Leadership Behavior Sets the Tone of Workplace Culture

Authority Magazine featured Enrique Suarez, CEO of HED, reflecting on leadership, trust, and organizational culture in practice.

Company culture is shaped less by policy than by repeated leadership behavior.

Conversations around workplace culture have shifted in recent years from recruitment rhetoric to operational reality. Across industries, leaders are being asked to reconcile performance, adaptability, and employee trust within organizations navigating sustained change, distributed teams, and evolving expectations around transparency and accountability.

In an interview with Authority Magazine, Enrique Suarez, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, co-CEO of HED, discussed how leadership behavior influences culture over time. Drawing from his experience guiding multidisciplinary teams, Suarez reflected on the importance of consistency, empathy, and visible accountability in shaping how organizations operate beyond mission statements or internal messaging.

The article, published by Authority Magazine, examines how executive leadership affects organizational culture from the top down. Through interviews with business leaders across industries, the series explores how values are translated into everyday decisions, team dynamics, and long-term institutional resilience.

 

Read the full article below, or view the original publication here:https://medium.com/authority-magazine/building-company-culture-from-the-top-down-enrique-suarez-of-hed-on-how-the-personal-example-of-e9da3907269b

 

Building Company Culture From the Top Down: Enrique Suarez of HED On How the Personal Example of Exceptional Leaders Shapes Companies That Thrive

An Interview With Jim Hamel

Empathy, meaning being human — the ability to read other people’s feelings, read their ambitions, and understand what they’re trying to do. If you can be empathetic, you’re way ahead. — E.S.

 

Asa part of this series, we had the pleasure to interview Enrique Suarez.

Enrique Suarez is Co-CEO and Chief Marketing Officer of HED, where he leads the firm’s brand strategy, innovation, and client engagement across all markets. A nationally recognized design leader, Enrique brings more than three decades of experience advancing integrated architecture and engineering solutions that strengthen communities and support client vision. As a principal architect and strategist, Enrique has guided award-winning projects across the workplace, mixed-use, and retail sectors — uniting design excellence with long-term business impact. His approach is rooted in curiosity, clarity, and a belief that architecture should capture the soul of a place while driving measurable results. Enrique is a catalyst for creative collaboration and forward-thinking partnerships. His leadership continues to shape HED’s positioning as a bold, thoughtful, and purpose-driven design firm committed to lasting impact.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we begin, can you please introduce yourself? Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

My name is Enrique Suarez, and I am the co-CEO of HED, an integrated architecture and engineering company.

I am first-generation Cuban American. Growing up in South Florida, I was a product of my little Cuban American bubble. I left that little bubble to experience the great Midwest when I went off to college and learned that culturally I live in two places.

I am part of the larger United States culture, but I’m also part of my Latin culture and heritage. And that’s important to know because for my whole life, it has informed how I approach things and how I view myself as a leader. Those things are cemented in who I am, in being fluid and able to understand where people are coming from.

I was always artistically inclined. As a little kid, I was always drawing and creating things and making things, and I found myself drawn to the creative process. My dad was a jeweler by trade, so he was a tinkerer and he could build anything. I think that’s where I caught the bug. I found out that my passion was in seeing things come to reality from nothing.

As a young teenager, I decided architecture was the road I wanted to take, but I had no idea what my path looked like. I just knew I had a passion for drawing and creating things that became real.

What I like about architecture and design is that it speaks to the power of imagination and to the power of the human spirit that you can create something, you know, complex things, essentially from nothing. When I started actually seeing designs be constructed, that was a huge point of satisfaction. And to this day in the firm, when I see things being built, even projects that I had nothing to do with, I get just as excited seeing that.

Becoming a CEO was never the vision for me. To be honest, some days I still have imposter syndrome. You don’t really plan for a position like this; it just sort of finds you. But to be a good CEO, I think you need to have experienced many roles in a company like ours. I had the opportunity and the pleasure of being an architect, being a project manager, being a designer, interacting with clients, and solving problems. Those experiences help shape how to react to the business and how to manage the needs of the firm. I know what it’s like to work in a lot of different roles in this industry and I always keep that perspective and never want to lose touch with it.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are?

I would say there were many people. It’s always interesting to me when I get asked that question, because some people can point to one mentor and say he or she made me who I am. I can’t point to just one person. I was influenced by so many people I interacted with along the way.

They all shaped me. Some of the best lessons actually came from people I disagreed with. In some cases, we went in the opposite direction of what I learned from an interaction with someone. That was just as formative.

There was one person who stands out, though. My third-year studio professor in architecture school, Rene Diaz. He was a really challenging guy. He instilled in us that we should never be satisfied with whatever we had done, that we should always strive for something better.

I think that was a life lesson.

Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. When you think about your company’s culture today, what’s one word you’d use to describe it and why? Please explain with stories or examples if you can.

One word would be empathy.

Empathy, meaning being human — the ability to read other people’s feelings, read their ambitions, and understand what they’re trying to do. If you can be empathetic, you’re way ahead. You’re more aware of what’s going on around you and around others, and that gives you an advantage.

