When a company's culture doesn’t need to be explained

Over the years, working in and around agencies, consultancies and large organisations, one pattern has stood out so consistently it’s become almost reassuring in its predictability: the healthiest cultures are rarely the ones that feel the need to talk about themselves the most.

You start to notice it when you pay attention to what organisations choose to amplify. Some fill their feeds with pronouncements about leadership, values and purpose, as though the sheer volume of declaration might somehow create the thing being described. Others are strangely quiet by comparison and seem to let the work, the people and the outcomes do the talking instead. In time, the difference becomes impossible to ignore.

There’s a quiet confidence in organisations that don’t need to explain who they are.

They don’t rely on slogans or posters to tell you what matters. You don’t need a slide deck to understand how they behave. Their culture reveals itself through everyday conduct, in meetings that feel honest rather than performative, in leaders who are present rather than posturing, and in teams who spend more of their energy on the work itself than on navigating each other.

It’s easy, particularly in large organisations, to confuse visibility with substance.

Culture decks, engagement campaigns and toolkits all play their part, but none of them can manufacture the thing they’re meant to describe. Culture isn’t something that can be launched or rebranded on a quarterly cycle. It grows over time through decisions, tone and behaviour, especially when nobody’s watching.

Large organisations often respond to cultural uncertainty by adding more structure around it. New roles appear, whole teams form and programmes multiply, all designed to “embed” culture, “activate” values or “build” belonging. None of this is malicious, but it is revealing. The very need for Chief Culture Officers, recurring workshops and quarterly values resets is usually a symptom rather than a solution. Culture doesn’t thrive by administration. It strengthens through consistency, example and trust in everyday leadership.

When culture’s genuinely healthy, it doesn’t need a permanent support function to stand in for it. It doesn’t need to be centrally managed or continually reintroduced to its own workforce. It’s already present in how decisions are made, who’s promoted, what behaviour’s quietly rewarded and what’s never tolerated. Where that foundation exists, workshops become secondary and titles become largely decorative.

In places where culture’s working, it’s rarely treated as a separate initiative.

It doesn’t have its own calendar of events, nor does it require constant explanation. It shows up in how people disagree without falling out, how leaders take responsibility without theatre, and how mistakes are handled without disproportionate drama. There’s nothing flashy about it, which is precisely the point.

The clearest example of this I ever experienced wasn’t the result of a polished campaign, but of a single expectation that hardly needed explaining. During my time at Bain, the line that described the culture most accurately was also the simplest: a Bainie never lets another Bainie fail. No murals. No manifestos. No need to evangelise. Just a shared understanding that people quietly took seriously.

Crucially, culture didn’t live on the website. It lived in how people showed up under pressure, in whether juniors were supported rather than tested, and in the absence of performative leadership. There was no obsession with promoting values because everyone already understood what they meant in practice.

That, in the end, is the real sign of strength.

When culture’s healthy, it’s often almost invisible because it’s dissolved into daily life. When it’s fragile, it becomes louder, more self-conscious and more dependent on language to make up for what behaviour doesn’t supply.

At its best, culture isn’t the product being sold, it’s the by-product of how people work together. Most people don’t join companies for their stated values. They join because something feels right in a way that’s hard to explain but easy to sense. They stay because of how they’re treated when things get difficult, not because of the words used to describe how things are meant to be.

You can usually tell a great deal about an organisation by noticing what it talks about least.

If you want to understand a company’s culture, look at how it behaves under pressure, how people are treated when no one’s watching and how leaders act when they’re not performing. Real culture reveals itself quietly, through habit rather than headline.

The healthiest cultures rarely try to persuade you that they’re healthy. They simply get on with the work and let you discover the rest for yourself.