It’s one of the most common questions candidates ask in an interview, and one interviewers now expect to answer:
‘What’s the culture like?’
It’s a reasonable question. Candidates want to know what they’re walking into: how people work together, what leadership is like, and what it feels like to be part of the organisation.
But how do you explain something as complex as organisational culture in the few minutes an interview allows?
Too often, the answer is reduced to a handful of familiar labels.
Open. Transparent. Cohesive. Family. Toxic.
Some are positive. Others are warnings. But all attempt to distil something complex into a single word.
The truth is, organisational culture can never just be one of these descriptions. Culture encompasses strategy, leadership, behaviours, relationships and the way work gets done. It’s how all these elements interact, not any one of them in isolation.
So why do we keep trying to label it?
Culture is a Combination
Organisational culture isn’t defined by a list of perks, how often teams meet or whether people can work remotely. These things might contribute to the experience of working somewhere, but they don’t tell the whole story.
Culture emerges from the combination of factors that shape how an organisation operates.
How are decisions made? How do people respond to challenge? What happens when priorities conflict? How is performance recognised? Do the behaviours leaders encourage align with the strategy they’re trying to deliver?
These questions start to reveal something a label never could: how an organisation actually functions.
Two organisations might both describe themselves as collaborative, for example, yet operate in completely different ways. In one, collaboration might lead to better decisions and shared accountability. In another, it might mean endless meetings, blurred responsibilities and decisions that never get made.
The label is the same. The reality is not.
Mixing Organisational Culture with Wellbeing
One of the most loaded words in conversations about organisational culture is toxic.
Perhaps employees don’t trust their managers. Deadlines are consistently unrealistic. Good work goes unrecognised. Meetings are dominated by the loudest voices, while others struggle to be heard.
These are real problems. They shape people’s experience of work and can have a significant impact on their wellbeing.
But they don’t tell us everything about the organisation’s culture.
Wellbeing is an important dimension of culture, particularly when we consider how people experience their working environment. But culture also encompasses how work is organised, how decisions are made, how performance is managed, how feedback is given and how effectively people can deliver on their goals.
An organisation might have a supportive, friendly environment but struggle with accountability and execution. Another might have clear processes and strong performance expectations but fail to give people the trust or autonomy they need to succeed.
Labels Don’t Lead to Understanding
Describing a culture is easy. Understanding it takes more work.
A label gives us a conclusion without necessarily explaining how we got there. It can hide contradictions, overlook the differences between teams and distract us from the factors that influence performance.
More importantly, it can lead us to the wrong solutions.
If an organisation believes its culture is toxic, for example, it might focus on improving morale or introducing wellbeing initiatives. But if the underlying issue is unclear accountability, conflicting priorities or leadership behaviours that undermine the strategy, those interventions are unlikely to address the root cause.
The point isn’t that labels are always categorically wrong. It’s that labels are far too binary to describe something as detailed as culture.
To understand culture, we need to look at the bigger picture: how leadership, strategy, behaviours and organisational systems interact, and what that means for the people working within them.
What’s next
Want to finally get to the bottom of your culture? Take a look at our hand-picked Top 10 list of culture advisory firms in the UK
Prefer your content in audio form?
Listen to Mark Cuddigan, CEO of THIS, discussing life in charge of a plant-based B-Corp certified organisation
Potential, realised
At Coode, we look at strategy through a human lens because success depends on how people work together. When leadership teams achieve real alignment in how they lead, they unlock performance that may have been present all along but not yet fully realised.
To explore how Coode helps leaders define culture and align it with their strategy and context, visit our services page or get in touch here.
Stay in touch and subscribe to de-cooded, our regular digest of business insights from the perspective of leadership and culture.