Your B2B leadership culture starts with you. All of you in a leadership roles of any kind.
Whether you are the CEO, founder, co-founder, people manager or a division or department leader, you are seen as a person who represents the business. Your behavior, decision-making and personal values signal and showcase every day what is acceptable and what’s not.
Because people want to belong, you attract the kind of people who want to mimic and copy your behavior. The more people behave like you at work, the stronger the leadership culture driven by you becomes. The more authority you have in your workplace, the stronger message your behavior carries.
This is how company cultures are really formed.
Summary of episode 208 B2B Leadership Culture Starts With You (Whether You Like It or Not)
In this episode of the Story-Driven Business podcast, Susanna Rantanen explores the intricate relationship between leadership behavior and organisational culture, particularly in B2B environments.
She emphasises that leadership is not just a role but a reflection of personal values and behaviours that shape the workplace.
Through the lens of behavioral science, she discusses how leaders influence their teams and the importance of self-awareness in leadership practices.
Susanna encourages leaders to reflect on their own behaviors and the stories they tell through their leadership, ultimately impacting employee engagement and organisational success.
Takeaways
- Leadership culture is shaped by individual behaviours.
- People need clarity from their leaders, not just inspiration.
- The way leaders behave sets the tone for the organisation.
- Humans learn by observing the behaviours of others.
- Leadership habits create a collective culture within teams.
- Emotional contagion affects team dynamics and performance.
- Reflection on leadership practices is crucial for growth.
- Leadership is more than a role; it’s a behavioural signal.
- Companies grow when leadership evolves and adapts.
- Self-awareness in leadership can transform organisational culture.
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Episode 208: B2B Leadership Culture Starts With You (Whether You Like It or Not)
I regularly work with senior leaders and I love it very much.
As someone who has worked and collaborated with at least a hundred engineering driven businesses coming from Finland, known as the engineering country, many of the leaders that I have worked with are very pragmatic and pride themselves on being rational.
They tend to believe leadership is a matter of process not personality.
I also work with their people and their story is different.
Especially over the past decade, with nothing but constant change, their people have been more exhausted and cautious than driven and inspired.
I love working with these pragmatic leaders!
They’re very smart, and I wouldn’t say that they are bad leaders.
Bad leaders do not care. Our clients always care. They’re often simply leading the way that they were led.
One particular client leader; his first manager was a hyper efficient, emotionally distant engineer who believed that the best feedback was silence.
Kind of like, I tell you if something is wrong, and if I say nothing, then nothing is wrong.
So guess what my client learned?
- Silence equals approval, everything’s okay.
- Distance equals professionalism.
- Emotion equals weakness.
He, like so many of his leader peers, inherited a leadership style.
One day sitting across from him in a meeting, I thought, we carry these ghosts into our leadership roles, the ghosts of those who led us before.
And I realized then, that leadership culture isn’t created in workshops.
It’s created in humans, inside us, within us. And every leader, every one of us brings our own history into the room.
Welcome to this episode about B2B leadership culture
You are listening to the Story-Driven Business Podcast. If you are new to this podcast, my name is Susanna Rantanen and I’m known as the world’s leading modern employer branding expert, trusted by B2B leaders who want their culture to become their competitive advantage.
And this podcast is for business leaders, founders, co-founders, communications, marketing, and HR decision makers, anyone responsible for shaping how a company shows up to its clients through its people.
If your leadership sometimes feels harder than it should, if you wonder why alignment slips, why people interpret instructions differently, why some teams thrive when others stagnate, I think this episode is going to help you understand it.
Leadership Culture Is Learned, Not Designed
Most of us B2B leaders mistakenly believe that our leadership culture is defined by value strategy decks and off-sites with sticky notes. But the real leadership culture is a lot simpler and much more confronting. It’s you, just like it’s me. It’s your behavior, just like it’s my behavior. It’s your habits, your tone, your emotional patterns, your view of the world.
The way we show up in our roles as
way we carry ourselves as leaders becomes the way our people think that they should show up too.
And this is the uncomfortable truth.
