TL;DR: Everyone’s talking about culture — ping pong tables, best-place-to-work awards, offsite retreats — but the data tells a different story: most employees are happy, but few are actually engaged. And despite CEOs pouring resources into culture initiatives, more than half still describe their workplaces as toxic. The real problem isn’t culture itself. Culture is just the echo. The source is identity — and until organizations do the hard work of defining who they actually are at their core, every culture fix will be a band-aid on a broken bone.
There’s a lot of talk about culture these days.
Gluttonizingly so.
It’s the hot button, cool-kid table talk that everyone loves to boast about.
We’ve cracked the code on building great culture.
We’re a Best Place to Work for the fifth year in a row.
We’ve got free coffee and snacks.
The problem with culture table talk, though, is that when you’re the one actually sitting at the table, you know that quite often, it’s all a load of cow patties.
From your view, people are tired, burnt out, overworked and underappreciated. (At least, that’s how they feel.)
And from your leaders’ views (the ones responsible for filling up everyone’s empty heart buckets), they’re tired, burnt out, overworked, and underappreciated, too.
The truth is that building strong cultures is nuanced – as proven by the weird data telling us that even though more than 75% of workers say they’re happy at work, less than 25% are actually engaged.
If we agree that happiness = comfort and engagement = investment, something about these numbers ought to be making our bellies rumble – because if my non-math oriented brain is right, the gap between happiness and engagement seems to be introducing a conundrum: What good are happy employees if they’re not invested in what you’re trying to build?
Ponder that conundrum long enough and you might start to wonder this out loud: If our happy employees don’t really care about the work enough to be engaged with it, how can our work endure?
Why the Usual Fixes Fall Short
It’s been the question driving culture research for decades, and while some people make good money selling their theories and wares to humans who lead other humans, if you catch them whispering in the alley, you’ll likely hear a confession that sounds something like this: If humans weren’t so messy, culture would be easy.
Story of the ages.
It’s a shared agony that points to something I’ve seen play out in my work with founders over the last decade: We struggle with finding the perfect culture fix because we’re looking in all the wrong places.
(If sales and marketing can just ramp up profits, we’ll all be better off.
If we can just create better employee policies, frustrations will decrease.
If we can host more off-work retreats, we’ll like each other more.
If we can just spend more money on the right marketing, everyone will understand who we are.)
These approaches are common first-line defense fixes – more sales, smarter marketing, more culture programs – but something appears wildly amiss.
92% of CEOs say culture is really, really important, BUT. . .
just 10% – 15% say their culture and business strategy are aligned, AND. . .
a whopping 52% describe their workplace culture as toxic.
If the numbers are right, and if CEOs know that culture matters, and if they’re still struggling to build a great one (in spite of the marketing dollars, leadership development, and strategy dollars spent), isn’t it logical to ask if culture is actually the thing we should to be trying to fix?
What an ancient story tells us about culture
Let me explain by starting with a story from the ancient traditions of the Abrahamic faiths – not because I want to sermonize to you, but because it’s one of the greatest stories I know when it comes to culture building.
The disclaimer I feel like I need to state plainly right about now: You don’t have to be a faith-follower to step into the lesson here.
When Abram left his home country of Ur, he took a gamble – leaving behind not just his land and his people, but his entire worldview. Ur was a polytheistic nation who worshiped a moon god. And they had advanced enough that their civilization was pretty sophisticated.
Plenty of knowledge. Plenty of life’s ancient comforts. Zero reason to leave on camelback.
If you put yourself back into the B.C. timeline, you’ll grasp why everything about Abram’s identity was tied up in this country: his land, his religion, the people around him. And you’ll grasp the slight insanity at leaving it all in pursuit of a God who left no room for moon gods when he promised to make Abram father to the multitudes.
Follow me and I will build you a great nation.
That promise, big and bold, had to feel pretty amazing – until Abram understood the realities of the painful pre-requisite: Before God could build that great nation, Abram’s identity would have to be completely undone and rebuilt.