At HED, there are thousands of stories of our people interacting with clients, listening to their needs, their passions, their visions, and interpreting those things into reality.

At the same time, there are hundreds of stories of our team members helping each other. In this business, the design business, there are no heroes. Contrary to what popular culture says about the architect as the lone visionary, nothing happens by an individual’s talent or power alone.

It takes a lot of people contributing their passion and unique points of view to make something happen in a constructive and creative way. And here, we also do that with empathy.

Many companies define values, but fewer truly live them. How do you personally hold yourself accountable to your organization’s values in day-to-day decisions, especially when it would be easier not to?

It’s what we talked about before. You have to listen. You have to be a good listener. That’s fundamental to our culture. If you start by listening to what the other person is telling you, whether it’s a client, a colleague, or a vendor, and you respect what they’re saying, that’s a very powerful combination.

Good listening and respect for other people. That’s where it begins.

You also have to self-reflect. You have to find the time and the space to be wrong about things. As a leader, you’re often wrong. You have to be able to say, “I didn’t handle that very well,” or maybe what someone else was telling me was more correct than what I was thinking.

Having the ability to self-reflect and listen is really important.

Looking back, was there a specific moment, decision, or behavior that became a turning point for your company’s culture?

No, I don’t think there was one specific moment. Culture is built by thousands of small acts, by hundreds of people rowing in the same direction.

It’s difficult to pinpoint a single event and say, “That turned the ship,” or “That was the seminal moment.” If you have like-minded people working toward noble ends, each incremental act of improvement builds something meaningful and authentic over time.

That’s how culture is formed.

Can you share a time when your company’s culture was tested, such as during a crisis, conflict, or major change, and how your leadership approach affected the outcome?

Our current leaders grew up in leadership not always in fun times. They’ve known a lot of difficulty. We lived through the Great Recession in 2008 and mini slowdowns in between. We lived through organizational challenges. We lived and led through the pandemic in 2020.

In the early years of my tenure at the firm, leadership was not always on the same page. You learn from those experiences. I remember thinking at the time that if I ever had the chance to lead, I would do it differently.

The number one lesson was flexibility. Be flexible in your approach. Be ready to change your behavior, your structures, your processes, whatever is needed to meet the moment.

That’s why we focus so much on the idea of a flexible framework as an organization. We don’t really know what’s going to come at us. And if you think you have it all solved, I can guarantee you don’t.

Based on your experience and success, what are the “Five Things Leaders Can Do To Build and Shape Company Culture From The Top Down?”

1. Go On A Listening Tour

Go meet people one-on-one, whether virtually or in person, and hear what they’re going through. It comes back to that listening skill we talked about earlier. If you want to shape culture, you have to understand what people are actually experiencing.

2. Live Your Values

If you say you have core values that you share as a company, individually and as a leader, you really have to live them. We talked about empathy. You have to model those things consistently.

3. Don’t Assume You’re Right

As a leader, it’s easy to think you have the answer. You don’t always. This ties back to being a good listener. Leave room for other perspectives.

4. Inspire People Not To Tolerate Mediocrity

You have to push for excellence. Not in a harsh way, but in a way that encourages people to be better than what’s easy or average.

5. Be Consistent

Be consistent. That’s really difficult to do. But culture is shaped in the repetition of behavior. If your actions shift depending on the moment, people notice.

What advice would you give to leaders who want to build thriving cultures but aren’t sure where to start?

Be true to yourself and be true to the organization.

You can’t build culture exactly the way you want it to look. It has to happen organically. You can’t speak it into existence, and you can’t force it. You build it one small act at a time, over many years.

You also have to be patient and impatient at the same time. You have to cultivate ambition and empathy and balance the two. That means being able to separate organizational issues from individual ones. Sometimes a problem isn’t about a person. It’s about the system.

Organizational change is slower. But if you have a vision, if you know where you’re going, you have to keep working at improvement all the time.

How do you make sure your values and expectations are actually reflected by managers and team leaders throughout the organization? 

You have to live by example. Culture comes from the top and the bottom.

If the culture at the top is diametrically opposed to the culture at the bottom, at some point there will be a crash. Leadership does set the tone. It sets expectations for how you want the organization to operate. But if people throughout the firm share those same values, you meet in the middle and create something special.

A lot of it comes down to simply talking to people. Tania Van Herle, our co-CEO, for example, creates schedules to regularly connect with our remote team members. We’ve heard from them that it’s really valuable that leaders take the time to reach out, ask how they’re doing, and pay attention to what could be improved or what they’re struggling with.

Most of the time, it’s not about a big initiative. It’s about having a conversation.

Being a leader is a role and a job. But at the end of the day, two people talking is much more important.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? 

Give back.

Give back and share what you’ve learned.

You get to a point in your career where it’s no longer just about you. It’s about everybody else. At some point, there’s a shift. There’s a book called The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann that talks about giving in order to get.

I think that’s a beautiful life lesson.