Culture isn’t something people absorb by proximity—it’s something they learn through structure, story, and repetition. This article explores why every strong organization must train its culture on purpose, or risk drifting into dysfunction.
The Lie That Culture Is “Caught”
There’s a line that gets repeated in leadership circles—sometimes with pride, sometimes with resignation: “Culture is caught, not taught.”
It sounds wise. It feels intuitive. Culture, after all, is made up of the thousands of little actions, reactions, and rituals that define an organization’s character. These things aren’t always written down. They emerge. They evolve. They’re passed down the way accents or mannerisms are passed down—through imitation, repetition, and shared context.
But this belief—that culture is something people “catch” just by being around it—is not just misleading. It’s dangerous. Because while culture may be absorbed unconsciously, it is almost never absorbed accurately. In fact, when culture is not taught with clarity and intentionality, what people actually absorb is not the best of your culture—it’s the loudest parts, the most visible behaviors, the most powerful personalities. Over time, those signals become the default culture. And often, they’re not the ones you meant to transmit.
The truth is this: every organization trains its culture, whether it realizes it or not. The only question is whether it’s doing it on purpose.
What Happens When Culture Isn’t Taught
When leaders fail to articulate and model the culture they want, something else will step in to define it—usually whatever behavior gets rewarded, tolerated, or repeated most often. That behavior becomes the unwritten rulebook, and the rest of the organization will adjust accordingly.
If the most aggressive person in the room always gets their way, your culture will become competitive. If no one ever disagrees publicly with leadership, your culture will become silent. If the only thing celebrated is quarterly performance, your culture will become transactional. And if someone asks, “Is this how we do things here?” the answer they’ll get won’t be a clear explanation of values. It’ll be a shrug.
Culture always fills the vacuum. If you don’t define it, someone else will. And they usually won’t do it with the same level of thought, nuance, or integrity that you’d bring to it yourself.
Culture Is Not Just a Set of Behaviors—It’s a Reflection of Shared Identity
One of the most common mistakes in organizational leadership is to treat culture as a set of surface-level behaviors. Teams often define it in terms of how people talk in meetings, how decisions get made, how feedback is delivered, or how conflict is handled. But while these behaviors are visible, they are not foundational. How we behave is always secondary to what we believe. They’re expressions—symptoms, not sources.
At its core, culture is a reflection of shared identity. It’s not just about what people do. It’s about what people believe about themselves—their purpose, their role, their belonging. Do they see themselves as trusted contributors? As caretakers of something meaningful? As secure members of a mission they’re proud to represent? Or do they see themselves as expendable, invisible, or replaceable?
If you want to shape culture, you can’t just coach behavior. You have to shape the internal identity that behavior flows from.
That’s why sustainable culture-building begins with clarity around who we are. Not aspirational branding or idealized values, but a grounded, day-in-day-out articulation of identity that drives both posture and action. When a team sees itself clearly and securely inside a larger mission, behavior doesn’t have to be enforced. It emerges. It coheres. It endures—even under pressure.
You Have to Teach People How to Think
In every healthy organization, people don’t just know what to do. They know how to think. They know how decisions are made. They know what trade-offs matter. They know the hidden criteria that shape whether something moves forward or dies in committee. And they know the why behind the work.
That kind of thinking isn’t intuitive. It’s taught—through coaching, repetition, exposure, and reflection.
I’ve seen this firsthand. I tell this story often, but years ago, while preparing to launch a new nonprofit, I spent six months crafting what would become a 17-word mission statement and a 15-word vision statement. They weren’t marketing phrases. They were strategic anchors—words that would get repeated thousands of times in meetings, memos, sermons, retreats, and one-on-ones. Those statements emerged from three simple but robust pillars of vision that our launch team had shaped together.
From the start, we trained our leaders not just in what we were doing, but how we were doing it. What questions we asked. What we prioritized when everything felt urgent. What we said no to, and why. Over time, those mental models became embedded in our language. New team members didn’t just learn the mission—they learned how to think like someone who carried it. That clarity became our most consistent compliment. People didn’t always agree with our choices, but they never questioned our direction. And that clarity made every decision easier—whether it was a hire, an initiative, or an exit.
What I’ve learned is this: people will copy what’s clear. But they will only carry what they’ve been trained to think. That’s the difference between culture as branding and culture as formation.
Culture Doesn’t Scale Unless It’s Transferrable
Small teams can sometimes survive on vibe. When an organization is new, lean, and high-trust, it’s tempting to believe that culture is self-sustaining. After all, you know each other. You move fast. You correct quickly. But as soon as the team begins to grow—especially across locations or departments—culture starts to splinter.
The same values get interpreted in different ways. What feels natural in one subculture feels alien in another. Meetings feel different depending on who leads them. Onboarding becomes more about task than tone. And slowly, without anyone noticing, the organization becomes less aligned—not because anything broke, but because the culture was never made transferrable.
If your culture only works when you’re in the room, it’s not a strong culture. It’s a mood.
