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A quick check-in. Remembering a personal detail. Giving specific praise instead of a vague “Great job.” These may feel minor, but they build trust, deepen loyalty, and inspire people to perform at their best.

The Power of Small Leadership Moments

I once worked with a leader whose team would walk through walls for him—not simply because of his strategic skills, but because he noticed.

• He paused in busy corridors to ask, “How’s your mum doing?”—and remembered the answer weeks later.

• He noticed when someone was unusually quiet in a meeting and followed up privately.

• His praise was specific, personal, and heartfelt.

None of these moments took more than a minute, but together they created a culture of connection and trust that no strategy slide could match.

At Optimist Performance, we see the same truth: when leaders combine vision with presence, they don’t just manage—they inspire.

What the Experts Say About Leadership Presence

“Trust is built in very small moments.” — Brené Brown

“Leadership is not about being in charge. It is about taking care of those in your charge.” — Simon Sinek

“Leaders establish trust with candor, transparency, and credit.” — Jack Welch

“Trust is like the air we breathe—when it’s present, nobody really notices; when it’s absent, everybody notices.” — Warren Buffett

💡 Quick Tips for Small Leadership Moments

(Optimist Performance recommendations)

1. Ask with intention — Put your phone down, make eye contact, and listen fully.

2. Follow up on details — Show you remember what matters to your team.

3. Be specific with praise — Replace “Great job” with exactly what you valued.

4. Notice the quiet ones — Reach out to those who seem withdrawn.

5. Celebrate effort — Acknowledge resilience and problem-solving, not just results.

Why It Matters for Business Performance

High-trust cultures consistently outperform low-trust ones in engagement, retention, and innovation. Embedding small leadership moments into your daily habits is a practical, repeatable way to strengthen trust and inspire excellence.

At Optimist Performance, we coach leaders to balance strategic clarity with human connection—because that’s how you go from great to world-class.

Further Reading & Resources

If you’re ready to explore more ways to strengthen your leadership presence and build high-performance cultures, check out our latest insights:

• Team Transformation – Read the Harvard Business Review on the Seven Transformations of Leadership

• Optimist Performance Insights – Our growing library of articles, tools, and ideas to help you go from great to world-class.

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What’s Emotional Culture? Emotional Culture is defined as the shared affective values, norms, artefacts, and assumptions that govern which emotions people have and express at work and which ones they are better off suppressing.

Thankfully, most businesses recognise the value of having an emotional culture and taking steps to implement it.

According to research by HBR, emotional culture influences employee satisfaction, burnout, teamwork, and even hard measures such as financial performance and absenteeism.

It’s important to be clear about the difference between cognitive and emotional cultures. 

Cognitive culture is defined as the shared intellectual values, norms, artefacts, and assumptions that serve as a guide for the group to thrive. Cognitive culture sets the tone for how employees think and behave at work—for instance, how customer-focused, innovative, team-oriented, or competitive they are or should be.

Most of us refer to our cognitive culture as a company or organisational culture (read our article about organisational cultures here). While they are distinct, it is critical for any firm to pay attention to both and ensure they are in sync.

How to identify your emotional culture?

As we mentioned before, even if your firm doesn’t have an intentionally developed emotional culture, there is one.

“Every organisation has an emotional culture, even if it’s one of suppression.” — Sigal Barsade.

Finding out what the most frequent emotions are among your team or organisation’s members is critical.

You can achieve this in a variety of ways:

Ask and observe your employees. A fantastic place to start is listening to your employees and noticing their non-verbal cues and signs. Here are some questions you can start with:

• To what degree do other people in this organisation (or division or unit) display the following emotions?
• Which emotions should or shouldn’t people express in this organisation?
• Do they feel comfortable about sharing their emotions at work, or would they rather hold back?

You can also measure basic emotions because, according to research, we can have more than one emotional culture. 

Use Emotional Culture Surveys. These types of surveys measure experienced emotions, expected emotions and ideal or desirable levels of emotions. 

Collect data about people’s emotions on a daily basis. For example, before leaving, employees at Ubiquity Retirement + Savings press a button in the lobby to describe how they felt that day. 

Another example is, Bridgewater where employees can log any negative emotions they experience at work using a ‘pain button’ app on their iPads. They then have the opportunity for follow-up conversations with colleagues to address and resolve any negative emotions.    

There are also bracelets or apps that allow employees to communicate how they are feeling. 

These strategies can be challenging to use; it all relies on how you manage the data you collect. If you utilise the information against employees, you will no longer receive accurate information from them. The “positive” aspect is that it reveals a great deal about your emotional culture.

Find external help. You can use team activities, workshops, or learning programmes to find out how people are feeling and how to move forwards with your desired emotional culture. 

This is one of our areas of expertise; we work with companies facing some challenges and help them ensure that everyone in their team is working together. 