Your leadership style is shaping your business and people’s behavior more than your strategy is unless they are strategically combined.
Your leadership style is shaping your business and people’s behavior more than your strategy is unless they are strategically combined.
You Inherited Your Leadership Style (Whether You Chose It or Not)
I want to talk to you about behavioral science, which is what I love very much.
There’s this guy called Albert Bandura and he has a very famous theory that is called the social learning theory.
This theory captures how we lead the way we were led because we observed and we imitated our leaders behaviors, especially the kind that was uploaded and rewarded by those people whose opinions we cared the most.
We lead the way we were led because we observed and we imitated our leaders behaviors, especially the kind that was uploaded and rewarded by those people whose opinions we cared the most.
Susanna Rantanen
In short, the social learning theory tells us that humans learn by observing others.
It emphasizes the role of modeling, imitation and reinforcement instead of us experiencing rewards and punishments personally.
We simply watch what happens to others and then adjust our behavior accordingly.
This is not only powerful in the way you and I learn, but also when we need to change how our organization, as in our people, behave and learn.
A need that has been super challenging, yet critical in the many business transformations companies have been going through since the digitalization, then COVID pandemic, inflation, world politics, tariffs, remote working and selling.
And most recently, the way AI has been and is expected to change our businesses beyond tools and technology and our ways of work.
Are you the kind of leader your people learn from in a positive way?
We all learned leadership from past managers, our first boss, the leaders we admired, and the leaders we feared.
That early modeling creates our default setting as a leader.
Unless we reflect on it regularly, we repeat it until the end of times.
You get the feedback from your people. You have to reflect, which means literally looking at your reflection and thinking, are you the kind of leader that people will talk about in a positive manner or in a negative manner when somebody asks them about the place that they work or when in years to come they want to become leaders.
Are you the kind of leader they learn from in a positive way?
Why Your Leadership Culture (Behavior) Matters More Than Your Strategy
Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
Every leader has a behavioral blueprint made of their personality, personal values, beliefs, fears, morals, comfort zones, insecurities, strengths, stress responses, emotional intelligence, prior experience, you name it.
This blueprint travels with us into every meeting, every decision, every conflict, every social situation as a leader.
Some of these work for us and some of these are quietly sabotaging us.
Now, here’s the fascinating part:
Your individual leadership habits form the collective leadership culture of your leadership culture because humans mimic what they see.
The more leaders, the more of collective leadership culture is being mimicked by what people see in the ways that leaders behave and collaborate, how you treat each other, how you listen, how you value each other’s opinions, how you behave in social circumstances, how you deal with conflicts and so on.
It doesn’t matter one bit what the HR state as your leadership principles, because you will continue leading the way you feel the most comfortable unless those principles match your comfort zone.
Or, unless you are supported to reflect and relearn new leadership traits.
It also helps if your business rewards and ‘punishes’ leaders for the wrong and right leadership behavior. Which hardly ever happens.
I strongly recommend a kind rewarding and punishment system put into action. Simple leadership bonus will do. You have to get a signal. This is the kind of behavior that we want you to reinforce.
[Not getting the praise and the bonus says outloud] this is the kind of leadership behavior that cannot happen again.
You can’t leave your leaders alone. People need support to reinforce the positives and get rid of the negatives, replace those with positive leadership behaviors.
Stress Reveals Leadership (It Doesn’t Create It)
Unless your collaborative leadership style and culture is addressed, your personal comfort zones become your team’s limits.
Your blind spots becomes their frustrations.
Your energy becomes their energy. Your insecurities become their caution.
Your strengths become their strengths.
Your tolerance becomes their workplace standard and your tone becomes the company’s tone.
Under pressure, leaders don’t become different people. They become more themselves. Neuroscience and behavioral research show that leaders literally set the emotional and cognitive “temperature” of the room.
Susanna Rantanen
Leadership is not just a role.
It’s way more than that.
It’s a signal of behavior, of decision-making style, of values, ethics, morals, how you appreciate people around you, how you value others around you.
