Every leadership team says culture matters. Yet when organisations face recruitment, retention or change challenges, culture is often treated as separate from strategy, as though it can be fixed with stronger engagement initiatives, refreshed values or another wellbeing programme.
My recent conversation with Hilda Hayo OBE, Chief Executive, and Nando Caicedo, Director of Strategy, Culture and Transformation, from Dementia UK, reinforced a different perspective. The organisations with the strongest cultures don’t start with culture at all. They start with leadership.
Dementia UK was recognised by The Sunday Times as the UK’s Best Place to Work in the Charity Sector in 2025. This is a fantastic achievement, and I was particularly interested in understanding what leadership behaviours sat behind that recognition.
Culture begins with clarity
One of the first things Hilda told me was, “I never wanted to be a CEO. I was an accidental CEO.” The story itself was entertaining, but it also revealed something fundamental about her approach to leadership. When Hilda joined Dementia UK in 2013, the charity faced financial challenges and, unusually, had no formal organisational strategy. Rather than beginning with conversations about culture, values or engagement, her priority was creating clarity.
It is a useful reminder that culture cannot compensate for a lack of direction. People are far more likely to be engaged when they understand where the organisation is going and why their work matters.
Throughout our conversation, Hilda returned repeatedly to one simple principle: get the right people and treat them well. It sounds straightforward, yet many organisations devote far more attention to attracting talented people than creating an environment in which they can thrive.
Values only matter when leaders live them
Almost every organisation has a set of values. Far fewer consistently use them to guide decisions.
At Dementia UK, values are embedded from the very beginning. Every new employee meets personally with Nando to discuss not only what the values are, but what they look like in practice. More strikingly, every member of staff is encouraged to challenge behaviours that fall short of those values, regardless of seniority.
That feels significant. Senior leaders are choosing to invest their own time because they recognise that culture is established through everyday interactions, not internal communications.
Values should shape recruitment, induction, performance conversations and strategic decisions. Otherwise, they risk becoming aspirations rather than expectations.
Employees rarely judge culture by reading the values on a website. They judge it by watching how leaders behave when decisions become difficult.
Psychological safety enables better decisions
Psychological safety has become one of leadership’s most frequently used phrases, but Nando offered one of the clearest and most helpful definitions I’ve heard.
“Psychological safety isn’t the absence of challenge. It’s what allows respectful challenge to happen.” That distinction matters because healthy organisations are not those where everyone agrees. They are organisations where people feel confident enough to question assumptions, contribute different perspectives and challenge decisions without fear of negative consequences.
The behaviours that create this environment are often quite simple: listening before responding, explaining decisions, acknowledging uncertainty and making it clear that leadership does not have a monopoly on good ideas. Those habits are not soft leadership. They are what enable better decision-making.
Growth reveals culture
Dementia UK has expanded rapidly in recent years, growing from around 160 employees to more than 340 while significantly increasing its income and impact. Growth inevitably tests culture. Structures become more complex, leaders have less direct contact with every colleague and change becomes a constant factor.
Rather than attempting to preserve culture by holding tightly to the past, Hilda and Nando described involving colleagues in shaping strategy, consulting authentically rather than performatively, and recognising that organisational change is experienced emotionally as much as operationally. Culture, they suggest, is not something you build before change, it is something you demonstrate during it.
Leadership is experienced, not announced
Reflecting on the conversation afterwards, I realised we had spent surprisingly little time discussing culture itself. Instead, we talked about strategic clarity, trust, humility, recruitment, communication and decision-making. In other words, we talked about leadership.
Perhaps we have overcomplicated organisational culture by searching for new frameworks and initiatives when the fundamentals have always been remarkably consistent. Great cultures are rarely created by programmes. They are built through leadership choices made every day: how strategy is communicated, how disagreement is handled, how new colleagues are welcomed and how difficult decisions are explained.
Long before people truly believe the values on the wall, they watch the behaviours in the room. These are not lessons any organisation master once and for all, they require constant attention from leaders at every level.
For me, those are the major takeaways from the conversation with Hilda and Nando from Dementia UK.
