Why Great Culture Is So Hard to Build

I’ve led teams on both sides of the cultural divide, and the difference is hard to forget.

In one organization, the dysfunction was palpable within a week. People had retreated to their silos, protecting their turf, quietly operating under a principle that was never stated but perfectly understood: I’m going to do my thing over here, and to hell with you. Cross-functional work was a negotiation at best, a battle at worst. Bad behavior — sometimes overt, sometimes subtle — was tolerated, either because the people exhibiting it hit their numbers, or had the right relationships, or because nobody took the time to say stop. New hires either adapted to the toxicity or burned out trying to fight it. The ones who could thrive elsewhere left. The ones who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, stayed.

In another, the opposite. The culture was palpable too, but in a different way. People saw how things worked and wanted to be part of it. Collaboration happened not because we mandated it, but because the environment made it natural. Great work was recognized. Bad behavior was rooted out—not through some elaborate HR process, but because everyone understood it wouldn’t be tolerated, and the people around them held the line. It was personally satisfying and professionally fulfilling in ways that the other environment simply wasn’t.

The difference between these two teams wasn’t complicated in principle. But building the second kind of culture—and maintaining it—turned out to be genuinely hard. Much harder than I expected. And over time, I’ve come to understand why.

The question we’re not asking

Most of what’s written about culture focuses on what it is (values, behaviors, norms) or how to build it (hire right, communicate clearly, reinforce what you want). This isn’t useless, but it skips over a harder question: Why do people behave the way they do at work in the first place?

When you dig into this, you realize that culture isn’t really about policies or perks or values on the wall. It’s about what people want—and more specifically, where they learn to want it. The parochialism and turf protection I saw in that dysfunctional team wasn’t because people woke up in the morning intending to be difficult. It was because the environment had taught them, through a thousand small signals, that self-protection was the rational choice. That’s what the culture was actually telling them to value, whatever the mission statement said.

This is where most culture initiatives go wrong. They try to change behavior directly—through training, through incentives, through inspirational messaging—without addressing the underlying forces that shape what people want. They treat symptoms and wonder why the disease persists.

What we actually want (and where it comes from)

The most useful framework I’ve found for understanding this comes from Luke Burgis, a student of the French philosopher and historian René Girard. In his book Wanting, Burgis makes accessible an idea that Girard spent his career developing: that we don’t figure out what we want in isolation. We learn what to want by watching others.

Girard called this “mimetic desire,” meaning the imitative nature of human wanting. According to Girard, we don’t desire things because we’ve independently calculated their value: we desire them because other people desire them, especially people we admire or see as similar to ourselves. This is why trends spread, why status symbols work, why keeping up with the neighbors is a cliché that never dies. It’s also why workplaces are far more contagious than we typically admit.

Burgis distinguishes between two kinds of desires. “Thin” desires are shallow and fleeting, often rooted in competition and comparison. The desire to be seen as better than someone else. The desire for status markers. The desire to win a zero-sum game, even when the game doesn’t matter. “Thick” desires are more substantial—connected to genuine values, to meaning, to the kind of fulfillment that doesn’t evaporate once you get what you wanted. The desire for mastery. The desire to contribute something real. The desire to be part of something worthwhile.

The tragedy of many workplaces is that they inadvertently cultivate thin desires. The competition for limited bonus pools. The jockeying for face time with leadership. The turf wars over resources and headcount. The performative busyness that signals dedication without producing anything. These environments teach people to want the wrong things—and then we’re surprised when they behave accordingly.

This is what I eventually understood about that dysfunctional team. The parochial instincts, the “I’ll do my thing over here” mentality; these weren’t character flaws in the individuals. They were rational responses to an environment that had been teaching thin desires for years. People were doing what the culture had trained them to do.

The reframe

If you accept the mimetic view, it changes how you think about culture. A great culture isn’t one where people are “happy” or “engaged” in some abstract sense. It’s one that minimizes thin mimetic behavior and maximizes thick mimetic behavior. It’s an environment where what people learn to want is actually good — for them and for the organization. It is an environment where success isn’t zero-sum, where collaboration is rewarded, and where selfishness punished. It is an environment where the models people imitate are worth imitating.

The hard part is obviously that you can’t dictate what people desire. What you can do, though, is shape the environment in which desires form. The environment is always transmitting signals, whether you’re intentional about it or not. The question isn’t whether your culture shapes what people want; it does, inevitably. The question is whether it’s shaping them well.

Culture is an output, not an input

One of the most persistent misconceptions about culture is that you can simply decide what it will be and then install it. Define your values, print them on the wall, roll out the training, and you’re done.

It doesn’t work that way. Culture isn’t an input you set. It’s an output — the emergent result of how a company actually operates. It reflects the decisions leaders make, the behaviors they reward, the processes they build, and the conversations they have. It’s the cumulative effect of a thousand small signals sent every day about what matters here.

Over time, culture becomes self-reinforcing. A healthy culture shapes how the company executes, and good execution enriches the culture further. People see that doing the right thing is recognized. They see that collaboration works. They see that the leaders practice what they preach. And they calibrate accordingly. The culture becomes part of why good people stay and why new hires get up to speed quickly — they can see what’s expected.

