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Your Culture Isn't What You Say—It's What You Tolerate | Part One

Chris Comeaux : Sep 9, 2026, 9:46:10 AM

Tom Foster Healthcare Leadership Workplace Culture Hospice Leadership Organizational Culture Leadership Accountability Culture Cycle

Your Culture Isn't What You Say—It's What You Tolerate | Part One

Your organization’s culture isn’t defined by the values hanging on the wall—it’s defined by the behaviors leaders allow to continue.

In Part One of Your Culture Isn't What You Say—It's What You Tolerate, host Chris Comeaux sits down with Tom Foster, President of Foster Learning Corporation and author of Premeditated Culture: The Consequences of What We Tolerate, for a compelling examination of how organizational culture is actually created. Foster challenges a common leadership assumption: culture begins with defining what an organization believes. Instead, he argues that leaders should start by identifying the specific behaviors they want to see—because beliefs, values, customs, and ultimately culture become visible through what people actually do.

The conversation explores Foster’s Culture Cycle, the difference between intentional and accidental culture, and why accountability is essential to protecting the culture leaders say they want. Chris and Tom also bring the discussion directly into healthcare and hospice, where workforce shortages, regulation, compliance demands, reimbursement pressures, productivity expectations, and rapid change continually test an organization’s stated values. The central leadership challenge is clear: when reality puts pressure on your values, which behaviors survive? Those behaviors—not your mission statement—become your culture.

5 Key Takeaways

Culture lives in what you tolerate. Aspirational values matter, but employees learn the real culture by watching which behaviors leaders reward, correct, ignore, or allow to continue.
Start with behaviors, not beliefs. Rather than beginning with another exercise to wordsmith organizational values, Foster recommends defining the concrete behaviors you want people to demonstrate.
Culture requires reinforcement. Clearly defined behaviors can become part of organizational DNA when leaders consistently train, discuss, model, and reinforce them until they become customs and rituals.
Culture often erodes through omission. The greatest threat may not be one catastrophic leadership failure, but the small accountability issues leaders repeatedly overlook or allow to slide.
Healthcare pressure reveals what an organization truly values. Compliance, regulation, labor shortages, productivity demands, and other pressures test whether an organization’s intended behaviors can survive reality—especially when caring for people at the end of life.

What behaviors are you tolerating that may be shaping your culture without you realizing it? Listen to Part One and challenge yourself—and your leadership team—to look beyond the values you say you believe and examine the behaviors your organization actually permits, reinforces, and repeats.

And don’t miss Part Two, where Chris and Tom continue the conversation and dig deeper into what leaders can do to intentionally shape a culture capable of surviving the pressures of reality.

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