How Great Culture Really Works

What & Who this post is for:

I’m not sure what your reaction to this post will be, but I’m eager to find out. Culture is an interesting topic because people have radically-differing opinions about it…not just about how to do culture well, but what culture even is.

There is no point in publishing or reading any more “me too” content about culture. Most content about culture is just saying the same things over and over again. So this post is going to push, and hard. It is going to scour your brain to create a clearer definition of the word culture. It is going to directly confront a popular cultural belief that happy people do better work. It is going to scrub away a few distractions that make people less effective. And then it’s going to talk about how you can actually change what a person believes, list out a few beliefs I think you should be serious about, and show you how to use those beliefs in real world work.

This post is for people who seek a deep, rather than a surface level understanding of what culture is, what it does, and how you can be great at it. I hope you love it and that it nudges you to grab on to new, powerful ideas while productively challenging old, weak ideas.

I have thought more about culture than I have any other topic in the last 10 years, discovering and connecting dots to create clarity where so many people feel vagueness. And I have personally experienced several big, eye-opening moments as these dots started to connect between culture and the human brain. I believe, if you embrace these insights and sculpt them into something that works for you, you will feel more clarity (and experience more success) with culture than you ever have before.

CORE is not the only high-quality source of information on culture, but I believe you will find it to be the highest quality by a significant margin, and also the most unapologetic in questioning the parts of culture that are placebos or counterproductive, irrespective of how popular those ideas might be.

Sacred Filet Mignon

To get down to a “pure” and effective approach to culture, we’re going to have to lead a few sacred cows into the ring. Namely, the paradigm of mission, vision, values. I will try to treat ideas like these with respect, but no more respect than they truly deserve, given their track record.

One thing to keep in mind: I’m coming at this from the perspective of having seen hundreds of cultures. When I say things like, “This doesn’t work,” I don’t mean it doesn’t work for you, specifically. You are just one data point within a massive social experiment that is unfolding across thousands of organizations all over the world. What I mean, instead, is across the over 500 companies I have personally seen up-close, there are crystal-clear patterns of what does and doesn’t work with potency, consistently, and requisite side effects. I don’t just talk to leadership teams in my work. I talk to the teams in the action, too. And it is not at all uncommon to see a leadership team that believes something is working great when almost nobody through execution, middle management, or even the customer base agrees. The truth can suck to hear sometimes, but it’s better to know the truth than to go on believing something is working when it really isn’t working well or at all.

This is important because the more elite you want to be, the more that you need truly elite solutions. Things that work sometimes, or only under the most ideal conditions, are not the tools I feel you should be staking the performance and value of your business or career on. Call me a snob, but I want you to have only the best stuff at your disposal.

It’s taken me a minute to write this post because I wanted to get it right; and I’m sorry for that. It just kept growing. So I’ve been toiling away to make this post come together into something cohesive, actionable, thought-provoking, and hopefully enjoyable.

On the heels of the last post on shallow leadership and casualty, we’re going to navigate down to the depths of culture, your single best causal tool for engagement, commitment, alignment, feedback, people’s growth, and operational efficiency.

Who this is for:

• Founders & Leaders - you are the most empowered audience for this post. I hope you leave with full confidence that you are the primary owner of culture and that you have a grasp on how to better understand and sculpt your culture with high intentionality and proactivity.

• The CHRO - The HR industry is currently circulating both great and not so great information about culture. This post is the fire the burns off the waste.

• Managers - you will also benefit from this post. I’ll show you how you can create a culture for your team that will be significantly better than the macro culture around you (like a bubble of greatness), and will make you the single best manager at your entire organization, by a landslide.

• Contributors - you will benefit from this post too, but very differently than managers and leaders. Instead, you will learn how to read a culture well enough to know what you are a part of (or would be stepping into if you’re job hunting), ask more powerful interview questions, and make vastly better career choices that compound into a 5x or 10x career by avoiding career-flattening cultures and staying on rocket ships. You will also begin to see the key ways in which you can influence culture, when you are able. And you will be ahead of the curve, understanding culture before you become a manager, leader, or founder.

