Every Company Has a Culture. The Question Is What Kind.

I’ve been reading a lot about culture again recently, and everything I’m seeing mostly says the same thing. Cite a statistic about how the best companies are the ones that get culture right, then a few hundred words on why culture is so important. And I get it, culture does matter. But that advice has always bugged me, because it doesn’t actually tell you anything. It tells you culture is important. It doesn’t tell you what kind of culture to build, or how to build it. It’s all just generic pablum that gets certain kinds of leaders excited.

You already have a culture

We talk about culture like it’s one thing. Like it’s a box you check, or something you either have or you don’t. But culture is a broad category. It’s the whole ethos of a business. How it behaves, how it operates, how it feels, what it values, what it treats as important.

Once you see it that way, “culture is important” stops being useful. Of course it’s important. But every company already has one. You don’t get to decide whether your company has a culture. It has one already. Whether you built it or not, whether you like it or not, there’s a way your company behaves and feels and treats people, and that’s your culture.

So “is culture important” was never the real question. The real question is what kind of culture you have, and whether you chose it.

Intentional or accidental. A culture you cultivated, shared, championed, and reinforced on purpose. Or a culture that just happened to you while you were focused on something else.

Nobody builds a bad culture on purpose

Bad culture almost always has a disconnect between the people doing the work and the people leading it. Leadership is one thing, the workers are another, and they’re not working toward the same goal. The leaders take the credit, and the people who actually did the work, who actually had the ideas, get none of it. You’ve heard the line: people don’t leave bad companies, they leave bad leaders. That’s accidental culture. Nobody set out to build it. It grew on its own because nobody was tending it.

Or it’s the company with constant infighting, where departments compete instead of supporting each other’s work.

Accidental culture usually starts the same way. You care about outcomes and ignore the process. You measure the results. You watch the numbers. But you never stop to evaluate the systems and the processes that got you there. You reward the what and you ignore the how.

And that does something to people. When you only look at outcomes, you stop evaluating how the work actually gets done and you start making assumptions instead. You see a result and work backwards to a story about why it happened. You end up with leaders who are harsh and critical, and team members who are disengaged and confused about what they’re supposed to be doing and why. There’s a disconnect between where the company is headed and how anyone is supposed to get there.

Because the how matters. It can’t just be get there at any cost. How you get there is the culture. Ignore that and stare only at the outcomes, and you’ll get jerked around by every trend, every win, every failure. You reinforce bad habits when something works, because you never looked at why it worked. You fix the wrong things when something breaks, because you’re staring at the result instead of the system that produced it. You end up throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. Do that long enough and a culture forms anyway. You just didn’t choose it.

Give your culture a name

Here’s a quick test. Can you name your culture? Not “we have a strong culture,” but the actual thing it’s built on, in a word or two. An intentional culture has a shape. It has a focus. It has a name. If the best you can do is “we care about culture,” then you probably don’t. Not one you chose, anyway.

Naming it isn’t about slapping a label on what you’ve got. It’s deciding what kind of culture actually serves what you’re trying to do, and then building it on purpose.

At Saturday Drive, our culture is built around fulfillment. But I didn’t start with fulfillment, and I didn’t start out building it on purpose. For the first 8 or 9 years, our culture was an accident.

We used to be an in-office company. We had ping pong, a pool table, dartboards, mimosa Mondays, a snack bar, all of it. We’d hired like-minded people and put them in a room together, and a certain kind of fulfillment just happened. But I wasn’t setting out to build a culture of fulfillment. I was just trying to be fulfilled myself. There was intention in the decisions we made, but I wasn’t thinking of it as building a culture. So most of what we built was vanity stuff. It helped, but it was all anchored to us being in the same place, and there was no real weight to the culture outside of the in-person connections we were making. I didn’t think much about how, because I didn’t have to.

Then in 2019 we left the offices and went fully remote. And the culture started to break down. I could feel it. What I realized was that we’d never actually had systems or processes for our culture. It had worked because we were all in the same place. Once the office was gone, the things that had been holding it together went with it, and we didn’t have the same camaraderie and relationships because we weren’t seeing each other face to face every day. If we wanted to keep the culture we’d stumbled into, we were going to have to be intentional about it.

So I went back to what I actually wanted. There’s a slightly derogatory term in small business: the lifestyle business. The implication is that it isn’t a serious business, that you’re not really playing to win. But a lifestyle business can absolutely be successful, if that’s the target you’re aiming at. And when I was honest with myself, I knew what I wanted. I wanted to do work I enjoy, with people I enjoy, and I wanted my family taken care of without fretting over every decision I made. I knew that’s what I wanted, and I figured the people who work with me probably want the same thing.

Most people have complex lives. Family, friends, hobbies, kids in school, a whole world outside of work. Some of us love work and want more of it, and that’s fine. But nobody wants to be controlled by a job they don’t love.

The hard thinking came over the next couple of years. I had a team spread across the world now, all living very different lives, and I spent a lot of time sitting on the patio of our coffee shop working it over. I kept landing on the same question. How do I build a workplace that serves them as much as it serves me? Fulfillment was the answer. I love the work I do. I believe the work I do matters. I can see the impact my work has. When all three are true, you’re probably fulfilled in your work.

The idea is simple. When people are fulfilled, they do better work. Not because they’re trying harder, but because they care more.

You can’t manufacture fulfillment directly, though. What you can do as a leader is commit to three things, and those three commitments are the levers we pull to shape the culture.

Clarity. Everyone knows what we’re doing, why, and how.

Collaboration. We work together, and we share the same goals.

Connection. People feel seen, valued, and part of something.

Those three are the culture, in practice. Everything we do runs through them.

One example. For 8 years we’ve done a weekly video podcast for the team. Just the three of us who own the company, 20 or 30 minutes. We talk about where the company’s headed, how the teams are working together, the numbers, what we’re wrestling with. It’s one of the tools we use, and it touches all three commitments at once. Clarity, because the team hears the direction straight from us. Collaboration, because we work through how the teams fit together out loud. Connection, because they get to know us. Our personal lives, what we’re working through, how we deal with each other. We’ve done it almost every week for 8 years.

How do you know the culture you’ve built is actually working? I don’t think there’s a single number that works for every company. But one of the ones I watch is retention. Most of our team has been with us 5 years or more, and a lot of them over 10. In a small software company, which is the bulk of our business, people usually move on every 2 or 3 years, so that kind of staying power is rare. Even the people who have left, sometimes for more money than we could pay them, often want to come back, because what the culture gives them is worth more than the raise. Fulfilled people stay, because the culture connects them to something meaningful. It was never just about the work.

Our entire culture is built around something I call Fulfillment Theory. I wrote it up on my website for the people who already agree culture is important and are stuck on what comes after that.

Now what? If what we’ve built resonates with what you’re aiming for, and it suits the goals of your business, take it. I put the tools and the framing and the thinking out there so you could use them. But you have to make it your own. You can’t just drop our tools and our systems into your company and call it done, because you’re a unique company, with your own people and your own values.

So when someone tells you culture is important, they’re right, and they’re also not really saying anything. Every company has a culture. The only questions that matter are the ones underneath it.

Are you being intentional about your culture?

Is it the kind that actually serves what you’re trying to do?

Can you give your culture a name?