Culture. It’s a word that holds immense weight in today’s workplace conversations but is often misunderstood, overused, or dismissed as a hollow buzzword.
Many people mistake building culture for surface-level perks, such as the flexibility to work three days a week, casual dress codes, or having a manager who avoids challenging team members. While these aspects can improve the work environment, they don’t define an organization’s culture. Culture isn’t about memorizing a company’s mission statement or core values plastered on the wall. It’s also not intended to make everyone happy or to eliminate discomfort entirely. In fact, the most effective organizational cultures set high standards and expectations that often push people beyond their comfort zones.
What Culture Isn’t
The perks we often see in modern workplaces—such as sleep pods, free snacks, and gym memberships—don’t represent what culture is. They’re simply beneficial perks. While they can enhance the employee experience, confusing perks with the process of building culture often leads to misplaced priorities. In my 13 years of management consulting and advisory work, I’ve seen this misunderstanding derail countless efforts to build a thriving workplace with organizations of all sizes.
This isn’t to imply organizations shouldn’t strive to offer the best perks for their employees; it simply doesn’t capture the true essence of culture. Perks might create temporary satisfaction, yet they don’t automatically build a resilient and high-performing culture. Recognizing this distinction is crucial to understanding culture’s true essence. Confusing perks with culture is a path that often leads many organizations astray.
Culture as Behavior at Scale
So, what is culture exactly? At its core, culture is behavior at scale—the collective actions, mindsets, and decisions of people across an organization. It’s not just how team members behave when their manager is watching; it’s how they show up when no one’s looking.
Effectively building culture influences how people perceive their roles, interact with others, and approach their work on a daily basis. Consider this: on Sunday evening, do your team members dread Monday, or are they genuinely excited to contribute? These subtle, unspoken feelings reveal the true essence of your culture. It’s not about what’s written in a company handbook; it’s about what’s lived and felt every day.
Culture’s Role in Driving Excellence
Culture is the heartbeat of organizational excellence. Many leaders invest heavily in developing strategic plans but then neglect to consider the behaviors required to execute them. Culture acts as a link between strategic objectives and daily actions, propelling organizations towards excellence.
Transformational leaders understand that culture isn’t an afterthought but the foundation that supports everything else. The heartbeat of any thriving organization is its culture. Without a strong cultural backbone, strategy remains just a plan.
Engaging Hearts and Minds
Culture does more than drive execution, though. It connects with people on a deeper level, engaging their hearts and minds. While data and performance metrics play a role, they rarely spark the kind of passion or enthusiasm that truly ignites people outside a select few high-performing self-starters.
What inspires people is having a total understanding of their role in the organization’s vision and how their daily work contributes to the bigger picture. This clarity of purpose is what building culture helps instill, driving engagement and enthusiasm across all levels of an organization.
Driving Alignment and Organizational Success
A strong culture drives alignment across all business units and teams. Despite their differing responsibilities, everyone must clearly understand how their work contributes to the organization’s overall objectives. In such thriving cultures, every division collaborates, rowing in unison toward a shared destination.
Building culture isn’t just a component of organizational excellence—it’s the core driver. Culture isn’t about temporary emotional highs induced by perks but the sustainable fulfillment of knowing one’s part within a greater whole. For leaders, nurturing and sustaining a strong culture is essential for achieving excellence.
For deeper insights and actionable strategies for building culture, explore my Wall Street Journal bestseller, Culture Is the Way—a guide to building thriving, high-performing organizations.