Get in touch with us and find out how we can help you. All our programmes are bespoke and tailored to your needs. 

Make use of games. This card deck created by riders&elephants includes questions for everyone in the organisation and worksheets to keep track of your findings and commitments.

How can you create and promote your emotional culture?

Now that you’ve discovered the most common emotions among your peers, you can move on to the next step. How can you create a positive emotional culture that benefits your company? 

Make sure you welcome emotions

This is possibly the most crucial part because welcoming emotions into the workplace is the first step toward creating a healthy emotional culture.

Many organisations have spent years attempting to avoid this. Fortunately, things are changing, and we now understand the importance of allowing individuals to be themselves at work.

Despite this, we still have a long way to go. According to research, 54% of employees don’t feel comfortable showing their true emotions around senior leadership. 

You can also train people to manage their emotions the same way you would train them to learn a new skill. The better we are able to manage our emotions, the easier it will be to implement the emotional culture you need for your company.

Think about your particular company

What type of emotions and behaviours are you trying to promote? What type of company are you in? What’s your industry? 

You may need to promote different emotions, depending on your industry. Healthcare professionals, for example, require a higher level of compassion than workers in other fields. 

Vail Resorts is a wonderful example of this, with “have fun” as one of its values:

HAVE FUN: Fun is our product – create fun, enjoy your work and share the contagious spirit.

In the hospitality sector, this is a fantastic emotion to encourage, and everyone is on board. 

However, before making any decisions, it’s important to observe your organisation; it may surprise you.

At Cisco, for example, they identified that joy was one of the strongest drivers of employee satisfaction and commitment at the company—and more of it was needed to keep up engagement.

Align your emotional and organisational culture 

Creating an emotional culture is not about saying to people how they should feel. It’s about putting in place the structures, environments, and procedures to enable them to feel that way. 

Can you imagine, using Vail Resorts as an example, what would happen if, after advocating having fun, they penalised individuals for having fun while working? It would not only be illogical, but it would also have a detrimental consequence.

Lead by example

From top to bottom, something has to change. And the first step towards change is to take the initiative and demonstrate that you are willing to do your part.

You can’t promote a culture of joy and then show up to work angry every day. Keep in mind also that emotions, especially negative ones, are highly contagious. (Read our article)

To use the same example, Rob Kats, Vail’s former CEO, took part in the ice bucket challenge, and many others in the company followed suit. They also share some fun moments on a daily basis, encouraging these emotions and behaviours.  

Find the right balance 

As previously said, it is the responsibility of the leader to lead by example. And there’s something to be said for “faking it till you make it,” or, in this case, “faking it until you feel it.”

We can model our emotions to some extent. If we smile even when we don’t feel like it, for example, we begin to feel a little happier. Acting out the feelings you want to foster is a good place to start.

On the other hand, you must use caution and avoid overdoing it. If you do, it can end up being overwhelming, leading to high levels of emotional labour, stress, and exhaustion. 

It can also convey a sense of deception. People can see right through our acts, and if they see we’re constantly faking our emotions, we’ll come across as unauthentic.

Pay attention to small details

If you want to promote fun, for example, use photographs of individuals laughing or team activities that encourage these feelings. Even having kleenex in common areas communicates that expressing emotions is acceptable.

Give time

Nothing changes from one day to the next, and when some emotions and behaviours are really integrated into your organisation, it can take time to change them. So, give yourself enough time to create these changes. You can implement recognition programmes to reinforce the emotions you aim to bring forward. 

The Optimist View…

Talking about expressing our emotions at work can seem scary or even unprofessional or unproductive. However, humans are emotional and constantly suppressing these emotions will negatively impact your team or organisation. 

The leaders of today and tomorrow need to be comfortable dealing with their own and other emotions. Whether you like it or not, emotions are part of us. So you can refuse to bring them to the surface and pay the consequences. Or you can openly talk about them and create an emotional culture that enables everyone in your organisation to flourish. 

At Optimist Performance, we help companies on the journey of bringing up their emotions and using them towards a common goal. 

Get in touch with us today and find out how we can help you. 

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The need to have a company culture is well known, and most of us understand its value and benefits. Unfortunately, while most companies are doing their job to create a culture, many fail to live up to these cultures.

In a nutshell, we have beautiful slogans on our walls that don’t impact employees’ day to day behaviours in any way. For the most part, they are considered nice-to-haves that ultimately don’t have any real impact on the organisation. 

In addition, many companies are failing to keep their organisational cultures alive in a remote working environment. Nonetheless, it is now more important than ever to maintain our company cultures and do whatever we can to keep them alive and progressive. 

What is a company culture: A company culture is defined as a shared set of values, goals, attitudes, and practices that make up an organisation.

