Culture reveals what leadership tolerates.

Public debate frequently highlights organisational symptoms: absenteeism, disengagement, silent attrition.

They are often treated as operational matters. Sometimes as economic concerns. Rarely as indicators of governance quality.

Yet recurring organisational patterns are never accidental. They reflect the conditions an institution has allowed to consolidate over time. And those conditions are shaped at the top.

Boards dedicate significant attention to strategy, performance, and risk exposure. Frameworks are reviewed. Controls are strengthened. Targets are monitored.

At the same time, culture is frequently positioned as an intangible dimension -important, certainly-but peripheral to formal oversight. Something to be encouraged, communicated, or supported. Less often something to be examined as a structural variable.

This distinction matters. Because culture is not what an organisation declares. It is what leadership consistently tolerates.

What behaviours remain unchallenged?

What inconsistencies between declared strategy and daily practice are normalised?

Where is accountability softened in the name of stability?

Which performance thresholds gradually erode without explicit decision?

What leadership tolerates becomes institutional permission.

From a governance perspective, this is not a “people issue.” It is a question of institutional maturity.

Oversight is often understood as control. In mature governance, oversight is also stewardship. Stewardship requires attention not only to outcomes, but to the conditions that make those outcomes sustainable.

When cultural drift is left outside the governance lens, blind spots emerge quietly. Strategy fragments at execution level. Responsibility becomes diffused. Risk accumulates in behaviours long before it appears in financial statements.

Conversely, when Boards integrate culture into their understanding of risk and direction, conversations evolve. They move from reacting to symptoms, to examining systemic patterns. From launching initiatives to clarifying expectations. From addressing isolated issues to recalibrating standards.

A growth-oriented institution -in its most mature form- is not one that simply pursues expansion. It is one that remains capable of questioning its own normalised assumptions.

Growth mindset, translated into governance, means recognising that culture is neither fixed nor incidental. It is continuously shaped by what is rewarded, ignored, corrected, or silently accepted.

The quality of governance is ultimately revealed not in times of stability, but in the willingness to reconsider what the organisation has come to accept as normal. Sustainable growth is decided there.

By Miriam Ponce

Director Corporate Culture & Governance