How One Unrehearsed Moment Shifted My Company’s Culture

I want to tell you about a chair.

A few months ago, before a company event, I walked into the venue while setup was still happening. Tables needed moving. Chairs needed stacking. The team was doing the work. Nobody asked me to help. There was no reason for me to step in. The task was beneath the title on my business card, and everyone in the room knew it.

So I grabbed a chair and started moving it.

What happened next is the point. People noticed. Not in a loud way. Nobody clapped. But the shift in the room was unmistakable. My chief of staff did the same. Others followed. The energy changed. And later, I overheard someone telling a colleague about it as if it were a remarkable thing.

Moving a chair. That was it.

I have sat through culture workshops. I have reviewed values decks that took consultants months to produce. None of those things traveled through my organization the way that chair did.

The culture industry’s dirty secret

U.S. companies spent $102.8 billion on corporate training in 2025. That number has climbed for years. Leadership development, values alignment, culture workshops, onboarding programs. An entire industry has been built around the idea that you can teach people what a company stands for.

And yet, according to McKinsey, roughly 70% of organizational transformation efforts fail. Gallup research found that only 2 in 10 U.S. employees feel strongly connected to their organization’s culture. These figures highlight just how failure-prone cultural goals remain in business today.

The money is not the problem. The model is.

Most culture programs are built on the assumption that culture is something you communicate. Write the values. Train to the values. Reward alignment with the values. It is a logical framework. But people do not learn culture by reading about it. They learn it by watching the person at the top of the room.

Why unscripted beats scripted every time

There is another layer to this that I think gets missed in most leadership conversations: the element of surprise.

A speech at an all-hands meeting is expected. A value poster is expected. An email from the CEO about “what we stand for” is so expected that most employees skim it or skip it entirely. Expected behavior does not register as information — even good behavior. It is background noise.

Unexpected behavior is entirely different. When a CEO picks up trash in the parking lot, helps carry boxes on moving day or admits in front of the whole team that they got something wrong, that moment pierces through. It is anomalous. The brain flags anomalies for retention.

Think about the stories you tell about leaders you have worked with. I would bet that almost none of them are about a great PowerPoint presentation someone gave. The stories that stick, the ones people repeat years later, are almost always about a moment when a leader did something nobody expected. For better or for worse.

The stories your team is already telling about you

Here is the part most leaders do not want to sit with: The stories are already being told. Right now. Today. Your team has an informal oral history of your company, and it is far more influential than anything in your employee handbook.

Some of those stories are the ones you want circulating. “Remember when she stayed late to help us ship the product?” “He took the call from a customer himself instead of routing it to support.”

But some are the other kind. “Remember when the VP said that was not their department?” “They talk about transparency, but nobody knew until the press release.”

Both types of stories are being told whether you know it or not. They travel through Slack channels, lunch conversations and exit interviews. They are passed along to new hires by colleagues who are, in effect, giving them a real orientation. Not the official one.

This is your actual values statement. Not the one on the website.

What this actually means for how you lead

I am not suggesting you manufacture spontaneous moments. Performed spontaneity is its own kind of lie, and people can smell it. The point is not to engineer authenticity, it’s to actually be the thing you are asking your team to be.

If you want a culture where people take ownership, you have to be seen taking ownership, especially in low-stakes situations where nobody expects you to. If you want a culture of accountability, you have to say “I got that wrong” out loud, in front of people, before you ask anyone else to do it.

If you want a culture where hierarchy does not make people feel untouchable, you have to move the chair.

There is also a practical implication here for how you allocate your budget. I am not saying don’t invest in training. Learning programs, particularly technical ones, have real value. But if you are pouring money into culture initiatives while the senior team’s behavior tells a different story, you are not solving the problem. You are funding the PR version of a culture that does not actually exist.

Your team is always keeping score

There is a version of the culture conversation that treats employees as passive recipients, people who need to be taught the values and trained into alignment. I think that version gets it exactly backwards.

Your team is not waiting to be told what the culture is. They are watching you to figure it out. They are collecting evidence, comparing it against the official story and drawing conclusions. They are doing this every day, in every meeting, in every moment where they see how you treat someone who has no power to help you.

Culture is not what you write. It is not what you proclaim at the all-hands. It is what you do when the stakes are low, the audience is small and nobody is officially keeping score.

Except your team is always keeping score.

I want to tell you about a chair.

A few months ago, before a company event, I walked into the venue while setup was still happening. Tables needed moving. Chairs needed stacking. The team was doing the work. Nobody asked me to help. There was no reason for me to step in. The task was beneath the title on my business card, and everyone in the room knew it.

So I grabbed a chair and started moving it.