Culture Is the Way We Do Things Around Here, So Why Leave It to Chance?

“Culture is the way we do things around here.” It’s the most quoted definition of culture in business, and it’s almost right. The trouble is the word do. It’s passive. It describes the culture you’ve already got, the sum of every habit, shortcut and unspoken rule that crept in while you were busy growing. For a scaling SME, that accidental culture is rarely the one you’d choose. The leaders who win don’t just describe the way they do things. They define the way they want to do things, then shape behaviour until the two match. This article is about making that shift, on purpose, using a structure you can actually work with.

Key Takeaways

• Culture is the behavioural pattern of “how we do things”, but the strongest cultures are designed, not inherited. Leaders shape them deliberately.
• A quarter of UK employees, around 8 million people, experienced workplace conflict in the past year, a direct symptom of unmanaged “the way we do things” (CIPD Good Work Index, 2024).
• Only 21% of employees worldwide are engaged, and disengagement costs the global economy $8.9 trillion, around 9% of GDP (Gallup, 2025).
• The Tribe365® 4 Culture Structures give leaders a map for shaping behaviour across two axes: Uniform Vision and Purpose-led Autonomy.

Summary based on Tribe365®’s culture work and 2018-2025 research on engagement, conflict and team effectiveness.

What does “culture is the way we do things around here” actually mean?

It means culture is behaviour, not posters. Culture is the accumulated pattern of how people treat each other, make decisions and handle pressure when no one’s watching. The proof shows up in friction: a quarter of UK employees, roughly 8 million people, experienced workplace conflict in the past year (CIPD Good Work Index, 2024). That conflict is “the way we do things” showing its true face.

So the popular definition is useful, but only as a diagnosis. It tells you culture is real and lived, not something printed in a values deck. What it doesn’t tell you is whether the culture you’ve got is the one you actually want. For most growing businesses, it isn’t. The way you do things at 30 people was set by a handful of founders in close contact. By 120 people, that same culture is being copied, badly, by managers who never heard the original reasoning. Have you ever watched a “value” mutate into something its founders would barely recognise? That’s culture drifting, one quiet compromise at a time.

This is exactly why we prefer a sharper version of the phrase: culture is the way we want to do things around here, made real by behaviour. The word “want” puts a leader back in the driving seat. It turns culture from a thing that happens to you into a thing you build.

Why should leaders shape culture deliberately instead of letting it form?

Because culture forms whether you manage it or not, and the unmanaged version usually undermines your strategy. McKinsey found that around 70% of organisational change efforts fall short of their goals, most often because the existing culture quietly resists the new direction (McKinsey, 2021). The behaviour you tolerate beats the strategy you announce.

Think about what “letting it form” really looks like in a scaling SME. Nobody decides to build a culture where feedback gets avoided, where decisions stall in committees, or where the loudest manager sets the tone for a whole department. Those patterns install themselves by default, through a hundred small moments that no one designed. Default culture isn’t neutral. It tends towards self-protection, silos and the comfortable status quo, because those are the lowest-effort behaviours under pressure.

Deliberate culture is the opposite. It starts with a leader deciding, in plain language, how this organisation will behave, then backing that decision with structure, repetition and consequence. Is that harder than hoping it works out? Of course. But the alternative is paying for an accidental culture in regretted attrition, stalled change and the slow erosion of trust. As we explore in our piece on culture shift, the shift only sticks when leaders treat culture as a thing to be engineered, the same way they’d manage performance.

What are the 4 Culture Structures that shape the way we do things?

They’re four predictable patterns of behaviour, set by how much shared direction and how much trusted freedom a team has. The Tribe365® model maps culture on two axes: Uniform Vision (does everyone share the same direction?) and Purpose-led Autonomy (can people act on it without being told?). This matters because engagement sits at just 21% globally, and the structure you operate in largely decides which side of that line your people fall (Gallup, 2025).

