The inside of leaders’ personality concerns their values, which function as an internal moral compass and determine how well the leaders will fit in with the culture of the organization and what type of culture they will create. For example, leaders who value tradition will have a strong sense of right and wrong, will prefer hierarchical organizations, and will have little tolerance of disruption and innovation. Put them in a creative environment, and they will struggle. On the other hand, leaders who value affiliation will have a strong desire to get along with others and will focus on building and maintaining strong interpersonal relationships and on working collaboratively. These leaders will not be engaged if their roles are too isolated and the company cultures are overly individualistic. Finally, altruistic leaders will strive to improve other people’s lives and drive progress in the world, so they will suffer if their organizations are purely driven by profits.

Even if the essence of leadership talent is universal, the context a leader is in will shape how they behave, ought to behave, and are evaluated. As a consequence, some leaders may be popular in some cultures but not in others (think Vladimir Putin or Hugo Chávez), and many high-performing managers may struggle when they are moved from one culture to another, for example, from Germany to Indonesia or from a nongovernmental organization to a fintech startup.

Leadership, the process that enables individuals to work together in the pursuit of a common goal, has been a critical resource throughout the evolution of humankind. Every significant accomplishment in human history—the use of fire, the invention of writing, the mapping of the human genome, and so on—sprang from collective action that could not have occurred without leadership.

As a leader, you are the embodiment of that company. What that means is this: Your values—your sense of integrity and decency and honesty, the way you comport yourself in the world—are a stand-in for the values of the company. You can be the head of a seven-person organization or a quarter-million- person organization, and the same truth holds: what people think of you is what they’ll think of your company.

How people actually go about their works, how decisions are made, who gets promoted, how employees interact with one another, what motivates them - these are the things that really count. What makes things especially tricky, especially for an outsider, is that as with real cultures of any type - from corporations to schools, towns, and even nations - most of the really important rules are not written down.

The place to start assessing a culture is to listen, really listen, to how employees describe a place. We believe that within most generalizations there lies an inner core of truth.