This spring I took my family to Disney World and we had dinner at the Contemporary. The food was good and the characters were fun. The evening was made by our waiter, who has worked at Disney since 1975.
He stopped by our table many times. He told us about the properties he has worked across and about the decades he has spent there, and he spoke well of the culture and of the people above him who supported him. He was not working that hard on our table because the job required it.
Staff demeanor is the most reliable read available on an organization. It will tell you more than the mission statement or the engagement survey. When the people in front of you are short, disengaged, and visibly waiting for the shift to end, that is information about the managers above them. Very few people show up to a new job that way. That gets built into them over time.
A good manager can also hold a decent culture inside a bad one. Not forever, and not across a whole company, but for the people who report to that manager. That claim gets argued, and the counterargument is fair, because a manager who spends everything shielding a team from an organization that will not change is working against a clock.
A few years ago a colleague who ran another division told me that my team would walk through fire for me. Then he asked what I was doing to get that, and I could not give him a real answer. All I had was that I cared, that I put my time into my people, and that they knew I would back them when it mattered.
That is a useless answer for anyone trying to reproduce it, and it is the only honest one I have.