The Puzzle of Organizational Culture
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In the course of my advisory work, I regularly ask senior executives to describe their organization’s culture. The answers I hear are usually variations on the same theme: people are collaborative, the team is strong, and leadership is accessible. These responses tell me something. Just not what the executive thinks they’re telling me.
They describe the culture as they experience it. From the top.
That gap between how leaders experience an organization and how everyone else does is one of the most consequential blind spots I encounter in my work. And in a business environment defined by disruption, it may be getting more expensive by the day.
The Same Company Can Feel Like Different Places
My work puts me in contact with people across the organization, from the C-suite to middle managers, frontline employees, and individual contributors. I often walk away from those conversations feeling like I’ve been inside three or four entirely different companies.
A senior executive who rose quickly through the ranks will frequently describe a culture built on trust, opportunity, and meritocracy. A mid-level manager who has watched two rounds of layoffs absorb her team’s responsibilities describes a pressure without purpose. A frontline employee’s experience may depend almost entirely on one variable: who their direct supervisor is.
The culture people experience depends in part on where they sit in the organization. Access to information, proximity to decision-makers, and the degree to which someone controls their own work — these shape how the same set of stated values actually lands.
But hierarchy is only part of the story.
The Culture Advantage Few Leaders Recognize
Every organizational culture rewards certain behaviors and quietly discourages others.
Some cultures prize consensus. Others reward speed and independent decision-making. Some value deep analysis before action. Others celebrate the person who moves first and figures it out on the way. Such preferences quietly accumulate over the years and become the organization’s implicit operating system.
Employees whose natural working styles match those expectations tend to experience the culture as supportive and energizing. Employees whose approaches differ from the dominant norm may experience the exact same culture as stifling or marginalizing.
This is not the result of bad leadership. It is simply the reality that cultures are not neutral. They encode preferences. And in a period when organizations urgently need new ideas and adaptive thinking, the people most likely to generate those ideas are also the ones most likely to rub up against the grain of a strong, settled culture.
Disruption Changes the Equation
This issue has always existed. Disruption has made it urgent.
Artificial intelligence is changing work faster than most organizations can respond. Business models that seemed stable a few years ago are under pressure. Competitive advantages disappear quickly. In stable environments, a strong, dominant culture creates consistency and output — genuine assets. In periods of disruption, that same culture can become a liability if it consistently marginalizes people who think differently from those in charge.
Organizations talk about wanting innovation, but innovation rarely comes from teams that see the world the same way. It comes from people who question whether the old rules still apply, who connect ideas across disciplines, and who spot what everyone else has normalized.
Those people often create friction. The question leaders should be asking themselves is whether that friction is a problem to eliminate or a capability to cultivate.
Why Leaders Miss It
Many executives genuinely believe they understand their organizational culture. In my experience, they rarely understand it as fully as they think they do.
The difficulty is the position. Leaders experience the organization from a place of influence. Over time, the feedback they receive conforms to the reality they’ve already shaped. Employees whose perspectives differ from the dominant narrative tend not to surface those perspectives — not because they don’t have them, but because the culture has taught them that doing so is unwise.
Culture Amp’s 2024 employee engagement research found that confidence in leadership has emerged as the top driver of engagement — and yet the share of companies that even ask employees about it has dropped from 54% in 2019 to just 37% in 2024. Leaders are avoiding the very question that matters most.
The result is not simply a leadership blind spot. It is the gradual erosion of the organization’s capacity to see itself clearly — and to adapt.
A Better Way to Think About Culture
Perhaps leaders should stop asking, “What is our culture?”
A more useful question is: “Who flourishes in our culture, and who struggles?”
That question can reveal far more than an engagement score or a values statement ever will. It can surface whether the organization is unintentionally pushing out the people whose perspectives are most likely to help it navigate what comes next.
This is not to downplay the weight of cultural coherence or pretend that all differences are equally productive. Clearly, there are times when people truly are a poor fit. But the best leaders recognize that the healthiest cultures are not the most uniform ones. They are the ones where different ways of seeing can contribute without being systematically marginalized.
McKinsey’s 2024 Organizational Health Index underscores precisely this: the importance of valuing the distinctive skills and viewpoints of all employees — not as a cultural aspiration, but as a driver of enduring organizational health.
The Leadership Challenge
Leaders do not lose touch with their organizations by stopping to care. They lose touch because they begin to mistake their own experience of the culture for everyone else’s.
And in a time when every organization is being asked to rethink old assumptions about how work gets done, who creates value, and what competitive advantage actually looks like, that mistake is costly.
The question is not whether your organization has a strong culture. It is whether that strong culture is positioned to protect your future or protect your past.