A toxic culture does the same in reverse. Dysfunction breeds dysfunction. Cynicism breeds cynicism. People learn that protecting yourself is smarter than sticking your neck out. The best people leave because they can. The ones who remain are disproportionately those who’ve figured out how to game the system, or those who don’t have better options. Dysfunctional cultures entrench quickly. It only ever takes one bad apple to spoil the bunch.

This is why themed lunches and pizza parties and Cultural Diversity Week don’t move the needle. They’re inputs pretending to be outputs. They are gestures without substance. When a company’s culture actually aligns with its stated values, these events can be celebratory. But when the culture doesn’t align, they’re performative at best and insulting at worst. People aren’t fooled. They know the difference between a cupcake and a functioning workplace.

Real culture comes from execution. From the daily reality of how work gets done, how decisions are made, and how people treat each other—especially when things are hard.

The three levers

If culture is an output of how you operate, then shaping culture means operating differently. In my experience, there are three levers that matter most: the environment you create, the people you bring in, and your ability to sustain all of this over time.

The environment

The first lever is the structure: the rules of engagement, the systems and processes, and the signals the organization sends about what matters.

Start with the zero-sum question, because so much of corporate life is designed as competition. Bonus pools pit people against each other. Forced rankings and scarce promotion slots guarantee someone loses. Resource allocation battles require every department to fight for its share. These structures teach people that someone else’s success threatens their own. Of course they retreat to their silos. Of course they protect their turf. The environment is telling them to.

You can change this. Transparency around decision-making helps. People can tolerate outcomes they disagree with if they understand the reasoning. Embedding collaboration into individual goals makes collective success explicit, not just rhetorical. But the deepest lever is what gets tolerated at the top. If the leadership team operates as warring fiefdoms, everyone below learns that’s how the game is played. The fish rots from the head, as the saying goes, and so does the culture.

Then there are the expectations. Clarity about what’s expected is the single biggest driver of engagement. What does success look like in my role? What are the standards I’m being held to? What does my manager actually want from me? Unclear or unstated expectations breed anxiety, second-guessing, and the kind of self-protective behavior that arises through confusion and results in disengagement. Managers have a responsibility to ensure their people know what’s being asked of them and have the resources to deliver. This is basic, and yet it’s remarkable how often it doesn’t happen.

Then there is the question of tolerance. What behavior do you allow? I’ll be direct here: there should be no quarter for negative people and practices. This includes high performers who are also jerks. It includes subtle toxicity, not just overt misconduct. Tolerating even one person with a corrosive attitude can poison an entire team. The message it sends — that results excuse behavior — teaches everyone what to actually value. Give people a chance, certainly. Be clear about the requirements, both functional and human. Allow the opportunity to make amends. But if the behavior doesn’t change, they need to go.

The people

The second lever is who you bring in and who you promote. Every hire is a signal. Every promotion is a louder signal. These decisions tell the organization what to imitate.

People don’t just watch what leaders say is valued. They watch who gets ahead. If the person who got promoted is collaborative, thoughtful, and delivers, that’s the model. If the person who got promoted is political, self-promotional, and cuts corners, that’s the model too. The same applies to hiring. The new person everyone’s meeting this week is a walking statement about what the company is looking for. Is it someone who embodies thick desires: genuine contribution, low ego, accountability? Or is it someone who embodies thin ones: impressive credentials, slick self-presentation, ambition that smells more like competition than aspiration?

This means expanding what “fit” means. The reflexive instinct is to hire people like ourselves, with similar backgrounds, similar trajectories, similar styles. It’s comfortable, but it leads to groupthink and can inadvertently reinforce whatever mimetic patterns (good or bad) already exist. You’re not cloning; you’re composing. Diversity of background and perspective is valuable precisely because it introduces new models into the mimetic environment. But what you’re really screening for is orientation toward thick desires which manifest themselves in low ego and high self-awareness, the ability to collaborate without keeping score, and accountability without defensiveness. These traits aren’t visibile on the surface, but can be understood through behavioral questions. Did they take credit or share it? Did they blame circumstances or take responsibility? Did they talk about the team or only about themselves?

There’s a harder truth here too. If your culture is toxic, hiring great people won’t fix it. You’ll just burn through great people. They’ll either adapt to the toxicity and become part of the problem, or they’ll leave, frustrated that the environment wouldn’t let them do their best work. Fixing the environment has to come first, or at least in parallel. Otherwise you’re pouring water into a leaky bucket.

Resilience over time

The third lever is the ability to sustain a healthy culture as the business evolves. Culture isn’t a project you complete. The company changes, the people change, the market changes. The question is whether your culture can adapt without losing what made it work.

Transitions are when culture is most vulnerable. Things like a new CEO, M&A, rapid growth, and layoffs are the moments when the implicit signals get scrambled — when people don’t know what the new rules are where anxiety creates fertile ground for thin desires. I lived this through M&A when two companies with different cultures collidied. Integration isn’t just about systems and org charts. It’s about culture, and if you don’t attend to it deliberately, you’ll get an outcome by default, and it probably won’t be the one you wanted.

