Recently I attended a Global Leadership Summit where I was able to listen to speakers live via webcast, including Terri Kelly, president and CEO of W.L. Gore & Associates Inc. (maker of Gore-Tex), and Blake Mycoskie, founder of Toms Shoes. My conclusion, after listening to several speakers from a variety of industries, was that leadership is all about creating a culture in which people want to work and can work effectively. The culture influences how people think, feel and behave, and is often a reflection of policies and procedures. Because the tone is set at the top, everything leaders say and do influences people throughout the organization.

Each speaker emphasized how important it is for leaders to pay attention to the culture they are creating by how they act, make decisions, respond to situations or approve policies.

Toms Shoes is a great story about culture, and I encourage you to research the company (www.Toms.com). Mycoskie, founder and “Chief Shoe Giver” (for every pair of shoes purchased, a pair of shoes is donated to a needy child), shared the following policies:

• There are no offices.

• Giving is incorporated into their work life, not just personal life. Toms pays for employees to go on “shoe drops” to other countries. Mycoskie said, “They bring back energy and more commitment for the mission of the company.”

W.L. Gore & Associates’ Kelly shared some critical aspects of her firm’s culture:

• On-demand hierarchy: Who has the vantage point and knowledge to make the decision?

• “We don’t tell them what to do or what to work on.”

• “We want the energy to shift from leaders to the rest of the teams and to the organization.”

Netflix Inc. also has a creative culture. There is a simple vacation policy: no policy at all. Since 2004, salaried employees can take as much time off as they’d like, whenever they want to take it, and no one tracks vacation days. Because people respond to e-mails on weekends and solve problems online at home during evenings, employees wondered why the company should keep track of how many holidays people were taking each work year when it was not tracking how many hours they were logging each workday.

Management thought this was a good point. Its “Reference Guide on Our Freedom & Responsibility Culture,” a 100-plus-slide PowerPoint presentation, has spread like wildfire on the Internet. Steve Swasey, Netflix’s vice president for corporate communication, said: “Rules, policies, regulations and stipulations are innovation killers. People do their best work when they’re unencumbered. If you’re spending a lot of time accounting for the time you’re spending, that’s time you’re not innovating.”

Jann Freed (FreedJ@central.edu) holds the Mark and Kay DeCook Endowed Chair in Leadership and Character Development at Central College in Pella.