Do you build a culture, or does it just happen? I have been pondering this over recent weeks, and I have come to the conclusion – it’s a bit of both.
Culture is grown. It emerges from what people experience day to day: how decisions get made, what gets rewarded, what gets tolerated when nobody’s watching. You can’t manufacture that directly, no matter how good your onboarding is.
But culture is also created, in the sense that leaders shape the conditions it grows in. You’re not planting the culture itself. You’re deciding what kind of soil it grows in.
When values are created but never lived
Most organizations have values. Somebody worked hard on them at some point, probably in a strategy retreat with sticky notes involved. Having them is rarely the issue.
The issue is what happens next. Plenty of organizations create a culture on paper — values on the website, a mission statement everyone can recite, a values slide in week one of onboarding. And then something else grows underneath it entirely, because the systems don’t match the words. Promotions reward something other than the stated values. Leaders behave one way in the values workshop and another way under deadline pressure.
That mismatch is costly. It shows up as cynicism: staff who’ve learned not to take the values statement seriously because they’ve watched it get overridden by whatever’s urgent. It shows up as inconsistent decisions, because there’s no shared reference point when a hard call must be made. And for nonprofits navigating funding uncertainty and constant change, it shows up at exactly the moments when a clear set of values would matter most.
Building the bridge between the value and the decision
Closing that gap takes more than restating the values more often. It takes a deliberate process of checking whether they’re still the right ones, being honest about where they’re not being lived, and then building them into the systems that actually drive behavior.
In practice, that looks like three things:
- Revisit the values. Don’t assume the ones written down five years ago (or by five people who’ve since left) still reflect where the organization is today.
- Name the gaps: identify (with examples) where current behavior lines up with what’s stated, and where it plainly doesn’t.
- Embed the values into the systems that shape daily choices. Go through your processes, like hiring and onboarding, performance and promotion criteria, governance and decision-making, wellbeing and psychological safety, and if the values don’t clearly show up in how things get handled in practice, then put the values in where they can best shape behaviors.
That last part is the step most organizations skip, but this is where the soil actually matters. It’s the difference between values as decoration and values as something that shape what grows.
The real test is pressure
It’s easy to live your values when nothing’s at stake. The real test is what happens when living them costs something — influence, comfort, money, control. Those moments aren’t failures of the culture work. They’re the actual point of it. If your values have never been tested under pressure, you don’t yet know whether they’re real.
For organizations navigating funding cuts, restructuring, or the ordinary strain of doing more with less, that pressure isn’t hypothetical. It’s today. Get the alignment right, and values become a genuine decision-making aid in exactly the moments when clarity is hardest to find. Leave the gap unaddressed, and every difficult decision chips away a little more at whether anyone believes the stated values in the first place.
Where to start
If you’ve got values sitting on a website that nobody’s revisited in years, or you suspect there’s a gap between what’s stated and what’s actually rewarded, that’s worth naming openly before you try to fix it. Culture isn’t something you finish creating. It’s something you keep tending.
Humentum’s Living Our Values Guide and Workbook are a useful place to start that work, practical enough to act on, honest enough not to pretend the process is tidy. The same page also has a recorded webinar, “Living Values During Crisis,” where leaders talk through what upholding values looks like when resources are ti
ght and trade-offs are unavoidable. Take a look and see where the gap sits in your own organization. It’ll help you figure out where to dig first.
Living your values under pressure isn’t something you need to figure out alone. Solutions Hub members get direct access to a Strategy Session with a trusted Humentum Guide to work through exactly where your values and your systems don’t yet line up, plus a peer community of nonprofits navigating the same trade-offs.
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