Organizational culture was never a top-down project
Leadership can set the conditions, but the people inside decide what actually sticks.
Ask executives how much interest their CEO takes in improving the work environment, and 69% say it’s high or very high.
Executives think they’re building workplace culture, but “wanting to develop culture” and developing and sustaining a particular environment is more than simply a mandate from the top.
When companies notice a workplace culture problem, the response is usually a project. New values get announced, or an executive committee is formed to brainstorm ways to improve company culture. Sometimes there’s an all-hands meeting about who we are and what we stand for (with slides!)
One review of workplace culture found that executives who rolled out new values reverted to old habits and a focus on tasks the moment they were under pressure. The supposed values or emphasis on company culture were nothing more than a communication exercise.
I’ve experienced this disconnect many times in my career: the company that proclaims to be people-first, and then lays off employees with no notice and no severance. It’s left me feeling like company culture is a farce, because when push comes to shove, the company will always put itself first.
Yet, I’ve seen companies that — at least from the outside — have amazing company culture. Employees seem to love working there, as evidenced by how much they talk about their employer online and the average employee tenure.
We assume that company culture flows downward from the top. And true, leadership sets the tone. But does everyone else simply absorb it? Or is workplace culture created by everyone?
How organizational culture is created
Sociologists settled on what culture means a long time ago: the shared values, beliefs, behavioral expectations, symbols, and artifacts that make up a group’s way of life. Organizational culture — aka workplace culture — is a bit different. It can run independently of the wider societal culture or alongside it. A company doesn’t invent a culture from nothing. It develops one through the way it interacts with the people who work there.
Company culture lives in the ordinary stuff. Hallway conversations and Slack channels. Emphasis on quality versus taking shortcuts. Whether people collaborate or throw each other under the bus.
Dr. Marcus Collins, a clinical associate professor who studies the influence and impact of culture on human behavior, told me:
Most organizations describe their culture by way of celebratory rituals (happy hours), objects (foosball tables), or perks (summer Fridays). Their articulation hardly ever constitutes the underlying cognitions that inform these kinetics, the shared thinking that drives our shared doing.
This omission, unfortunately, often prevents corporate leaders from rolling out a desired cultural state for the organization.
A company’s leadership sets the conditions, without question. There are absolutely situations where the problem starts at the top — operating in a culture of fear is a real thing, and one executive’s behavior can set the tone for everyone reporting to them.
But setting the conditions isn’t getting at the root of what leads to a positive workplace culture, as Dr. Collins notes. It’s missing the “shared thinking” and “shared doing.”
Starbucks has long set the narrative that it’s a great place to work. Once upon a time, that may have been true. But more recently, one journalist argued that “many employees went from feeling like they had ‘the coolest job on the planet’ to something closer to a third-shift factory worker.” The company shifted drastically over time — whether intentionally or not.
Culture sometimes shifts because of external forces. Technology changes. So do regulations, or the market. Any of those can reshape what the work feels like day to day. Explosive growth can also impact culture, if you look at companies like Meta or Google, once heralded as great places to work. Few would say that now.
What this means for employees
Most workplace commentary, including a good deal of mine, focuses on what companies and leadership get wrong. That criticism is warranted: leadership failures are real and expensive, and the people most impacted are those with the least power.
But even if leadership determines a company’s direction, that doesn’t mean change will actually happen. Dr. Collins points out:
When a company says it’s “changing its culture,” the change is predicated on how the organization ultimately responds to said forces. This response is not determined by leadership mandates pushed from the top down but by a collective negotiation that happens from both ends. Just like the marketplace when new ideas are introduced through media or industry, the population decides if the idea sticks.
That negotiation plays out all the time. A company’s “About Us” page may describe the company culture and values one way, and the employees describe something completely different. That disconnect is what people are pointing out when they say a company “lost” its culture. The company keeps broadcasting one version of itself, but that ideal did not permeate through the ranks through collective negotiation. The employees either rejected it or recognized that it was nothing more than lip service.
I’ve written about what happens when employees stop caring and about how management needs to stay connected to the team. Both are relevant to workplace culture: it gets made at the level where the work happens.
None of this means employees should be handed the job of fixing a broken workplace. Some companies like to say that “culture is everyone’s responsibility.” Employees may have some agency, but ultimately, the people responsible are those whose paychecks support that level of responsibility.
I asked Dr. Collins what happens when people feel like a company’s culture and values are no longer aligned with their own. He replied,
When people feel like their values no longer line up with their place of work, what they really need to evaluate is (1) whether they believe what the organization believes and (2) if the organization is living up to it.
If the answer to the first prompt is “no,” then it’s definitely a mismatch, and that person should go find a better fit. If the answer to the second prompt is “no” but the person aligns with the organization’s beliefs, then it’s worth trying to make a change. In fact, this is a potential opportunity to lead.
One of the interesting things about leaving a job — for another job, or to work for yourself — is finding out how much of the culture came with you. You have assumptions about how work is supposed to feel. I remember leaving a toxic job, and when I went to my next employer, I said, “Wait… people are actually nice to each other? On purpose?”
You can walk out of the building and still be running the “how to survive” playbook you learned while there. Which is worth knowing, because that’s the part of the culture that will change, no matter where you land.
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