When organizations talk about culture, they often focus on company-wide values, executive messaging, or mission statements. But while these elements matter, they do not define what it actually feels like to work at your company day to day.

The people who shape that experience most are mid-level and functional leaders.

Culture Is Built in the Middle

Whether you call them “leaders of leaders” or functional managers, mid-level leaders play a pivotal role in shaping culture where it matters most — in the everyday rhythms of team meetings, feedback conversations, and decision-making moments.

These leaders set the tone not through vision statements but through coaching, modeling, and prioritizing behaviors. They often determine:

• What gets rewarded or ignored

• How decisions are communicated

• Whether team members feel seen, supported, and trusted

• How aligned the team is to broader company priorities

That is why investing in their development is not just about building leadership capability. It is about intentionally shaping your leadership culture.

Leadership Culture vs. Organizational Culture

It is easy to blur the line between company culture and leadership culture, but they are not the same.

• Organizational culture is the broader environment, including your mission, values, and brand identity.

• Leadership culture lives within functions and departments. It is how people lead and are led every day.

A healthy leadership culture requires more than frameworks or competency models. It calls for leaders who understand how their behaviors cascade, and who balance people leadership with operational results.

Within leadership development, we often see mid-level leaders fall into one of two common traps. Some focus so heavily on delivering results that they lose sight of the people doing the work, leading to burnout and disengagement. Others lean too far into team harmony, avoiding hard conversations and sacrificing accountability in the process.

The goal is not to compromise between the two. It is to optimize for both. The best culture shapers drive high performance while creating high engagement. They hold standards, give feedback, and coach others to grow while staying aligned to business goals.

What Culture Shift Looks Like in Action

One common shift we have seen across organizations is a stronger coaching culture within functional teams. After going through our business simulations, leaders often come away with a new point of view. They realize that their job is not to solve problems but to develop problem solvers.

That shift changes how they approach conversations. They ask more questions. They create space for managers to take ownership. They coach instead of direct. Our client, Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult, experienced a similar shift through our simulations, which empowered technical experts to grow into confident leaders and ultimately transformed the way their teams collaborated and took initiative. And over time, that changes the way their teams operate, with more trust, more engagement, and more accountability.

Make Culture a Leadership Practice

At the end of the day, culture is not what is on your website. It is what happens in the thousands of micro-decisions made by your leaders each week.

If you want to shape that culture with intention, start with the leaders who carry it forward every day. Abilitie’s Director Challenge simulation helps these leaders see their cultural impact in real time. It also equips them with the tools to coach, align, and lead more effectively.

Learn more about our Director Challenge and how it helps your leaders become intentional culture shapers.