While it can seem quite challenging to maintain our company cultures while WFH, we need to remember that culture is about values, beliefs, and behaviours. It’s not about ping pong tables or nice offices with free drinks (even though they help to keep things fun!). 

Keeping in mind what company culture really is can help us find ways to keep it alive while working remotely. 

Are we living up to our organisational cultures?

According to an analysis done by MITSlogan, there is no correlation between the cultural values a company emphasises in its published statements and how well the company lives up to those values in employees’ eyes. 

Even more, while most company leaders accept the importance of having a company culture, statistics show that they are not walking the talk. 

According to the Achievers Engagement and Retention Report, 45 per cent of employees say that their leadership is “minimally” or “not at all” committed to improving company culture.

And according to various LinkedIn polls by Massimo Brebbia about vision, missions and values, the results weren’t any better. 

37% of the voters have never seen the Mission Statement

25% believe it is not in line with the vision

38% believe it’s in line with the Company Vision

42% of the voters claim the Company Values do not reflect the company behaviours

43% confirm they walk the talk

7% is not aware

56% of the voters said Company Vision had been presented and discussed with them

44% have not seen it or discussed it

So, if we all know how important having an organisational culture is for success, how can we make sure we succeed in living up to it?

9 tips to help you succeed

Involve everyone

According to a behavioural experiment, when we choose something for ourselves, we are far more committed to the outcome (almost by a factor of five to one).

So, instead of creating or even changing your culture behind closed doors to later communicate it to everyone else, why don’t you include people in the process?

This can be a challenge for big companies, but there are ways we can still involve as many people as possible. For example, using forms, questionnaires, … The crucial thing is that people feel included in the process. 

Make sure everyone believes in the culture

As we mentioned above, including everyone is not always possible. For small businesses, it can be easier, but this can be a challenge for big companies. So, if not everybody can be involved in the creation process, at least make sure everyone agrees and buys into it. 

You can have a beautifully written culture, but if people don’t really believe in it, it will only be that; beautifully written words. 

This is even more important with younger generations because they are looking not only for a paycheck but for a company that aligns with their personal values. 

When we create a culture based on a mission, vision and values that people can relate to, we will be on the right track to creating an organisational culture that people believe in. 

Creating a story or narrative can be a good idea to communicate the company culture effectively. An excellent example of this is the CEO of a retail bank who, in order to implement an organisational change, created a compelling story that would make sense to all the bank’s employees, top to bottom.

The main idea was that everyone could relate, understand and believe in the story, making them work together towards success. 

Focus on a sense of belonging

This is strictly related to the two points above. If we involve people in the process and make sure that everyone believes in the culture, we will be closer to achieving a sense of belonging. 

A culture should focus on creating an environment where people feel like they belong. Concentrating on creating a culture that promotes inclusion, collaboration, and authenticity is a good starting point to build a working environment where people feel safe and feel a sense of belonging. 

Hire accordingly

When we talk about hiring people who align with the values, it doesn’t mean they all need to be and think alike. It’s essential to find people who share the same values but who can also challenge us to evolve and grow. 

Finding people who align with our values should never be an excuse to forget about the importance of diversity. This is also why many companies are moving away from hiring cultural fits and hiring cultural add. 

Keeping our company culture in mind will also impact people who are already part of the company. Sometimes, redefining a company culture can lead to having to let people go. 

This happened to Gail Kelly, former CEO of St. George Bank in Sydney, who had to let some people from the team go in order to implement a cultural change that could improve performance. 

This situation is not ideal; there should always be an opportunity for people and organisations to adapt and change, but also knowing when something or someone doesn’t fit can save us time, energy and resources. 

Accompany your company culture with behavioural guidelines

Sometimes, when we create a culture, we can fall into the trap of believing that everyone thinks and understands it the same way we do. 

So, in addition to communicating and explaining the culture, it’s helpful to include what the culture means in terms of behaviours. For example, if we say that collaboration is one of our values, what does it mean to our day to day lives? 

Setting clear expectations of what the culture means for everyone can be helpful to live up to it successfully. 

Be authentic

When we create a company culture, we must be genuine about it. Creating something that sounds perfect on paper but doesn’t replicate the company’s day to day behaviours will have little to no effect. In fact, it is likely to have negative consequences for the business. 

The idea of having a company culture is to effectively communicate what the company stands for, its values, and its mission and vision. So, everything we do has to align with it. 

For example, if a company states that they care about people’s wellbeing or are “people-first”, their actions must demonstrate the same thing. No one can fool people for an extended period of time.

If we use over time as an example, imagine that a company clearly says they care about their employees’ work-life balance but then promotes people who overwork all the time. Even though the message is excellent, their actions are talking louder than their words.

We are not saying authenticity is a must-have; instead, it’s a must-demonstrate value. This means that whatever your values are, they have to be authentic and champion everything that the company does and represents. 

