We have asked thousands of executives from around the world the same simple question: “Who is responsible for culture in your organization?” Hands go up and, almost to a person, the response is, “Everyone.”

We then ask a follow-up: “If everyone is responsible for culture in your organization, what do you do to manage it?”

Hands go down. Gazes divert. The most common answers are uninspiring: “Keep an open-door policy.” “Provide good performance reviews.” “Check in with employees.” While each of these actions may be helpful, not one is specific to culture. They are simply generic management habits — that is, none are practices specific to translating a company’s unique set of values into a lived experience for the people who work there.

Organizational culture is the set of shared values that guide how work gets done. There used to be a debate about whether culture predicts high performance or whether high performance affords leaders a strong and cohesive culture. Evidence now overwhelmingly supports the former.1 But for a business to harness the power of culture, it needs midlevel leaders across the organization — the managers and team leaders — to go beyond believing that they are responsible for culture to actively building it.

Our research revealed that midlevel leaders often feel they need to endorse cultural norms rather than enrich them, by which we mean supporting expressions of cultural norms and values as they arise in smaller teams. We also identified key behaviors that managers at any level of an organization can embrace to become culture builders. Specifically, we found that the most successful midlevel leaders find ways to link the “big-C” culture of their organization — its official set of values — with the “small-c” culture that plays out in the narrower and vibrant daily patterns of interaction.