Organizations that scale well are organizations that teach their culture as a system. They create documents, rhythms, rituals, and expectations that reinforce how people think, how they speak, how they act in tension, how they make decisions, how they resolve disagreement, and how they evaluate performance. They build a culture library—not of slogans, but of mindsets. They systematize story-sharing. They train managers not just to hit goals, but to translate values into behaviors at every level.
The Danger of Cultural Drift
When culture isn’t trained, it starts to drift. And that drift is rarely benign. It usually drifts toward passivity, fear, ego, or cynicism—because those are the default patterns in most organizational life.
What begins as “high-trust autonomy” becomes unspoken hierarchy. What begins as “grace-centered accountability” becomes low-confrontation tolerance. What begins as “entrepreneurial freedom” becomes every department optimizing for itself.
And because culture drift is gradual, most teams don’t notice it until something breaks. Morale drops. A toxic manager rises. Turnover spikes. People stop raising concerns. And by then, the damage is already done.
But none of this is inevitable. Drift can be prevented—but only if culture is treated as something that must be taught, guarded, and continually retrained.
How to Train Culture on Purpose
Training culture doesn’t require a two-day offsite or a laminated value card (though tools like this can be a helpful and even necessary starting point). It requires consistency. Here are five ways healthy organizations train culture in the real world:
1. Codify Identity-Shaped Practices
Don’t begin with behavior—begin with identity. Culture doesn’t stick because people are told what to do. It sticks when people know who they are. Strong organizations start by articulating a shared identity: a secure, collective sense of who we are, what we believe about our mission, and how we relate to one another.
From that foundation, you can begin to name the practices that flow from that identity. These practices aren’t rules—they’re reflections. How does a trusted team handle conflict? How does a mission-minded leader make decisions when values compete? How does a community centered on grace respond to failure?
Codifying culture is about making the invisible visible—so that what’s most valuable isn’t left to guesswork or diluted over time. You’re not scripting behavior. You’re translating belonging into shared rhythms.
2. Ritualize the Story You Want to Scale
Every culture lives on story—whether it knows it or not. The stories your organization tells, repeats, and celebrates become the moral memory of your team. Over time, they form your real culture—not your stated one.
That’s why wise leaders are story-shapers. They don’t just share success stories. They curate formative ones. They celebrate the moment someone acted in quiet integrity when no one was watching. They name the cost of staying aligned. They hold up small examples of identity lived out in pressure, uncertainty, or ambiguity—and they tell those stories until they form a pattern.
You can’t scale values if you don’t scale story. So build cultural storytelling into your rhythms: onboarding, all-hands, retreats, manager meetings. Help your people understand not just what matters—but why it matters, where they’ve seen it embodied, and how they’re part of continuing the story.
3. Teach Your Operating System Out Loud
Most teams are expected to execute culture without ever being taught how their leaders think. That’s a recipe for drift.
Culture won’t replicate unless people understand the underlying decision-making system that supports it. They need to know how leaders weigh trade-offs, how tension between values is resolved, and what happens when clarity is slow or incomplete.
This means leaders must lead out loud. Say what you’re choosing. Say why. Say what you’re saying no to. And say it in a way that trains others how to think—not just what to do. When leaders narrate their internal process, it equips others to carry those values when no one’s there to model them.
Don’t assume your team understands how cultural integrity plays out under pressure. Teach it. Live it. Narrate it. That’s how alignment moves from instinct to shared structure.
4. Coach the Translators, Not Just the Executors
Middle managers carry the most cultural weight—and the most risk. They’re the translators between top-level clarity and day-to-day execution. If they haven’t internalized your identity as an organization, they will default to performance, policy, or self-protection under pressure.
That’s why you can’t just train managers to hit metrics. You have to train them to embody and extend your culture—to be secure enough to lead from trust, not fear; to coach for ownership, not compliance; and to reinforce shared identity in every room they enter.
If you want your culture to outlast the founding team, this is non-negotiable. Spend disproportionate energy here. Create space for conversation, reflection, and feedback—not just performance dashboards. Your managers will either multiply culture or muffle it. And the difference is whether they’ve been coached in identity, not just output.
5. Hold the Line When It Would Be Easier Not To
Culture is not proven in easy moments. It’s proven under pressure—when the decision is expensive, when the performer is irreplaceable, when the shortcut would be faster.
This is where many organizations lose their way. They say the right things, until upholding those things costs something. But every time you bend a value for convenience, you train your team to believe that identity is conditional. Every time you protect someone who violates the culture because they deliver results, you teach the team that performance matters more than character.
The most formative moments in an organization’s life are the moments it could compromise—and doesn’t. If your culture only holds when it’s easy, it isn’t culture. It’s branding. But if it holds when the pressure mounts, it becomes conviction. And conviction scales.
Culture Is the Real Strategy
Every company has strategies, products, and objectives. But those things change. Culture is what holds or breaks when pressure comes. It’s what makes some organizations resilient and others brittle. It’s what turns short-term momentum into long-term movement.
But that only happens when leaders take responsibility for training culture—not just assuming it will be caught.
Culture is not caught.
Culture is taught.
And when it’s taught well, it doesn’t just stick.
It scales.
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