It doesn’t matter what it states on your walls as your values or as your leadership principles. It’s your behavior that becomes the signal of what is approved, welcomed, and what’s not.
Your stress behaviour becomes your team’s crisis behaviour.
That is how leadership culture is formed in real life.
The Science of Behavior in B2B Leadership Culture
Let’s go even deeper because I know that us B2B leaders also love facts.
Mirror Neurons & Emotional Contagion
Human brains copy the emotions, the tone and the behavior of the person in power. Us leaders literally set the brainwave temperature of the room. This is science.
Neuroplasticity
Teams adapt to repeated behavior like clay taking shape. If you’ve ever done ceramics, you know how you shape the clay to a form that you want it become. Repeated behavior by a leader turns team behavior into clay.
If your (leadership culture) patterns stay the same, their patterns are going to stay the same.
Cognitive Bias
We also gravitate towards what feels familiar. This is called the cognitive bias. Unchallenged leaders recreate all leadership patterns, even the bad ones, without even really noticing it.
Psychological Safety
Amy Edmondson talks a lot about psychological safety and her research shows that people only speak up when leaders model curiosity, openness and humility. Otherwise, people stay silent.
Stress responses
Your stress behaviour becomes your team’s crisis behaviour.
If you shut down, they shut down.
If you panic, they panic.
If you get solution-focused, they get solution-focused.
This is how leadership culture forms: leaders’ behavior → teams’ behavior → organisational behavior
Saying “this is a safe space” is meaningless if leader behaviour contradicts it. Teams don’t listen to what you say. They watch what you do when it’s uncomfortable. That’s where B2B leadership culture is truly defined.
Susanna Rantanen
Why This Matters For B2B Leaders?
This is not “soft stuff.”
This is hard business logic.
In B2B organisations, your people are your product and the way they make customers feel is your brand.
And your product behaves according to the leadership it receives, turning your leadership culture and how your people feel about it your employer brand.
B2B companies do not have any other brand than how people feel about your organisation’s behavior –including your leadership behavior and your people behavior.
Make a note of this: Your leadership cultur, the way you personally choose to lead, impacts:
- retention rates
- performance consistency
- customer trust
- customer life time value
- talent attraction
- the successful execution of the business strategy in your team
- innovation capabilities
- communication
- employee trust in your company’s leadership, just to mention a few hardcore facts
- and this: your own career opportunities as a business leader
And here’s the kicker:
People don’t leave companies.
They leave leadership cultures that feel unsafe, unclear, or uninspiring.
I’ve had this happen to me, too, when I wasn’t in my best form.
But I reflected hard, and made changes. And I keep reflecting and adjusting, with the knowledge that I don’t need to be perfect, but I need to make sure whatever I do and however I lead makes sense to my people.
Companies stay small (powerless, unable to create impact) because leadership stays small.
Companies grow when leaders grow.
What Great Leaders Do Differently?
Before I close with this episode, I want to share with you what I believe and have witnessed great leaders doing differently.
- They reflect.
- They challenge old patterns.
- They evolve.
- They observe themselves.
- They forgive themselves for leadership mistakes. And allow others to make mistakes, too.
- And, they ask one question every morning: “What story am I teaching my people about how we lead here?”
This reflection alone can change your entire leadership trajectory.
I want you to pause and consider:
- Who taught you to lead?
- Which parts of their leadership still live in you?
- Which patterns serve your people?
- Which patterns sabotage your growth?
- What behaviour are you teaching — intentionally or not — every day?
- And what would change if you chose your leadership identity consciously instead of inheriting it?
This is where real leadership culture begins: with self-awareness.
You’ve been listening to me, Susanna Rantanen, a world’s leading expert in story-driven B2B branding, which equals your employer brand and reflects your promise to your clients and your people.
If this episode gave you a new way to see your people, your business, or your leadership, please share it with someone who needs to hear it; a colleague, a CEO, a founder, a leadership team.
See you again next week on this same channel!
Susanna XO
Check out this previous episode: “#203 How to Build A Story-Driven Business Step by Step”