What organizational culture really means in practice

When I ask a founder how their company culture is, the most common answer is a list: transparency, agility, collaboration. Sometimes there's a poster on the wall. Sometimes a slide from the last company meeting. That makes sense, since it's what most management books teach you to do.

Culture has very little to do with what's written down. It's what happens in practice — in everyday decisions, in what gets silently tolerated, in how people behave when they're under pressure and think no one is watching.

When the discourse and the practice diverge

I worked at a technology company that prided itself on being human, accessible, open-door. That was what showed up in presentations, in hiring processes, in leadership speeches. But in practice, people were afraid to bring bad news upward. A significant client problem would stay bottled up, passed from person to person in hallways. The CEO only found out when the crisis had already set in. The week before, the status report said everything was fine.

This pattern has a name. Roberto Shinyashiki, a psychiatrist and Doctor of Business Administration from the University of São Paulo, has spent decades studying human behavior inside organizations. One of his most precise observations is that people follow what they observe around them, far more than what they hear in speeches. When leadership talks about openness but reacts poorly to whoever raises a problem, the message the team receives is a different one. And that message is what shapes the culture for real.

Strong culture can also be fragile

There's another pattern I know well — and it's even harder to name because it looks like the opposite of the problem. These are companies with strong cultures, values proclaimed with conviction, well-built rituals. From the outside, everything points to organizational health.

But what drives people's behavior isn't commitment. It's fear. Fear of the unpredictable temperament of whoever's in charge, of being the bearer of bad news, of disagreeing at the wrong moment. This shows up in companies of all sizes — it's not exclusive to any sector or stage of growth.

Kotter and Heskett, professors at Harvard Business School, spent years researching exactly this. They studied over 200 companies across a decade and arrived at a conclusion that still surprises people: a strong culture doesn't guarantee good results. What determines whether a culture sustains long-term growth is whether it's adaptive — that is, whether people can speak up, question things and debate openly. Patrick Lencioni, in his work on team dysfunctions, places trust as the foundation of any culture that truly works — because only with trust is there space for productive conflict, for the kind of debate that makes a company better. Where there is fear, that space disappears.

Where it all begins

Every culture begins with the founders. What gets prioritized under pressure, what gets celebrated, what gets swept under the rug — all of that is absorbed by the people who come after. Over time, it becomes the norm. It becomes the way things are done here, our culture, our way of working.

So when someone tells me their culture "got out of hand," I usually ask: what was leadership tolerating while that was happening? The answer almost always says more than any formal diagnosis.