The Culture Conundrum

Last week we looked at “professional” a word that does enormous organizational work precisely because no one has to define it. Culture can operate the same way.

Pick up any leadership article from the past year and you will find the word culture doing heavy lifting. Companies say they have values and an amazing culture; few use them as a real operating system. Leaders talk about culture constantly, they protect it, cite it in hiring decisions, and blame its absence when things go wrong.

But ask ten leaders in the same organization what their culture actually is, and you will get ten different answers. That is not a communication problem. It is a design problem, and it is built into the word itself.

Scholars have been trying to pin this word down for decades, and the research on this is unusually candid. Despite over 5,300 peer-reviewed papers spanning five decades, there is still no sharp, accepted definition of organizational culture (CIPD, 2022). One of the most cited definitions calls it simply “the way things get done around here” (Deal & Kennedy, 1982), useful shorthand, but thin enough to mean almost anything. A 2024 systematic review of 52 peer-reviewed articles found that most contemporary definitions still converge on the same cluster: shared values, behaviors, norms, assumptions, and beliefs among organizational members — without specifying who set those values, whose norms they reflect, or who gets to decide when someone has met the expectation (Al-Saadat & Sardoh, 2024).

The word holds everything and pins down nothing.

This is the same problem we identified with “professional” in the last post. When a word is elastic enough to absorb any meaning, it becomes available for any use. And in organizations, that availability is rarely neutral.

Here is where the misalignment lives.

When a senior leader describes the culture as collaborative, transparent, or high-performing, they are usually describing the experience of people who already fit the unspoken version of it. The norms that feel obvious to them feel obvious because those norms were built around people like them.

For someone on the outside of that fit, whether by identity, background, communication style, or some combination, the culture is a different place entirely. Same organization. Same values statement. Completely different lived reality.

Only 49% of employees say they trust their employers to create a workplace culture where everyone can thrive (Randstad Workmonitor, 2025). That number is not a morale problem. It is a measurement problem. The culture being described at the top is not the culture being experienced in the middle and at the margins. The gap between those two things is what most culture initiatives never reach, because most culture initiatives start with the assumption that the word means the same thing to everyone in the room.

It does not. Here is what tends to go unsaid.

When an organization says “we have a strong culture,” what it often means is: we have a clear, shared sense of how things are done, and that clarity was built by a particular group of people, in a particular moment, with a particular set of reference points. People who match those reference points experience the culture as welcoming and legible. People who do not spend significant energy translating themselves into it.

That translation has a cost. It shows up in attrition, in disengagement, in the quiet exit of people who could have contributed more if the culture had made room for them.

The fix is not a new values statement. It is a harder question: when we use the word “culture,” whose experience are we using as the baseline? And whose experience are we leaving out of the definition entirely?

That question, asked honestly, changes the conversation. Most organizations have never asked it.

The Unstated is published by Jovanny A. Suriel, Ed.D. If this resonated, share it with a leader who needs to read it.