Share this post with:

• Your leadership peers - to help you spot gaps, stoke discussion, feel conviction, and create alignment for the months and years ahead.

• The people managers who report to you - to push them harder to be intentional instead of passive with their team culture. Use this as a framework to audit strengths, gaps, and mistakes in the culture each manager is creating for their team.

• Friends and industry peers - to compare notes on your approaches and geek out on career and what’s working for you.

• Your audience - to add your own thoughts on social media, podcasts, or your own newsletter if this creates a platform for getting your thoughts to sink in.

The State of the Union

We have gotten lost with company culture. Whether you listen to your friend’s anecdotes or scrub through the hundreds of statistics published by Gallup, McKinsey, and more about how company culture, employee engagement, cross-functional work, and more are going, it’s a true disasterpiece out there.

• 2 of every 3 people in the US are disengaged (Gallup)

• 82% of managers are not working out (Gallup)

• Only 21% of leadership teams are trusted by their team (Gallup)

• 85% of workers do not feel purpose in their work (McKinsey)

• Toxic cultures cost $223 Billion (with a B) per year (SHRM)

• 75% of cross-functional teams are dysfunctional (HBR)

We have to consider that results like these indicate we might be deeply, deeply wrong about culture. Yes, it’s possible that we are just getting a few tactics wrong and that these abysmal outcomes are because we just have to tighten a few bolts down. But it’s also possible, and probably more likely, that these types of stats indicate that we must be getting this super wrong, and we might need to rethink things all the way down to the bare metal and consider totally new and different thinking.

I get that not everyone wants to be an early adopter of novel ideas or a contrarian to what’s popular, but human science has started to make it really clear that there are better approaches than the ones we’ve used over the last 80 years. We know what the brain responds better to; we just haven’t brought that knowledge to the business world yet.

Even AI already knows how and why those approaches fail so often…Just look at this answer from ChatGPT. ChatGPT could already build a better culture than most leadership teams, simply because it actually acknowledges the issues that many leadership teams totally deny:

When cultures are designed in such a way that the human brain is clearly misunderstood and misused, you get all sorts of non-ideal outcomes, and those are exactly the outcomes most businesses are getting today, per the statistics above.

Too many cultures are using brains wrong. They are working against the grain of the human mind, rather than working with it. And the data makes that pretty clear.

So today, let’s learn how to use brains best. Let’s be on the good side of just about every statistic.

Our Checklist:

• Accept that things aren’t working

Culture is Easy! Happy People Do Better Work!

Why is the scrollbar on this post so long when culture can just be simple? We figured this out, already, right? What more is there to know?

With all of these statistics pointing to how unhappy people are at work, it seems to many like the answer is staring us in the face. People are super unhappy. Unhappy people do crappy work, disengage, and quit. So, the answer is obvious, then...

We need to make people happy!

This makes total sense if the only two states of the human mind are unhappy and happy. Let’s just toggle the switch inside of everyone’s brain and we will be good to go!

Human beings love to find the simple solution to complex problems. We love things that sound right. And this solution checks both boxes: it looks simple and it does sound right.

But it isn’t. It actually isn’t simple, or right.

And when things are neither simple nor right, that’s a big issue because we are about to spend a lot of energy trying to solve a complicated problem (how to make people happy) when solving it won’t even get us what we are looking for (doing better work).

The “happy people do better work” idea became popular through the tech boom, and surged in popularity through COVID, especially once hiring became ultra-competitive and happiness was treated as a differentiator to attract talent.

So, why is this wrong?

First, it’s a classic case of getting cause and effect conflated.

This is a bit like when we say people who floss live longer. When we look at environments where people are doing great work and working well together, they do seem to be happier than the people in environments doing crappy work poorly together. But is the happiness the cause of the good work and cooperation, or is it the other way around?

