Culture Is Not a Feeling — It’s the Accumulation of Everything You Tolerate
A few years ago, I was driving to a client meeting, half-listening to TED Radio Hour, when Margaret Heffernan said something that made me pull over and write it down.
“Culture is the accumulation of everyone’s actions.”
Seven words. I sat with them for a minute. Then I turned off the radio and drove the rest of the way in silence, because that sentence had just collapsed the distance between something abstract and something you could actually work with.
Most organizations treat culture like weather — something that happens to them, that they can describe but not control. Leaders commission engagement surveys. They hang values on walls. They announce cultural initiatives. And then they wonder why the needle doesn’t move. (See also: The Four P’s of Engagement.)
Heffernan’s framing changes the question entirely. If culture is the accumulation of actions, then culture is not a feeling or a vibe or a brand promise. It’s a ledger. And you’ve been making entries in it every single day — whether you knew it or not.
What Culture Actually Is (And Isn’t)
Edgar Schein spent decades studying organizational culture and concluded that most leaders are only seeing the surface. His model describes three levels: artifacts (what you can see — the office layout, the rituals, the dress code), espoused values (what the organization says it believes), and underlying assumptions (what actually drives behavior when nobody’s watching).
The gap between espoused values and underlying assumptions is where culture lives — and where most culture change efforts quietly die.
An organization can say it values transparency. But if the people who speak up in meetings get subtly sidelined, if bad news never makes it to the senior team, if leaders ask for feedback and then punish candor — the underlying assumption that gets learned is: keep your head down. No values poster counters that. No all-hands meeting fixes it. The behavior is the message.
W. Edwards Deming said it more bluntly: “A bad system will beat a good person every time.” Culture is a system. It has inputs, feedback loops, and outputs. You don’t change a system by announcing that you’d like it to behave differently. You change it by changing what flows through it.
This is the insight Heffernan’s quote makes visceral. The system is made of actions. Accumulated. Over time. By everyone. Including you.
Culture Is Not What You Declare — It’s What You Tolerate
Christine Porath has spent years researching incivility in the workplace, and her findings are both damning and clarifying. In studies spanning thousands of employees across industries, she found that 98% of workers have experienced uncivil behavior at work — and that a single observed act of rudeness degrades team performance significantly, reducing helpfulness by over 50% and creative output by nearly a third.
The mechanism matters: it’s not just the rude person causing damage. It’s what the organization does — or doesn’t do — in response. When incivility is tolerated, the message to everyone watching is that this is who we are. Tolerance becomes endorsement. Silence becomes policy.
This is the accumulation Heffernan is talking about. Not just the big, visible decisions — who gets hired, who gets promoted, which projects get funded. Culture accretes in the small moments. The meeting where someone interrupts constantly and nobody says anything. The email that goes unanswered for two weeks. The leader who always has a reason why the feedback doesn’t apply to them. These are all entries in the ledger.
Daniel Coyle, in The Culture Code, studied some of the highest-performing groups on earth — Navy SEALs, Pixar, the San Antonio Spurs, the U.S. women’s national volleyball team — and found that their cultures weren’t built through mission statements or retreats. They were built through what he calls belonging cues: small, repeated signals that tell people they are safe, connected, and that what they do matters.
The opposite is also true. When leaders deliver mixed messages — when the stated culture and the lived experience diverge — people don’t split the difference. They trust what they experience. Every time.
The Numbers Make It Concrete
Here’s something that should concentrate the mind: Gallup’s most recent State of the Global Workplace report found that only 23% of employees worldwide are engaged at work. That means nearly eight in ten people are either passively going through the motions or actively working against organizational goals. (See also: When Leaders Don’t Trust the Numbers.)
The report is careful about causation, but one finding is remarkably consistent across countries and industries: the single biggest driver of engagement is the direct manager. Not compensation. Not perks. Not the CEO’s vision statement. The person an employee interacts with most, whose behavior signals every day what is actually expected, what is actually rewarded, and what will actually be tolerated.
That’s Heffernan’s accumulation in action. Each manager, in each interaction, is making a deposit or a withdrawal. Across thousands of managers, millions of interactions, the sum becomes the culture. The engagement score is just the readout.
Google arrived at a similar conclusion through a different route. Project Aristotle, the company’s multi-year study of what makes teams effective, found — to researchers’ initial surprise — that team composition mattered less than team dynamics. You could assemble a group of individually brilliant people and end up with a mediocre team. You could take a group of average performers and build something extraordinary, if the culture within the team was right.
