what’ you do; they will remember the ‘how’ you do it. It’s easy to be a values-based leader during the good times, but the best leaders are those who stick to their values during the challenging times too.”

This insight cuts to the heart of why so many organisations fail their cultural tests. They mistake the announcement for the implementation. But employees have longer memories than leaders assume.

They will forget the specific rationale for shutting a business unit. Still, they will remember whether they were treated with dignity, whether leaders showed up with care, and whether the promises of the company’s values held steady when they were most difficult to keep.

Scaling without fracturing

And as organisations grow beyond the intimate scale where everyone knows everyone else, culture faces new forms of stress. The challenge is no longer just maintaining authenticity under pressure, but maintaining coherence across distance and difference.

Rodney Kinchington, managing director for Asia-Pacific, Japan and Greater China at BT International, leads across geographies where culture cannot be cut and pasted.

“The biggest challenge has been balancing global standards with local realities. Inclusion looks different in every market, and the tension often comes from ensuring consistency without ignoring context.”

This is where many global organisations stumble, believing that culture can be exported like a product manual. But Kinchington has learned that such neatness is fiction. In Singapore, the issues may be hybrid work and gender-neutral job descriptions; in India, flexible policies to close attrition gaps; in Australia, partnerships that challenge perceptions in cybersecurity. Each context demands a different touch while serving the same principle.

His solution requires a type of disciplined flexibility: “Building a culture of Inclusion isn’t a one-size-fits-all programme. It’s a principle that requires adaptation and humility.” Values must remain firm — inclusion as an imperative, not an option — but their delivery must bend to the grain of local culture.

Without that flexibility, global ideals risk becoming empty gestures imposed from distant headquarters. With it, inclusion becomes not just a policy, but a lived reality that earns trust across cultures.

The ultimate test

If global organisations wrestle with consistency across distance, family businesses face the most intimate test of all: whether culture can survive the founder. For Dennis Chua, founder of Timah Partners, succession represents the ultimate measure of whether culture was built into the organisation or remained dependent on a single person.

The difficulty is not simply financial. “The difference between a transaction and a succession is that the outgoing owner is willing to lend his reputation to you as the new owner,” Chua explains.

That act of lending is personal and perilous. It involves staff who have been with the company for decades, customers who have traded on trust, and friends who have invested not for profit but for loyalty.

This reveals succession as fundamentally a cultural act. A founder who has spent forty years building a business discovers that the business’s future depends not on its balance sheet but on its capacity to inspire continued faith.

Chua’s solution is to cultivate leaders capable of earning that faith: “Followership is followership, is followership. It’s not a real word — but it is. It means what it sounds like. Can you get people from all walks of life to want to follow you?”

Here, culture proves whether it was ever more than the founder’s personality projected outward. A business sold without trust is merely a transaction. A business entrusted to someone who can earn followership is a true succession — culture passing from one generation to the next, tested and proven transferable.

What endures

These perspectives reveal culture’s essential nature: it is not what organisations claim about themselves, but what they prove when proving becomes difficult. Wu shows that culture lives or dies in private moments between leaders.

Snowball demonstrates that culture is remembered in implementation, in the care taken when care is most expensive. Kinchington proves that authentic culture can bend without breaking. Chua reveals that culture’s ultimate test is transferability.

What unites them is the rejection of culture as performance. Culture is not the easy consensus of posters or campaigns. It is what remains when every other explanation has been stripped away by pressure.

It is less about what leaders say than about what their people remember when the crisis has passed. Culture is forged in the crucible because that is the only place where it can be proven real.

Organisations that understand this prepares differently, lead differently, and endure differently. They know that culture is not what they hope to be, but what they prove to be when they have no choice but to show who they really are.