And second, it’s a gross oversimplification to believe that the only two options in the human mind are happy or unhappy, and that either one of those options is best for anything, never mind good work.

The human mind can feel many, many things in addition to happy and unhappy. It can feel nervous, excited, curious, confident, resilient, compassionate, detached, expressive, obligated, stubborn, desirous, accomplished, disoriented, appreciated, imaginative, pragmatic, analytical, vulnerable, and more. And it can feel many of these things, like resilience, obligation, and vulnerability, whether the brain is “happy” or not.

The blunt truth is that happy people do not do better work. From a strict causality perspective, meaning, “Does INPUT A actually cause OUTCOME B to occur?” happiness is beyond the shadow of any possible doubt not causal of better work. Not even close.

So, the question is what IS causal of people doing their best work? What causes people to engage, cooperate, think well, embrace personal growth, learn quickly, and do it all in a way that produces positive side effects (including happiness) instead of negative side effects (like unhappiness)?

Well, to the brain, the answer is clear: purpose.

Just look at these two sentences:

Happy people do better work.

Purposeful people do better work.

To me, it feels pretty obvious that the second sentence is the correct one. Purpose, fueled by resilience-boosting serotonin and connection-building oxytocin, is a state of mind that is hell bent on creating impact, serving, mastery, and meaning. And it will experience a form of happiness, called fulfillment, as a payoff. Good, authentic happiness.

And if you’ve been a part of a culture that tried the happiness approach out, it probably feels pretty obvious what the side effects of a happiness-causes-good-work culture might be…

A culture focused on happiness is going to be a mess. A hidden mess at first. A small mess shortly thereafter. And a hypermassive disaster after a few years.

A culture centrally focused on happiness is causal of several things:

• Self-centeredness

  • A sense of entitlement to protect their happiness and comfort

  • Difficulty creating alignment due to people feeling validated to have their own disparate views and beliefs

• Avoidance of discomfort

  • Difficulty delivering and receiving feedback

  • Difficulty with upholding standards of excellence and conduct

• Depression

  • A sustained focus on happiness can later lead to a sense of emptiness and meaninglessness, especially if we have prioritized happiness over achievement and impact

• Fakeness

  • Benign fakeness will come in the form of feigned enthusiasm, forced fun, and inauthentic enthusiasm, treating the team like children

  • Manipulative fakeness will come in the form of bad actors leveraging the niceness and assumption of good intentions to control things, using humility as a weapon to silence those who seek to stop them

• Not doing great work

  • Teams that fake niceness, can’t navigate tough discussions, can’t offer feedback, can’t experience discomfort, and are entitled to their own perspectives on everything do genuinely terrible work.

Have you seen any (or all) of those phenomena? Sadly, these are actually natural consequences of focusing on happiness itself. These are not hypotheticals. This is exactly what is happening at many companies. Perhaps the one you work for now.

In an attempt to solve the surprisingly-complex problem of “making people happy,” these cultures start to reach for the awkward tools of disproportionate rewards and recognition, exorbitant benefits that people acclimate to, and the tacit promise of constant, ongoing happiness. I have spoken with literally hundreds of people who use the phrase, “We are all ______ nice,” where you fill in the blank with their company name. This is the brand the employees have given to the inauthentic niceness they are exposed to on a daily basis, where we pretend we like ideas that we don’t, pretend we like people we don’t, and pretend we like a culture we don’t. Where we actively sustain and allow things we should be actively nullifying and correcting.

At the macro level, this trend has made much of the workforce self-centered, self-righteous, and depressed, miraculously at the same time.

I hope it is clear that the human brain is not designed to be drowning in the happiness culture: easiness, pleasure, and protection from negative emotion at all times. Nor is it designed to be drowning in the threat culture: stress, chaos, and total uncertainty about who can be trusted. Nor is it designed to be soaking in the hard-charging rewards culture: incentives, bonuses, power, bias to action, hustle bros, all-in, etc.

