School Leaders Shape Culture More Than They Realize

Leadership Question

What are people learning about how this school really works from the way we lead it every day?

“Leaders are always teaching the culture. The question is whether the culture is learning what they intended to teach.”
— Dr. Dwan Anthony Jordon

Abstract

School culture is widely recognized as consequential to teaching, learning, educator retention, organizational trust, and school improvement. Yet discussions of cultural leadership often emphasize the deliberate actions leaders take to establish vision, articulate values, strengthen relationships, or implement formal culture-building initiatives. This article advances a complementary argument: school leaders also shape culture through the accumulated meaning employees, students, and families assign to their ordinary behavior. What leaders consistently notice, how they respond to mistakes and disagreement, what they reward, what they tolerate, how they exercise accountability, who receives access to opportunity, and what they model under pressure become organizational signals from which people infer how the institution actually works.

Drawing on research in educational leadership, organizational culture, sensemaking, psychological safety, organizational support, procedural justice, and continuous improvement, the article introduces Cultural Instruction as a conceptual framework for examining how repeated leadership behavior becomes organizational meaning. The framework identifies six interrelated forms of cultural instruction: Attention, Response, Reinforcement, Accountability, Access, and Modeling. These mechanisms are situated within a broader process through which repeated leadership signals are interpreted collectively, become expectations and norms, and ultimately contribute to organizational culture. The article further introduces the concept of Cultural Coherence, defined as the degree of alignment between an institution’s espoused values and the leadership patterns people repeatedly experience.

The argument is informed by findings from the author’s 2025 Dissertation of Practice examining mentorship, belonging, and retention among Black male educators in a specialized school setting. Those findings illustrate both the possibilities and limitations of leader-directed cultural intervention: relational belonging and recognition can improve while institutional voice, advancement, trust, and perceptions of fairness remain uneven. The article concludes that school leaders are not the sole authors of school culture, but their positional authority gives their everyday behavior disproportionate interpretive weight. Developing more equitable and sustainable schools therefore requires leaders to examine not only the culture they intend to create, but the culture their repeated actions are actually teaching.

Keywords: school leadership, organizational culture, school climate, principal leadership, belonging, psychological safety, organizational support, educator retention, sensemaking, equity, improvement science