Walk the talk

This is probably the most critical point of all, and it includes a bit of everything we have already talked about. We need to walk the talk. From top to bottom, everyone in the company should act according to the values, mission and vision stated in the company culture. 

For leaders, this is extremely important because most of the time, leaders are the ones who need to implement the culture. Also, people will behave according to the behaviours of the people around them. 

To use the overtime example again, in this case, leaders should show with their behaviours that they care about work-life balance. Taking time off, disconnecting after work hours, or even being vulnerable when they feel overwhelmed will help everyone feel safe doing the same. 

Make sure there is a reward system in place

Using a reward system to establish the company’s behaviours can be a great way to implement a company culture successfully. 

Rewards can be shown in many different ways. The easiest of all would be a monetary reward or even link it to promotions. But we can also implement a reward system to show appreciation and value to the people committed to living up to their company culture. 

For example, John McFarlane, the former CEO of ANZ Bank, sent a bottle of champagne to every employee for Christmas with a card thanking them for their work on the company’s “Perform, Grow, and Break-out” change program. While this can seem like a small gesture, employees consistently report that the rewards have a disproportionately positive impact on changing motivation that lasts for months, if not years.

As we mentioned before, people not only care about money, they want to feel valued and sometimes asking people’s opinions, caring for them, even small tokens of appreciation can have more of an impact than a salary increase in a toxic culture. 

Don’t be afraid of change

Last but not least, it’s essential to be aware that company cultures will continually evolve and change. 

It’s important to consider that company cultures are living entities that will evolve over time. So being open to its evolution is essential to succeed. 

The crucial thing to remember is what our core values are, and keep them in mind even during times of change.

The Optimist View…

At Optimist Performance, we believe that every company has a culture, even if it wasn’t thought or designed. Once a group of people start working together, you will soon see a culture of shared values and principles emerge. This is why we should never underestimate the importance of creating and implementing the culture you want for your company. 

We also believe that company cultures are much more than nice words on a piece of paper. It is the set of values and principles that determine the whole identity of the organisation, and as such, it should be a guide for everyone in the company. 

Unfortunately, this is not an easy task, which is why so many companies fail to live up to their cultures, even more so in big organisations where there is constant staff turnover. The positive side is that there are many ways out there to help you succeed. 

At Optimist Performance, we help organisations build a culture to succeed, and we do it in different ways depending on your organisation’s needs. 

If you want to know more about our services, get in touch with us today and find out how we can help. 

You can also learn more about our leadership programmes, experiential events, or executive coaching here.

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Tactics and organisation are important at this stage but I would argue that two things stand head and shoulders above everything else. Both can relate to every one of us in our daily lives: leadership and team culture.

leadership and team culture

To take England as an example, reflecting back on 2003 there’s always a temptation to focus on Clive, Johnno and Jonny. The mastermind, the captain, the kicker. All three were exemplary in what they did and their work ethic on and off the field of play and practice constantly set a benchmark for all the others to follow. But around them in the dressing room stood yet more leaders, role models, army officers, former captains, future captains.

We’re talking about guys like Jason Leonard, Lawrence Dallaglio, Phil Vickery, Richard Hill, Matt Dawson and Neil Back. Or Lewis Moody, Mike Tindall, Mike Catt, Will Greenwood, Ben Kay, Jason Robinson and Josh Lewsey. Do you think they needed to be told how to train or what to eat? Probably not, but neither did that happen by accident.

Together they were an exceptional generation of players, but over a period of time they installed a set of guiding principles by which they trained, ate, slept, drank, recovered, met, spoke to each other, spoke to the media, all before even stepping onto a rugby pitch. Out of respect for each other, they were living common values and that is what we call building a strong team culture.

Of all the teams heading into the Six Nations, Ireland are probably closest to this at the moment. It’s no coincidence that their coach Joe Schmidt is a kiwi. In rugby, the All Blacks have pretty much stood out on their own in terms of living a team culture, certainly over the past 10 years. I’ve experienced the trickle-down effect of playing them in sevens. You only need to read about their ‘Sweeping the Sheds’ mantra in James Kerr’s great book Legacy 15 Lessons in Leadership. “Never be too big to do the small things that need to be done” is just one great quote that comes to define their powerful blend of pride and humility.

Same principles can apply to any environment

Living by a common culture is essential in elite sport but the same principles should apply to any team or environment. Getting the best out of people is the same, whether they’re playing in the Six Nations, competing in the Square Mile or running a pub in the Lake District.

Cycling across the States and sailing around the world I was part of a team made up of very different people, like any business. That in itself required us to adopt a common set of values, a culture, without which we would almost certainly have failed.

So whoever you support over the next couple of months, ask yourself this: Is our team culture what it needs to be in order to reach and exceed our targets in 2019?

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