Culture by Design
Culture isn’t something you build. It’s something that emerges — from everything else you build.
Why culture initiatives fail, what actually produces culture, and what I learned about all of it from being part of a leadership team that had to close schools.
Every organization I’ve ever worked in or consulted to has had some version of a culture initiative. The values statement. The offsite. The new ritual. The all-hands with the slides about who we are and where we’re going.
And in almost every case, the culture initiative was a symptom of a misdiagnosis.
Not because the values were wrong or the intentions weren’t genuine. But because culture isn’t a thing you build directly. It’s what emerges — inevitably, whether you intend it or not — from how a leadership 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 hedged, 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.
It felt like we were carefully lowering a ship to the bottom of the ocean. We weren’t letting it crash down and make a massive mess for everyone — we were lowering it down gently, together, as a team.
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.
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:
- Navigational leadershipLeaders who are honest about the path — who acknowledge that change is not linear, that they don’t have all the answers, and that the journey will require hard choices. When leaders perform certainty they don’t have, people feel managed. That feeling is culture.
- Calibrated domainsVision, Process, Relationships, and Problem Solving — in balance, not maximized. When any domain is over or under-dialed, people feel it before they can name it. Over-processed culture feels bureaucratic and transactional. Under-processed culture feels chaotic. Too much vision without the other three and people feel overwhelmed and cynical. That feeling is culture.
- Embedded learning cyclesDeliberate rhythms of action and reflection that let the organization adjust course based on what it’s actually experiencing — not just push forward on the original plan regardless of what the evidence says. Organizations that learn from their experience stay alive. The aliveness is culture.
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
The best positive example I can point to from my own work is Felix Brandon Lloyd and the team at Beanstack, now Joyful Reading Co.
What Felix built there wasn’t an accident. It was the product of a leader who is genuinely balanced across all four domains — someone who holds vision without letting it overwhelm, who runs tight enough process to create productivity without bureaucracy, who builds real trust while holding real standards. And a team that grew from 15 people to 70, navigated an acquisition, and through all of it never felt stuck or stale.
Same recipe as AltSchool. Completely different circumstances. In one case, it produced the dignity and trust that let a team go through a genuinely hard thing without it becoming a disaster. In the other, it produced the kind of organizational vitality that makes people proud to be part of something and eager to keep building it.
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.
The poster on the wall is fine. It’s just not the work.