If you don’t know his story, it’s one worth reading. He faces famine, economic scarcity, political danger, moral failure, family fracture, hope deferred, and existential testing – time and time again where he wondered if the God he had followed out of Ur had betrayed his trust and if the promise he’d been given would indeed come true.
In hindsight, we can see Abram’s trials as part of a bigger, incomprehensible plan where God makes it clear: I am God and you are not.
God’s promise wasn’t just to Abram. It was to an entire people group, and God knew those people would face pressure — pressure that would test rituals, challenge symbols, and strain belief. He knew He’d give them rules they’d never be able to follow and that they’d spend nights wishing God had never called their name. So, God didn’t start with the culture. He started with Abram’s identity – because He knew the culture of a nation would fail if it was asked to live out what identity hadn’t clarified.
Abram’s story is just one of many throughout the globe that reinforces the same idea: Culture doesn’t fail (just) because the wrong leaders are at the helm or because initiatives don’t get the right support or enough funding.
It fails when identity hasn’t been clarified. (See Greek myths, Roman tales, and even the Declaration of Independence. Change and culture-building always come after identity has been tested and defined.)
Identity vs. Culture: What’s the Difference?
| WHAT IS IDENTITY? who you are | WHAT IS CULTURE? how that’s expressed |
|---|---|
| Beliefs Values Worldview Assumptions Mental models Moral boundaries | Symbols Artifacts Stories Language Rituals Formal/Informal Behaviors |
Identity is the only star in a dark night sky that points towards who you are, who you’re not, and who belongs or doesn’t belong with you.
It serves as the decision logic that determines how tradeoffs get resolved. It offers the values hierarchy that establishes what gets protected when pressure mounts. It builds the moral boundaries that reinforce what your organization refuses to become.
Leaving no room for self-deception, identity lets you go into the world, wide-eyed awake to the reality that when priorities get big, values will be threatened. And in the midst of that threat, identity is the only thing that can show up with the receipts, proving you are who you claim to be.
Culture, by contrast, is what happens after identity has been clarified.
Culture is the expression of identity that gets lived out through the stories we tell, the behaviors we reward, the decisions we make, and the future we pursue. But (and this is a crucial point): Culture is an echo of identity. It can never exist on its own, and if it is to remain real and authentic and healthy, it must always remain close to identity’s original voice.
This is why when culture becomes unstable and disruptive, our first notion to address policy, rewrite incentives, or initiate problem-diagnostic survey feedback often falls short. Their lure is that if we just get enough data, we’ll Sherlock our way to a remedy. But that often doesn’t work — because on their own, none of these strategies inform the underlying logic that tells us why those behaviors exist in the first place — or what they are meant to protect.
That instability is identity knocking, asking us to take a closer look to see where we’ve been knocked off course.
Culture Is the Signal, not the Source
At this point, it’s worth noting that we need to extend ourselves a little bit of grace here.
Relying on a diagnostic-first approach has served a dominant role in our Western culture. For ages.
We’ve been taught to elevate data above all else, even when the inner truths of our souls are telling us otherwise. And it’s here’s where we’ve been led astray.
Because if you’ve ever been a part of a ruptured company, a broken partnership, or an agonizing dismantlement, you know that culture rarely crumbles because of what we can see. It breaks when it gets severed from its identity – and no one is looking deep enough to see it happening.
Perhaps best understood as the invisible structure that holds culture together, a clearly defined identity creates the boundaries around who you are, what you believe, and what you will and will not do. Existing as both a constraint and a freedom, identity is THE singular force that determines whether your culture bends or breaks when growth, pressure, or disruption come.
Treated this way, it’s best described as the operating system beneath every decision and behavior — from culture to strategy — protecting the organization from cultural drift, inconsistent leadership standards, hiring by preference over principle, and strategy that slowly erodes what once made the organization distinct.
Culture matters significantly. That’s undeniable. But if we really want a way to create and sustain healthy cultures, it’s time we acknowledge culture’s role in the ecosystem: It’s a signal (not the source), designed to point your team, your customers, and every stakeholder back to the identity that holds it all together.
