Culture is Infrastructure.
"I really want to spend more time on culture — coffees, lunch and learns, maybe even a team retreat later this year. But right now I need to focus on onboarding our new VP of Product and figure out our response to AI. Everything is just coming so fast."
Our client, let’s call him Trevor, was being honest. And I got it. In that moment, he was overwhelmed and juggling a lot. But he was missing the bigger picture. He needed a clearer understanding of what culture actually is. I’ll give you a hint: it isn't coffees, lunches, or team retreats. That isn’t obvious to everyone. So if it's not that, then what the hell is it?
Well, that's the problem in a nutshell, now isn't it? I've worked in this space for years, and that definition just seems elusive. I have even found myself struggling to articulate in simple words what culture is. But I was determined.
First, to the Stacks!
As the resident rebel, I am all for changing it up when it doesn’t serve. But before we do that, let’s look at how some folks have defined corporate and team culture in the past. Because there is some good stuff in there.
Take Schein's 1984 seminal definition:
A pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, which has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.
Accurate. Also a mouthful. Schein's triangle model — Artifacts, Espoused Values, and Underlying or Tacit Assumptions — is genuinely useful work. I've read it. My work is informed by it. It still wasn’t direct enough for me to move my client past his presumptions about culture.
Then there's Deal and Kennedy's model from 1982 which coined the enduring phrase: "the way we do things around here." I'd argue this is the most dangerous definition in circulation — not because it's wrong, but because of how it gets used. It's usually delivered as a way to avoid changing what isn't working. It lets people be lazy. And it strips the original model of everything that made it interesting — which was a specific framework for understanding how organizations make decisions and experience consequences. Reduced to a bumper sticker, it's become slang for "don't ask questions." Not for us.
Gruenert and Whitaker offer: "The culture of any organization is shaped by the worst behavior the leader is willing to tolerate." Descriptive and, frankly, accurate. Originally written about education — which as a parent genuinely terrifies me — it applies broadly to the outsized influence leaders have on culture anywhere. But it only tells half the story. It dismisses what leaders inherit, how others contribute, and perhaps most importantly, what leaders can choose to build.
Not really feeling any of these. On one hand, they carry a lot of weight - and take a lot of time to unpack. On the other hand, they almost over simplify just how integral Culture is to the inner workings of an organization.
I looked back over the work we’ve done. The image that’s come to me most often as I’ve worked with clients on employee experience design, performance management, and business strategy, and now in the weeds of team dynamics, and one word stands out. Infrastructure.
What's Inside the Walls
Imagine you're buying a house. Your inspector tells you everything looks good. No significant issues. Maybe eventually get the pipes in the mudroom sink looked at. The water runs a little slow. Probably nothing.
Plumbing's good. Electrical checked out. No structural issues. No mold. You've been thinking about going greener anyway — solar panels, EV charger in the garage, get rid of the gas lines. Strong bones. Good systems. All good enough to close.
Three months later, you're getting ready to move in. Your electrician does a walkthrough and thinks most of the work will be straightforward. He's got concerns about the wall in the garage where the charger would go. Wants a plumber to look at it.
Sure enough, that mudroom sink with the slow faucet had a slow leak. And it shares a wall with the garage. It's been quietly dripping on drywall and wood framing for who knows how long — and not only is it damp, it's moldy. Hidden behind a fancy garage storage system (a surface selling point!), it's now bleeding through where you can see it. And it's going to affect the electrical work. It's all connected. These largely invisible systems that make your house function every day. Until suddenly, they don't. But it really wasn’t all that sudden.
That's culture.
As my 12-year-old would say: it's IN YOUR WALLS. You don't really see it until something goes wrong. Because you're not looking for it. Turn on the faucet, the water runs — until that day it’s just a trickle. Hold a meeting, the team shows up — they are there physically, but totally checked out. And you don't always immediately know why. You have to open a crack and look inside. Grab a flashlight and get under the sink. Because you didn’t just make culture. You inherited some of it. The good and the bad. Just like those pipes that came with that house. Maybe the previous owners replaced the other bathrooms over time but never got around to that one sink. It wasn't a priority. Cast iron rusts slowly. That wasn't your choice. But now it's your problem. And your opportunity to choose a new way to fix it.
Culture is no different. It's the relationship infrastructure that dictates how values are lived, how people communicate, how they interpret feedback, collaborate, create, and get things done together. And because work is a team sport, hard-wired into your entire system.
But we often can't see it — because we're busy marveling at the new wallpaper, the art we just hung. Or in the work context: the new strategy, the values refresh, the all-hands celebration we've mandated attendance for. In the name of culture. Meanwhile nobody addressed the odd smell coming from the drain. The engagement survey that said an entire team is struggling under a manager who delivers on time but burns people out. The high performer we keep promoting even though everyone knows they're not a kind or skillful people leader. But hey — results.
