Every organisation has a document somewhere describing its values. Almost none of them describe the actual culture. The real culture is a far simpler thing: it is the worst behaviour that the most senior person in the room walks past without comment. That is the line. Everything above it is encouraged and everything below it is, in practice, permitted, whatever the poster in the corridor says.

The mechanism is almost mechanical once you look for it. Someone misses a deadline and nothing is said. Someone speaks dismissively to a junior colleague in a meeting and the senior people present say nothing, and the lesson is that this is within bounds. Nobody intended to set a norm. But a norm was set, because people calibrate on what actually happens rather than on what is declared, and silence from someone with standing reads unambiguously as endorsement. The more senior you are, the more your silences do this work, which is an uncomfortable thing to realise about your own quiet moments.

The hard part is that the correction almost always has to happen in the moment, and in the moment it is awkward. You have to interrupt the flow, say something mildly uncomfortable, and accept that you may be told you are overreacting. The question to carry around is therefore not whether your standards are high but whether they are enforced, and the evidence is in the things you let pass. So, as a reflection for today: what did you walk past last week? And what did everyone watching learn from it?