Every organisation lives in one of these four structures, often without naming it. The value of naming it is simple: you can’t deliberately shape a culture you can’t see. Once you know which structure you’re in, you know which lever to pull. The goal for a scaling business is almost always the same, to move towards the Collaborative structure, where shared direction and trusted autonomy reinforce each other instead of fighting.

Culture structure	Uniform Vision	Purpose-led Autonomy	How “the way we do things” feels
People	Low	Low	Everyone’s doing their own thing and pulling in different directions.
Power	High	Low	Command and control. Behaviour is dictated from the top. Compliant on the surface, disengaged underneath.
Role	Low	High	Clear roles and responsibilities, low interconnectivity. People know what they need to do, yet rarely look up to think of the global challenges.
Collaborative	High	High	Shared direction plus trusted freedom. People know where they’re heading and choose how to get there. This is the target.

Notice that none of these structures is “good” or “bad” in the abstract, they all feature positive elements. A start-up in survival mode might feel the need for speed of a Power culture for a while. A safety-critical manufacturer leans on elements of Role. The point is to consciously choose your structure rather than drift into the one that requires the least leadership. For most SMEs we work with, the honest answer is that they’ve drifted into People, Power or Role and called it “our culture”. The deeper dive lives in our guide to the different types of organisational culture.

How do you move from “the way we do things” to the way we want to do things?

You close the gap between stated values and observed behaviour, deliberately and repeatedly. Google’s Project Aristotle studied more than 180 teams and found psychological safety was “far and away the most important” driver of effective teams (Google re:Work, 2015). Safety is what lets people behave the way you want them to, instead of defaulting to self-protection.

Start by naming the gap. Write down, honestly, how your team actually behaves under pressure today. Then write down how you want it to behave. The distance between those two lists is your real culture project, and it’s usually more specific than any values statement. Maybe the gap is that “we value candour” but disagreement gets punished. Maybe it’s that “we trust our people” but every decision needs three sign-offs. Naming the gap turns a vague aspiration into a behaviour you can change.

Then make the wanted behaviour easier than the default. People don’t adopt a new culture because they read a memo. They adopt it because the new way becomes the path of least resistance: it’s modelled by leaders, reinforced in everyday moments, and given a shared language so people can name what they’re aiming for. That’s where frameworks earn their place. When a team shares the vocabulary of collaborative culture, “be better” turns into something concrete people can actually practise.

Which behaviours actually define your culture day to day?

The small, repeated ones that no one writes down. Culture isn’t built in the away-day. It’s built in how a manager responds to bad news, whether meetings start on time, and who gets listened to. These micro-behaviours compound, and when they go wrong they’re expensive: disengagement drains an estimated $8.9 trillion, around 9% of global GDP, every year (Gallup, 2025).

So which behaviours should a leader watch? In our experience with scaling SMEs, four signals tell you more about your real culture than any survey headline.

• How disagreement is handled. Do people challenge each other openly, or do the real conversations happen in side channels afterwards?
• What happens after a mistake. A culture that hunts for blame teaches people to hide. A culture that hunts for learning teaches them to speak up.
• Who gets the benefit of the doubt. Watch whether trust is extended widely or hoarded by an in-group. That single pattern shapes your whole autonomy axis.
• How decisions get made. Fast and clear, or slow and political? Decision-making is “the way we do things” in its purest form.

Here’s the uncomfortable part. Every one of those behaviours is set, first, by what leaders model and tolerate. If the way you want to do things and the way your managers actually behave have quietly diverged, the managers win, because people copy what’s rewarded, not what’s recommended. That’s why a shared self-leadership language matters so much. It gives every manager the same words for the behaviour you’re trying to build.

How do you know if “the way we do things” is actually changing?

You measure behaviour over time, not opinion once a year. The problem with most culture measurement is timing: an annual survey is a snapshot of a moving thing, and by the time you read it, the culture has already moved on. Given that roughly 70% of change efforts fall short, leaders need a faster feedback loop than that (McKinsey, 2021).

The fix is to shorten the loop. Instead of one big survey, you gather a small, low-friction signal often, so drift shows up in weeks rather than after the good people have already left. The chart below shows why the gap between current and intended culture is the number worth watching, and why most organisations only ever see one side of it.