Yet in the hundreds of companies I’ve worked with, cultures are overwhelmingly a mix of happiness, threats, and rewards. Cultures that pretty much everyone looks back on when older and wiser and realizes that wasn’t it.

So why do most cultures look like this? Because these are the easy ways of thinking about culture. Happiness, threats, and rewards are obvious tools. They are approaches we can use to train dogs. But purpose, the uniquely human, future-centric, impact-centric, resilient, unselfish thing that actually causes deep, fulfilling happiness and good work? Well, that seems hard in contrast.

But it isn’t. It’s actually easier to cause a brain to feel purpose than happiness. I’ll show you why and how.

The human brain is built for adaptation, problem solving, cooperation, resilience, achievement, and the correct timing of rewards: after success has been achieved.

The human brain is built for purpose. And if we can simply stop distracting ourselves with canine-level tactics for a minute, we will see how to activate purpose within the human minds around us.

Our Checklist:

• Things aren’t working

• Happy people do not do better work, culture has to be about purpose

What is “Culture?”

Let’s get a bedrock definition of culture in mind as we proceed. What I want to propose is that culture is actually a much simpler idea than most people describe. There are good reasons we overcomplicate it, but in doing so, we distract ourselves from aiming at the target that a better definition reveals.

We’ll begin with what culture isn’t. These might cause a reaction, but this is a necessary step when working with an overgrown definition. When definitions balloon to include distractions, it’s essential that we first highlight a bunch of things that don’t belong and hit the delete key. Stick with me, because I think this is incredibly important to work through if you want to experience clarity.

1. Culture is not our team’s behavior and habits. It is deeper than that. It is a gigantic mistake to say that culture is about behavior and habits, because this statement will cause people to try to sculpt behavior and habits directly. This leads to inauthentic, clumsy, fake, and impermanent behavior and habits (or outright ambivalence and rejection). We do not want to say anything that would aim people’s efforts at this target instead of the correct one.

2. Mission, Vision, Values is not culture. It is a cultural tool, and a fairly ineffective tool for most teams who try it. Mission, Vision, Values is like kicking a field goal. Looks simple enough, but 95% of executives can’t kick a field goal from 10 yards away. It’s harder than it looks…most people who try just do something hysterical, embarrassing, or injurious. I’ll show you a much better and much easier way that 95% of executives can do. And even if you are one of the 5% of executives who can kick a field goal or conjure a truly inspiring mission, vision, and values, it will still work significantly better when you build a culture using better tools.

3. Culture is not the non-work stuff. While some “culture” budget goes into non-work stuff, your actual culture is fully work-related. We call this duality the culture “in the work” vs. the culture “around the work.” Most of the “around the work” culture assumes that if we create happiness, activities, cool office space, fun, games, and team building exercises, we strengthen culture and the work we do. It’s highly-ineffective to try to improve work by doing non-work things, and it can backfire badly. We’ll show you a better way, and you can still have plenty of fun, too.

If you look up culture in the dictionary, you’re going to end up with a definition that looks like this (with a bunch of other synonyms, too, like values, rituals, customs, behaviors, etc.)…

Culture is the beliefs and habits of a group of people.

So the first order of business is dealing with what I just said about what culture isn’t (#1, above).

You must understand that people’s habits are a product of their beliefs.

If you struggle to believe that, you will never understand culture, and you will never be good at culture. That is because your behaviors will emerge from a belief that behaviors can work independent of beliefs (and you will be wrong). It is a mistake to attempt to change your team’s behaviors and habits directly, without first changing their beliefs. It will not go well.

Sorry to be so blunt, but you will fail at culture if you try this. You might even believe that it’s working as people pantomime the behaviors and habits you’ve worked so hard to ingrain into them, but their behaviors will be deeply inauthentic and impermanent due to the underlying misalignment with what they truly believe.

