Culture isn’t a thing you build directly. It’s what emerges — inevitably, whether you intend it or not — from how a team actually operates. From whether leaders navigate uncertainty honestly or perform confidence they don’t have. From whether the domains of team performance are calibrated well or wildly out of balance. From whether the organization has built the systems to learn from its experience and adjust, or whether it’s just lurching forward and hoping.
You don’t manufacture culture. You build the conditions, and culture is what those conditions produce.
The most important thing I can tell you about culture is that you find out what it’s really made of not when things are going well — but when things fall apart.
What I learned from carefully lowering a ship
I was part of the leadership team at AltSchool during one of the hardest periods of that organization’s life. We were closing schools. People were losing jobs. The mission that everyone had signed up for — building a new model for education at scale — was contracting in ways that were real and visible and painful.
In moments like that, there’s an easier path and a harder one. The easier path is to manage the information. To throw a deck at people and try to convince them it’s going to be okay. To protect yourself from the discomfort of sitting in the room with people’s grief and anger and uncertainty.
We chose the harder path. We shared hard news honestly — not softened into something more palatable, but honestly. And then we talked about it. Like adults, not like a management team delivering a verdict. We created real dialogue, not curated presentations. And in those conversations, I asked people directly what I needed from them — to keep showing up for the students and families who were counting on us through the transition.
What I remember most about that period is that the culture held. Not because things were good — they weren’t. But because people felt seen, told the truth, and treated as intelligent adults who deserved to understand what was happening and why.
That’s culture. Not the version that shows up in the good years. The version that holds when the conditions are the hardest they’ll ever be.
And it held because of everything that had been built before the crisis arrived — the honesty in how the leadership team operated, the trust that had been earned through real conversation, the habit of naming hard things rather than managing around them. Taking good care of people within the variables you can control.
The recipe, as I've come to understand it
The organizations I’ve seen build genuinely strong cultures — durable ones, not just ones that feel good in a good year — all have the same three things working together:
The culture initiative — the values workshop, the offsite, the new team ritual — can reinforce these things. But it can’t substitute for them. If the leadership isn’t navigating honestly, if the domains are badly out of calibration, if the organization has no mechanism for learning — the poster on the wall doesn’t change what people experience when they show up to work.
What it looks like when the recipe works
A clear example I can point to from my own work is Felix Lloyd and the team at Beanstack, now Joyful Reading Co.
What Felix built there wasn’t an accident — and it wasn’t just outcomes. It was a leader who embodies all three parts of the recipe, simultaneously, consistently, over years.
On navigational leadership: Felix models it in his own behavior before he asks it of anyone else. He shares hard things honestly. He gives real feedback. He cares deeply for the people on his team and makes that care visible — while never losing his willingness to make difficult calls. When decisions get hard, he reaches for his own mantras — “team first,” “do the next thing,” “slice the apple” — and the team knows them. That’s not a communications strategy. That’s culture-building in action.
On calibrated domains: the team was intentional and consistent about balance. Enough vision to stay oriented, never so much that it became overwhelming. And on process specifically — they excelled at building just enough structure when they needed it. Not before, not after. That discipline kept the culture from tipping into chaos on one side or bureaucracy on the other.
On learning cycles: they built the containers to organize the mess. Weekly CEO updates anchored in roses, buds, and thorns. Semi-annual cycles that created genuine space for reflection and forward planning, punctuated by interim progress checks in between. Regular performance reviews focused on growth, not just evaluation. And underneath all of it, stamina — the consistent small actions that create confidence through constant evolution.
The result was a team that grew from 15 people to 70, navigated an acquisition, and never felt stuck or stale. Not because the conditions were always good. Because the recipe was always working.
The culture held not because conditions were good — they were the hardest they’d ever been — but because honesty, dialogue, and genuine care were built into how the team operated, and leadership treated people like they could handle hard things.
A leader balanced across all four domains, and learning cycles embedded into the organization’s DNA. The culture never got stale — because the organization was always a little more capable than it was six months before.
So what do you actually do?
The honest answer is: you work on the three things in the recipe. You develop your own navigational leadership — your capacity to be honest about uncertainty, to make decisions without all the information, to have the hard conversations rather than manage around them. You calibrate the four domains — diagnose what’s out of balance and adjust deliberately. And you build the cycles that allow your organization to learn from its experience over time.
Do those three things with genuine commitment, and culture takes care of itself. Not overnight. Not without hard moments. But sustainably, durably, in a way that holds even when the conditions get hard.
That is where culture comes from.