The most important factor? Psychological safety — the shared belief that it’s safe to take risks, to speak up, to admit you don’t know something, without fear of humiliation or punishment.
Amy Edmondson, whose research on psychological safety predates Project Aristotle and whose work helped name what Google found, is precise about what psychological safety is and isn’t. It’s not comfort. It’s not the absence of conflict. It’s a cultural output — something that gets created (or destroyed) by the accumulated behavior of leaders and teams over time. You cannot mandate it. You can only build the conditions for it, action by action.
So What Do You Do With This?
If culture is the accumulation of actions, then changing culture means changing actions — specifically, consistently, starting with the ones at the top of the organization. Here’s a practical framework for making that concrete:
1. Audit the gap between what you say and what you do
Take your organization’s stated values — or your team’s stated norms — and ask a hard question: what is the behavioral evidence for each one? Not intentions. Not aspirations. Evidence. What does it look like when we act in accordance with this value? What does it look like when we don’t? And what happens when we don’t?
Schein’s underlying assumptions live in that last question. The consequences — or lack of consequences — for misalignment are the most reliable indicator of what an organization actually values.
2. Get rigorous about what you tolerate
Porath’s research suggests a useful test: when you observe behavior that contradicts the culture you say you want, what is your default response? Silence? A private conversation that goes nowhere? A pattern of exceptions made for high performers who happen to also be jerks?
Each non-response is a cultural signal. It tells everyone watching: this is permissible. This is who we are. The culture calcifies around it.
This doesn’t mean every cultural violation requires a dramatic confrontation. But it does mean naming what happened, clearly and without drama, is a leadership obligation. (See also: The Accountability Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight.) “That’s not how we do things here” — said consistently, in the moment, by people with authority — is one of the most powerful cultural tools available. It’s also one of the most underused.
3. Make the belonging cues visible and deliberate
Coyle’s research found that belonging cues are often small: eye contact, active listening, using someone’s name, following up on what you said you’d do. These feel trivial, but they compound. They signal: you matter here, your contribution is seen, you are safe.
For leaders, the question is whether these signals are being sent intentionally or defaulting to whatever is habitual. A leader who is always distracted in one-on-ones, who cancels meetings with junior employees when things get busy, who only engages with the loudest voices in the room — is also sending belonging cues. Just the wrong ones.
4. Measure what you actually want to change
Heffernan’s framing is most useful here, because it transforms culture from something you feel into something you can count. If you want psychological safety, you can measure it — through anonymous surveys, through meeting behavior data, through how often people surface problems versus bury them. If you want collaboration, you can look at how knowledge actually flows across team boundaries. If you want accountability, you can track whether commitments are made clearly and whether they are followed through. (See also: The Accountability Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight.)
The act of measurement itself is a cultural signal. What organizations measure communicates what they believe matters. If you measure output but ignore how people treat each other to get there, you’ve made a cultural choice — even if you made it unconsciously.
The Question That Actually Changes Things
I want to return to what stopped me on the side of the road.
If culture is the accumulation of everyone’s actions, then every action is a cultural act. Every meeting facilitated or poorly run. Every hard conversation had or avoided. Every commitment kept or quietly abandoned. Every moment when someone needed air cover and the leader either provided it or didn’t.
Heffernan’s broader work — particularly her research on willful blindness — makes the implication explicit. Organizations, like individuals, have an extraordinary capacity to not see what is inconvenient to see. Leaders who tolerate bad behavior because the person is a top performer are not making an exception. They are setting a precedent. They are teaching everyone else what the real rules are.
The question she effectively poses — and the one I’ve carried into my own practice — is this: Am I proud of how this action contributes to the culture of my organization?
It’s a daily question. Not annual. Not quarterly. Not reserved for culture initiatives and off-sites. Every meeting. Every email. Every moment you choose to address something or let it slide.
Deming’s insight and Heffernan’s insight converge here: culture is a system, and systems are made of actions. The good news is that actions are the one thing leaders can actually control. You cannot mandate belonging. You cannot will psychological safety into existence. You cannot declare your way to an engaged workforce.
But you can be precise about what you do, what you ignore, and what you refuse to tolerate. And you can do it every day, in a thousand small moments that most people won’t notice — until the accumulation becomes undeniable.
That’s how cultures change. Not in pronouncements. In actions. Accumulated, over time, by everyone. Starting with you.