We expect people to be thrilled by decorative and performative gestures in the name of culture. That ain't it.
Culture Isn't the Book Club. It’s the relationship infrastructure that’s running your organization. Whether you’re tending to it - or not.
The Four Choices
So that’s it. Culture is the relationship infrastructure of an organization. It's not a perk or a program or a personality. It's the system underneath everything — the one that's always running, always shaping how people experience work together, whether you designed it or not. So if that's what it is, how does it get built?
Over time, through the impact of four specific, recurring choices.
What you PERMIT
To permit is to allow, to authorize, to make possible — by decree or by example. This is the word most people associate with bad behavior: what did you let slide? But permit cuts both ways. The leader who says nothing when a colleague is talked over in a meeting is permitting that dynamic. The leader who says "try it, we'll figure it out together" is permitting experimentation. Both are choices. Both send signals. Both build or erode something in the relationship infrastructure.
Here's the part that makes people uncomfortable: looking the other way is still a choice. Silence is permission. The person who watches something happen and says nothing has also made a choice. (psst. we’ll talk more about power later, don’t worry)
What you PROMOTE
To promote is to advance, elevate, put ahead — people, ideas, behaviors, ways of working. You promote consciously and unconsciously, constantly. When you publicly recognize someone who took a risk that didn't pan out but generated real insight, you're promoting a culture that values learning. When you keep elevating the person who delivers results at any human cost, you're promoting the idea that ends justify the means. What you put ahead tells everyone what actually matters here. Not what you say matters. What you demonstrate.
What you PROTECT
This is the one nobody talks about enough. To protect is to shield from exposure, injury, or damage — to guard, defend, cover. Leaders protect their teams when they prioritize effectively and say no to another poorly timed request. They protect dysfunction when they insulate a toxic high performer from consequence because the numbers look good. Protection can be an act of genuine care or an act of institutional cowardice. From the outside, they can look identical. The difference lies in what — and who — you're actually defending.
What you PRACTICE
This is where the other three live or die. Practice is the daily accumulation of every permit, promote, and protect decision you've ever made — and every one your predecessors made before you arrived. It's what people experience without being told, what new hires absorb in their first 90 days, what survives leadership transitions intact. Practice is culture in its most durable form. And it is the hardest to change — because by the time something is a systemic practice, nobody remembers choosing it. It becomes “how things are done here.”
Practice is the inheritance. It can be beautiful wood floors preserved under well lain carpet. Or it can be asbestos.
There Are No Passive Riders
This is where shit gets uncomfortable y’all. Yes, everyone is participating in culture. Reinforcing it, challenging it, or quietly consenting to it. That includes the people who tell themselves they're just keeping their head down. But we don't all carry the same weight.
Leaders hold more power — which means their choices inside these four words carry more consequence. What a leader permits, promotes, and protects becomes the practice that everyone else inherits and many times works around. That asymmetry is real. And it makes certain things genuinely hard.
Saying "this isn't working." Raising your hand with an idea nobody asked for. Telling someone their behavior isn't okay. Even asking whether a standing meeting can move to better suit the whole team. These aren't dramatic acts. But they can feel like enormous risks depending on where you sit with proximity to ‘power’.
Someone still has to say it.
Just maybe not the same person every time. Different people can find their footing in different rooms, on different days, around different issues. But healthy cultures need people willing to be that person. The one who notices the smell from the drain before it becomes mold. Who asks "have we checked on this lately?" Who names the thing everyone's been carefully tiptoeing around.
The flipside? The system has to be mature enough to actually hear them. To not punish the question. To treat "something seems off" as useful signal rather than inconvenient noise. Cultures that can't receive that kind of feedback don't just stagnate — they corrode. Slowly. Behind the walls. Until something that should have been a simple fix becomes a much bigger problem.
That's why an overly simplistic or purely academic definition of culture is actually dangerous. If people don't understand what culture is and how it works, they can't act on it — at any level. And if they can't act on it, it just keeps running beneath everything, doing what untended infrastructure does. Crumbling slowly until things collapse.
Which brings me back to Trevor.
When he told me he needed to focus on the AI challenge before he could get to culture, I told him what I'll tell you: that challenge is the culture work. Every decision he makes about how his team navigates that shift — who has a voice, what gets communicated and when, which roles change and how, what work gets protected and what gets let go — is permit, promote, and protect in real time. He's building practice right now, whether he's paying attention or not.
For that client, hell, for most of you, AI won't just redefine tasks and workflows. It is already redefining how teams work together, how they trust each other, how they relate to clients, customers, and even their own work product. That is relationship infrastructure being rewired in real time. And that’s just the latest example.
Bottom line:You don’t get to ‘do culture work later.’ It is always happening.
What I hope you consider is this: How are you intentionally caring for your relationship infrastructure? What might need immediate attention before it compromises the entire system?
If you’re not sure, ask your team. And then believe them when they tell you what’s happening inside your walls.