Feedback loops matter as well, though not in the way companies typically implement them. The standard advice is to conduct employee surveys and hold feedback sessions. Fine. But the real question is whether anything happens as a result. Feedback that disappears into a void teaches people that their input doesn’t matter, which is itself a powerful cultural signal. Acting on feedback, even in small ways, teaches the opposite. It says we’re paying attention, and what you experience here matters. The survey isn’t the point. The response is.

Finally, you don’t really know what your culture is until it’s under pressure. When times are good, even mediocre cultures can feel functional. People are generous when there’s plenty. It’s when things get hard — when there’s a crisis, when resources are constrained, when hard decisions have to be made — that culture reveals itself. When the going gets tough, do people pull together or fracture into factions? Do leaders communicate honestly or retreat into spin? Does trust hold or collapse? It’s worth asking these questions before the pressure arrives, not after.

Why this is so hard

If building great culture were easy, everyone would do it. It’s not, and they don’t. There are real obstacles that make this work genuinely difficult.

The first is that you can’t start from scratch. Most leaders inherit a culture; they don’t create one from nothing. The history, the power dynamics, the entrenched behaviors, the people who’ve been there for years and know how things “really work” — all of this is already in place. Changing culture isn’t installation; it’s renovation while people are living in the building. You have to work with what exists, and what exists often has deep roots.

The second is that not everyone’s thick desires will align with what your company does or how it operates. This is a real limit. Some people’s deepest professional aspirations simply won’t be fulfilled here. That’s okay. It doesn’t make them bad employees, and it doesn’t make your company bad. But it does mean culture can only do so much. You can create the conditions for people to thrive, but you can’t guarantee every person will thrive in those conditions. Some won’t, and the kindest thing you can do is help them recognize it.

The third is scale. What works in a 20-person startup doesn’t automatically work at 200 or 2,000. The personal relationships that transmit culture in small teams get replaced by systems and processes. Leaders can no longer model behavior for everyone directly. They have to work through layers of management, each of which is a potential point of dilution or distortion. This is where most culture efforts break down: not at the top, but in the middle, where managers are the real carriers of culture and too many of them haven’t been equipped for the job.

And the fourth is the pressure to shortcut. There’s always someone who wants to treat culture as a project with a deliverable. Roll out the values, do the training, launch the initiative, declare victory, move on. But culture doesn’t work that way. It’s the accumulated weight of consistent behavior over time. There are no shortcuts, only sustained attention. And sustained attention is exactly what’s hardest to maintain when there are quarterly targets to hit and fires to fight.

To leaders in transition

If you’re stepping into a leadership role — whether as a CEO tasked with turning an organization around, or a manager trying to build something better within your team — I want to speak to you directly.

To the CEO or founder: you set the tone whether you intend to or not. Your behavior is the most mimicked in the organization. What you pay attention to, what you tolerate, how you treat people when you’re stressed, what you do when no one’s watching (someone is always watching)… everyone is learning from you. This is both a burden and an opportunity. You can’t delegate culture. You can’t outsource it to HR. You have to live it, visibly and consistently, or it won’t be real.

To the mid-level leader: you have more influence than you think. Your team’s culture is substantially in your control, even if the broader organization is mediocre or worse. I’ve seen managers build genuine oases where the dynamics are healthy, where people do great work because they want to, and where thick desires win even when the company around them is mired in politics and dysfunction. It’s hard, and it requires constant vigilance — and you may not get much support from above. But it’s possible, and the people on your team will know the difference.

To anyone inheriting a mess: start small. You won’t transform the culture overnight, and if you try, you’ll exhaust yourself and alienate the people whose buy-in you need. Pick one or two things that are clearly broken — maybe it’s tolerating a toxic high performer, maybe it’s the lack of clarity around expectations, maybe it’s the way meetings run — and fix them. Let people see that things can be different. Incremental change, sustained over time, is how culture actually shifts. Grand gestures are satisfying but rarely stick.

The work that never ends

I think back to those two teams I was a part of — the one defined by parochialism and self-protection, the other by collaboration and genuine contribution. The difference between them wasn’t mysterious. One had allowed thin desires to take hold—turf protection, zero-sum competition, tolerance of bad behavior — in the name of results. The other had cultivated thick desires characterized by meaningful work, shared success, and a genuine intolerance for people who poisoned the well.

The first kind of culture is easy to fall into. It’s the default, what happens when you’re not paying attention. The second requires constant work. Not heroic work, necessarily, but consistent, unglamorous, never-finished work. It requires being aware of the signals you’re sending, holding the line on what you will and won’t tolerate, hiring and promoting people who embody what you want the culture to be, and being honest about where you’re falling short.

Culture isn’t a destination you reach. It’s a discipline you practice. The signals you send today shape what people will want tomorrow. And the question isn’t whether your organization has a culture — it does, whether you designed it or not. The question is whether it’s the kind of culture where great people can do great work. Where thick desires win. Where people see how things operate and want to be part of it.