The Culture Conundrum: Why Leaders Are Overcomplicating What Should Be Simple

Culture: it’s one of those buzzwords that gets tossed around the boardroom with more fervor than anyone cares to admit. It’s become this nebulous, overcomplicated thing that’s often reduced to surface-level perks and shiny distractions. Companies get caught up in a dangerous game of thinking that throwing bean bags in the break room, offering unlimited vacation time, or slapping on a “cool” tagline will fix their culture. Here’s the blunt truth: it won’t.

If you’re a CEO or founder, this should be one of your top three strategic priorities, yet most get it wrong. Culture isn’t a perk buffet; it’s the experience your employees have with you as their leader, and it’s how they feel when they’re working for you. It’s not about how fun the office looks, nor how many team-building exercises you can cram into a calendar quarter. Culture runs deeper—it's rooted in the emotional, psychological, and professional experience of your employees. It comes down to the environment you create for them to succeed, both personally and for the business.

Let’s break it down: culture is about what you want your people to feel when they show up for work. Are they valued? Are they trusted? Are they challenged in ways that make them better? Or are they just numbers, cogs in a wheel, going through the motions?

Culture is About Experience, Not Perks

Far too many companies reduce culture to being “how we do things around here.” That phrase is essentially meaningless because it implies that culture is something you can put on autopilot. If culture is just some vague set of habits or norms, then you’ve already lost. It’s not about what’s happening externally—it’s about the internal experience you're creating.

Culture is about the experience you want employees to have and the emotions you want them to feel when they’re doing their work. Trust and autonomy? Or micromanagement and suffocation? Joy in success? Or dread in failure? It’s what drives how they operate day in, day out, and how connected they feel to the mission.

If you want your employees to bring their best selves to work, you’ve got to do more than just dangle superficial benefits. You have to invest in creating an environment that aligns their individual successes with the business’s success. Stop with the gimmicks. Instead, look at how you communicate with your team collectively and individually. How you coach them. How you trust them.

Leadership and Culture Go Hand in Hand

Here’s where most founders and CEOs screw it up—they see culture as something separate from leadership. It’s not. The kind of culture you foster is directly tied to how you lead, how you show up for your people, and how you allow them to show up for you.

Ask yourself: Do you micromanage? Do you give your employees the autonomy to solve problems, or are you there breathing down their necks? Do they feel supported and heard, or are you just running down a list of KPIs? The answers to these questions reveal your true culture—not the fancy mission statements or the branded swag you hand out at every company offsite.

Leadership is about creating an experience where employees feel their work is meaningful, their voices are heard, and their contributions are valued. When people feel this way, they’re going to invest their energy and creativity in driving your business forward. It’s a win-win. Their growth is the business’s growth. You don’t need to over-engineer this—you just need to ask yourself what experience you want to create for them.

Start with the Experience, Then Build Outward

If you’re thinking about how to improve your culture, don’t start with the perks. Don’t start with the list of trendy programs your HR team is pitching. Start with this: What do I want my employees to feel? How do I want them to experience working here? What kind of emotional and professional environment will bring out their best?

Once you’ve answered that, reverse-engineer your culture. Design policies, processes, and benefits that drive that experience. If you want people to feel trusted, build systems of accountability, not surveillance. If you want them to feel valued, give them ownership and the opportunity to succeed. If you want them to feel connected to the mission, show them how their individual efforts push the company forward.

You have to align what you offer with the experience you want to create, and that means prioritizing things that matter—not the fluff.

I Offer You This: Invest in the Experience You Want to Create

Too many companies throw a bunch of cool stuff at the wall and hope it sticks. That’s not culture. That’s hope. You don’t lead a company on hope. Decide what value you want to create through your culture and invest in the things that make that happen. That might be investing in leadership training, building an environment of trust, or giving your people real ownership over their roles.

At the end of the day, culture is about making deliberate decisions. The choices you make around how people experience work will either fuel your business or stall it. The companies that get it right know that culture isn’t a sideshow—it’s a driving force. And if you’re not treating it as one of your top priorities, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

‍