A very common question I’ve received from job candidates over the years is: "What is your company's culture like?"

I've taken two different approaches to answering this question:

The first is to talk about my company's values that our leadership team created, the initiatives we're running that quarter or year around employee engagement or work-life balance, the fun events we do after work, or the employee development initiatives we've invested in.

The second, and much more sincere and accurate, way I've answered this is to take a step back and try to be an impartial observer of my company and talk about what I see every day: trends in the way people behave, how they treat customers, how they treat each other, what the company is good at and what it is bad at, what makes us unique, the sense of mission, and the interesting things that I see inside the company that I don't see in other companies—good and bad.

Often, what I've seen as an objective observer isn't the same as the culture we wanted to create from a top-down perspective.

This is because, at a certain scale, a company's culture stops being what leadership wants it to be and starts becoming the actual, on-the-ground, higher-profile, and consistent behaviors of the broader team. These things very often don't relate at all to work-life balance programs or team outings at the local bowling alley.

These behaviors are directly tied to the high-status people inside your organization—that is, the people you reward and promote. Your teams are watching the behaviors of these people very closely, far more closely than they’re paying attention to any top-down initiative.

If you promote one high-profile salesperson who overpromises and lies about the competition, people will get on board and do the same, or they'll opt out of your company, and that’ll be a part of your culture. If you promote leaders in your company who aren't willing to admit they got something wrong in front of their team, people will emulate that behavior. If leaders don't hold their employees accountable for results, this will spread, and you'll have a culture that isn't accountable.

This is rooted in social learning theory and a concept called “status signaling,” where people learn the optimal way to behave by watching and emulating others with higher internal professional status. In my experience, this is an extremely powerful force that drives culture more than any other aspect.

Quite simply, your culture isn’t driven by what you say it is or what you want it to be; more than anything, it’s driven by the values and behaviors of those that you reward and promote. Do so carefully.