This is not as abstract as it might seem. A human being’s actions are either in alignment with their beliefs, or they are out of alignment. It is a basic, mechanical concept. Behavior that is out of alignment with beliefs is untenable. Therefore, aiming your cultural efforts at behavior, itself, is a very big error. Instead, we’re going to use behavior as the symptom…behavior is proof of whether a person’s beliefs have been updated or not. Doing it this way will cause both the belief and the behavior to adapt more quickly.

So here’s the real definition of culture:

Culture is what people believe.

That’s it. Your job, if you want to have a great culture, is to understand and sculpt what people believe. It’s not that people’s behavior doesn’t matter…it’s that we are treating behavior and habits as a consequence, and as proof, of beliefs. It works like this: if you are not seeing changes in behaviors, it is simply because you did not succeed in changing what people believe. Know that, embrace that.

When you don’t get the behaviors you want, don’t ask for different behaviors. Ask people why they do/don’t believe the thing that caused the behavior. Keep bringing everything back to what people believe. Treat their belief as the goal, not their behavior.

I want to reinforce this as much as possible: it is more important than it might seem to remove the behaviors part from the definition and reinforcement of culture. We don’t want people trying to alter both beliefs and behaviors. We do not want to present culture as a two-target concept. Doing so will cause people to attempt shots on the second target, which, as we just covered, will cause huge issues.

Culture is a single-target concept. Aim 100% of your efforts at the beliefs target.

Our Checklist:

• Things aren’t working

• Happy people do not do better work, culture has to be about purpose

• Culture is about beliefs. Do not try to change behavior directly. Big mistake.

Can we change what people believe?

When I talk to most people about people’s beliefs, I get exactly the same pushback from anyone who pushes back: You can’t change what people believe.

From there, I also get a number of supporting arguments:

• People’s beliefs are based on their lived experience.
  (Not true - people believe all sorts of things they’ve never experienced.)

• You can’t change everyone’s beliefs.
  (True. We don’t want to change everyone’s beliefs. We want to change the beliefs of the people who want to be a part of what we do.)

• People have to decide for themselves what they believe.
  (True. It’s great when people volunteer that they want to believe illogical things. They can go ruin our competitors’ companies instead of ours.)

This pushback feels a lot like arguing with someone about the value of design. You can win the argument with 1,000 people, and tomorrow you’re going to meet a brand new person who doesn’t get the value of design. It’s like groundhog day.

All of these counterpoints are either wrong because they are wrong, or wrong because they are right and we want them to be right. It does not matter what barrier to sculpting people’s beliefs a person thinks is in the way. What we all need to see, instead, is that people are doing the impossible, every single day.

The Ritz-Carlton, Disney Parks, and Costco are changing what people believe every single day, replacing self-centered beliefs with service-oriented beliefs. Other companies (names redacted) are changing what people believe every day, replacing a desire to create value for customers with an inward-facing desire to receive value from customers. And many companies that I also won’t name are changing what people believe every day, replacing a desire to focus on work and impact with a desire to focus energy on social topics, politics, and issues their actions will never impact.

Companies and cultures are changing what people believe every day. Some for the better, some for the worse. The question isn’t whether people’s beliefs are changeable. It’s whether or not you are good at it, and whether or not you’re using it for the better.

Our Checklist:

• Things aren’t working

• Happy people do not do better work, culture has to be about purpose

• Culture is about beliefs. Do not try to change behavior directly. Big mistake.

• You 100% can change what people believe, and fast.

Becoming Effective at Sculpting Beliefs

The skill of culture building: challenging, proposing, and confirming beliefs. You need to be adept at understanding what people currently believe, comfortable discussing those beliefs, and comfortable showing why certain beliefs help us, and others hurt us, objectively.

Let’s talk about how to do that, and why it should feel perfectly fine to do it.

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