This is the job the Tribe365® app is built for, at £10/month per user. A two-minute daily reflection turns culture from an annual guess into a continuous signal, then rolls up into a Snapshot and dashboard so misalignment, low engagement and micromanagement surface while you can still do something about them. You can’t shape the way you do things if you can only see it once a year, can you?

What’s the accountable leader’s job in shaping culture?

To go first, and to keep going when it’s inconvenient. Culture is shaped most by what the most senior person in the room actually does, and that requires a level of self-awareness that’s rarer than leaders assume. Harvard Business Review research found only 10 to 15% of people genuinely meet the criteria for self-awareness, even though around 95% believe they do (HBR, 2018).

Sit with that gap. If most leaders can’t accurately see their own behaviour, then most leaders are unknowingly shaping a culture they’d never choose on paper. The MD who says “we value open debate” but visibly bristles at challenge is teaching the room to stay quiet, regardless of the values on the wall. The accountable leader’s first task, then, isn’t to roll out a culture programme. It’s to look honestly at the gap between the behaviour they model and the behaviour they want.

For the People Leader supporting that MD, the job is to make the wanted behaviour systematic: a shared manager vocabulary, a daily habit your team actually keeps, and a dashboard you can take to the board. For the Accountable Leader, it’s to back that with visible, repeated modelling. Neither works alone. Culture changes when the person who signs the cheques and the person who owns the people agenda are shaping the same behaviour, out loud, on purpose. That’s the heart of the 4 Culture Structures in practice.

Shaping culture deliberately: FAQ

What does “culture is the way we do things around here” really mean?

It means culture is the lived pattern of behaviour in an organisation, how people make decisions, treat each other and respond under pressure, rather than the values written in a document. The phrase is a useful diagnosis, but the strongest leaders go further and define the way they want to do things, then shape behaviour until reality matches the intention.

Can you actually change an organisation’s culture on purpose?

Yes, but it takes deliberate, repeated effort rather than a one-off launch. McKinsey found roughly 70% of change efforts fall short, usually because the existing culture quietly resists. Shaping culture works when leaders name the gap between current and intended behaviour, model the wanted behaviour themselves, and use a shared language and short feedback loops to reinforce it (McKinsey, 2021).

What are the 4 Culture Structures?

They’re four behavioural patterns in the Tribe365® model, set by two axes: Uniform Vision (shared direction) and Purpose-led Autonomy (trusted freedom). The four are People (low vision, low autonomy), Power (high, low), Role (low, high) and Collaborative (high, high). Collaborative is the structure most scaling SMEs will want to shape towards for growth and sustainability.

How is shaping culture different from writing a values statement?

A values statement describes intent. Shaping culture changes behaviour. The gap between the two is where most culture work fails. Deliberate culture means making the wanted behaviour the path of least resistance through leadership modelling, a shared vocabulary, daily reflection and visible measurement, not just a sentence on the wall.

How does the Tribe365® app help shape culture?

The Tribe365® app, at £10/month per user, runs two-minute daily reflections that roll up into a Snapshot and dashboard. It turns culture from an annual guess into a continuous signal, surfacing misalignment, low engagement and micromanagement early, so leaders can shape the way they do things while there’s still time to act.

Summary: stop describing your culture, start shaping it

“Culture is the way we do things around here” is a fine description of what you’ve already got. It’s a poor instruction for what to build. The accidental culture that forms while you grow tends towards silos, blame and the comfortable status quo, and you pay for it in conflict, disengagement and stalled change. The way out isn’t a bigger values poster. It’s a decision: name how you want to do things, choose your culture structure on purpose, and shape the everyday behaviours that make it real.

That work is shared. The Accountable Leader goes first and keeps going. The People Leader makes it systematic with a shared language, a daily habit and visible data. Do that, and “the way we do things around here” stops being something that happened to you and becomes something you chose. People in great spaces, behaving the way they meant to, do great things.