Introduction
A company can print its values on the office wall and still reward the person trampling over their team, as long as that person hits their numbers. Shaara Roman has watched this pattern repeat across decades of leadership and culture work, and it is the quiet thread running through her conversation on Everyday Leadership. Roman, founder and CEO of The Silverene Group and author of The Conscious Workplace: Fortify Your Culture to Thrive in Any Crisis, built her career on a simple but uncomfortable observation: culture is not what leaders say, it is what they are willing to tolerate.
A career built by circumstance, not a plan
Roman did not set out to become a culture strategist. Her first professional role was meant to be in accounting, until the head of HR at her company spent six months quietly asking whether she was sure she wanted to stay buried in reconciliation reports. She eventually relented, and what followed was two decades moving through HR and culture roles in large organisations, each one interesting for about eighteen months before the operational grind set in.
The turning point came when she finally reached the head of HR seat she had been chasing, then realised within eighteen months that she disliked the role. She loved the strategic design work, shaping how an organisation could position itself through its people and culture. She did not love the day-to-day operations. A CEO she was interviewing with told her plainly that if he had a sales position open, he would put her in it. That comment named something she had felt for years: she had been pigeonholed by the department she happened to start in.
The early failure that taught her what actually matters
Before any of this, a 21-year-old Roman tried her hand at real estate and insurance sales and failed, in her words, miserably. She had the technical competence to pass the exams. What she did not have was a network, a track record, or an understanding of the unwritten norms of an industry she had just arrived in as a newcomer to the country.
The lesson she draws from that failure is precise: passing a test and having relationships are not the same asset, and only one of them gets you hired, trusted or referred. It is a lesson she says she did not fully absorb until years later, but it reshaped how she built every subsequent chapter of her career, from client relationships to public speaking.
Culture is not a slogan, it is a living system
Roman is direct about what most organisations get wrong when they talk about culture. They treat it as a fixed asset, something you build once and then defend, rather than what it actually is: an organic, constantly shifting system that has to be revisited deliberately and often. A culture that worked five years ago is not automatically fit for a workforce that now includes Gen Z employees and Millennial managers navigating a different set of expectations.
Her starting point for any organisation is returning, regularly, to a clear North Star: purpose, values, and how those translate into strategy. Without that discipline, she argues, companies drift, and the drift is invisible until a crisis exposes it.
The iceberg beneath every culture statement
One of Roman's sharpest frameworks is the culture iceberg. What sits above the waterline is what a company says it values. What sits below is what it actually rewards through pay rises, promotions and bonuses. When those two things do not match, employees do not believe the statement above the water, they believe the incentive structure below it.
She is candid that this misalignment shows up constantly in the form of tolerated bad behaviour. A department head who hits their numbers while treating their team badly is, in her experience, rarely held to account in the way the company's stated values would suggest. Middle managers notice this. They are not naive, she says, they simply follow what gets rewarded at the top, which means a values mismatch at senior level cascades through the entire organisation.
What thriving in a crisis actually looks like
Asked whether a company can genuinely thrive during a downturn rather than just survive it, Roman points to Chobani as a case study she returns to often. Its founder built the business around sustainable farming and paid manufacturing staff above minimum wage in an industry known for paying as little as possible, then distributed company stock to employees. The business has continued to grow well beyond its original valuation years later.
Her broader argument is that leaders who see downturns coming, through rising rates, inflation or shifting demand, too often default to layoffs as the tested, easy lever rather than making earlier, harder decisions. She is not naive about the pressure of being a publicly traded company driven by quarterly numbers, but she argues that leaders who think in terms of people, purpose, planet and profit together tend to come out of a crisis in a stronger position than those optimising for one financial metric alone.
Choosing work without losing yourself
Roman describes an early fear that becoming a CEO would mean, in her words, selling her soul. What she has built instead is a personal filter she says her own team holds her accountable to: is she pursuing a piece of work because of the revenue, or because the client is genuinely committed to the harder, longer journey of culture change. She is explicit that culture and diversity work is not a one-time box to tick, it is an ongoing process of change that has to be introspective as well as external.
She also talks about consistency as a leadership discipline in its own right. There is no version of her that performs differently on stage than she does in front of a client or her own team. That consistency, she suggests, is part of what makes the accountability she asks for from others credible.
What leadership means across a life, not just a career
When asked to define leadership, Roman resists a tidy formula. She describes it as something that can exist at any level of an organisation: noticing an opportunity to reduce waste, speaking up when someone is being marginalised, offering an idea nobody asked for. It is available to a brand-new team member just as much as to a CEO.
She extends the same thinking to 35 years of marriage, describing it as a practice of growing individually while staying accepting of how the other person is also changing, communicating directly, and giving each other space to hold different beliefs without needing constant agreement. It is, in her telling, the same muscle as building an organisational culture: something living that has to be tended, not something you arrive at once and keep forever.
