Inklings of Sense: Culture Lives in the Little Things
Updated: Sep 11
“It’s the little things that are important. It’s the little things that get you caught.”
— The Little Things (2021)
Workplace culture is often discussed in big language and polished words—mission, vision, values, engagement, belonging, leadership. As organizations, we spend significant time defining those words, placing them in strategic plans, and putting them on walls, only to forget what we truly intended the language to mean.
Why?
Because we often think of these words as a display of who we want the world to see us as, without truly practicing the meaning and reasoning behind why we chose our mission, vision, values, and so on in the first place.
But culture rarely breaks down because an organization forgot to write a value statement. It breaks down because we don't understand the true essence behind the statement. It breaks down in the little things.
Who gets acknowledged when they enter the room? Who receives information, and who consistently hears it secondhand? Does someone follow through on what they said they would do? What happens when someone makes a mistake? Are difficult conversations addressed or quietly avoided? Does the standard change depending upon who is standing in front of us?
Those moments may appear small individually, but collectively they tell people what an organization actually values.
Transactions or Transformation?
Organizations can become very good at performing culture transactionally—we held the meeting, sent the email, created the committee, wrote the values, completed the training, checked the box—without those things actually transforming the human experience inside the organization.
We often hear, “That meeting could have been an email,” or “That email was too long; it could have been said more simply.” But at what point do we begin to see every interaction as an opportunity to be intentional?
When every interaction becomes purely transactional, we risk losing a small piece of the human experience—especially when humanity is left to chance.
Wow. That may seem like a lot of responsibility to place on simply replying to an email with the requested data or answering a question. But intent versus impact happens every time. We see it. We experience it. And whether we recognize it or not, we respond to the result.
Humanity cannot be left to chance. It has to happen with intentionality and purpose.
That intentionality and purpose are wrapped up in the little things. And those little things, repeated over time, become culture.
Culture Is What People Experience
Culture is not simply what an organization says about itself. It can't be.
The culture of an organization lives within the people who are helping to build it. Each of us brings our own cultures, experiences, expectations, communication styles, values, and ways of navigating the world into the workplace. If an organization has not truly established what its culture looks like—and, more importantly, what it feels like—then the individual cultures we bring will ultimately begin shaping the collective culture.
Culture is what people repeatedly experience because culture is what we learn and what we allow.
Policies matter. Processes matter. Strategic plans matter. But people experience organizations through people. And people matter most.
That means every interaction has the potential to reinforce—or contradict—the culture an organization says it wants to create.
A workplace can have respect written among its core values while tolerating disrespectful behavior.
It can say it values communication while important decisions consistently happen behind closed doors.
It can champion collaboration while rewarding individual behavior that undermines the team.
Eventually, people stop listening to what the organization says and begin responding to what the organization repeatedly does.
Culture Lives Here. But Whose Culture?
What are we sharing?
I would argue that we need to share more than policies, procedures, mission statements, and organizational values. We need shared language and shared experiences—human experiences.
That doesn't mean everyone has to experience an organization in exactly the same way. We shouldn't. We bring different perspectives, backgrounds, expectations, and experiences into the spaces we share. But an organization should be intentional about creating a shared understanding of how we will experience one another.
How do we communicate? How do we disagree? How do we hold one another accountable? What does respect look like here? What happens when harm occurs? What behaviors are we willing to challenge, and which ones do we quietly allow?
Without that shared understanding, culture is left to interpretation. And when culture is left entirely to interpretation, the loudest, most established, or most tolerated behaviors can become the culture by default.
The human experience within an organization should not be accidental. We have to create it intentionally.
The Little Things Become the Big Things
Small behaviors become patterns. Patterns become expectations. Expectations become culture.
That is why we cannot afford to dismiss seemingly minor moments as just the little things.
The email that doesn't need to be warm, but doesn't have to be dismissive.
The person whose contribution is heard in the meeting but never acknowledged.
The information that everyone technically has access to, but somehow the same people consistently receive first.
The difficult conversation repeatedly postponed because addressing it would be uncomfortable.
The person who continually absorbs the impact of someone else's behavior because confronting the behavior seems harder than asking them to adjust.
The request for honest feedback followed by defensiveness when the feedback actually comes.
None of those moments alone defines an organization.
But repetition does.
And once a pattern becomes normalized, changing it requires significantly more effort than addressing it when it first appears.
Compassion Does Not Remove Accountability
This is where Strategic Compassion™ becomes important.
Compassion in the workplace does not mean avoiding difficult conversations, lowering expectations, or excusing behavior that negatively affects others. We can seek to understand why something happened while still addressing the fact that it happened. We can acknowledge someone's circumstances while maintaining expectations. We can care about the person and confront the behavior.
That intersection—where humanity and accountability coexist—is where healthier workplace cultures are built.
If you really want your organization to be the best that it can be, you must take what may be the hardest—and truly the first—step:
You must say something.
Of course, you may get that weird feeling in the pit of your stomach. Your hands may begin to sweat. Other physical responses may show up. Because saying something, particularly when the culture around us has taught us not to, can be uncomfortable.
But here's why this matters.
Many of us have moved from one organization to another, experiencing cultures that have become toxic—or, in some cases, were unhealthy from the beginning. And because we are human, we take pieces of those experiences with us. Sometimes, we leave pieces of ourselves behind as well.
This is how culture begins to take root—not only through our human experience, but through our human exposure.
What we have been exposed to teaches us what to expect. It can teach us what to tolerate, what to avoid, what not to question, and even what we begin to believe is simply “the way organizations work.”
So again, the first step is to acknowledge that what is happening is, indeed, happening—and then communicate it.
That doesn't mean shouting from the rooftops. But if we want healthy organizations, those organizations have to be intentional about creating space for true communication to occur. Communication can remain “professional”—and professionalism is another blog for another day—while still allowing people to communicate what they are actually experiencing.
And perhaps most importantly, we have to make room for communication to occur in the way a person needs to communicate it—not simply in the way we want them to communicate it.
Can we make room for the humanity of the person communicating without abandoning responsibility for how we communicate with one another?
Pay Attention to What You're Normalizing
We shape culture not only through the decisions we make, but through the behaviors we consistently acknowledge, reinforce, challenge, or ignore.
So perhaps the better question isn't:
“Do we have a positive workplace culture?”
Perhaps it is:
“What are people learning about our culture from the little things we do every day?”
Because ultimately, culture isn't built only in strategic planning sessions, leadership retreats, or employee engagement initiatives.
It is built in ordinary moments.
And sometimes, the little things tell you everything.
