Why I Stopped Trying to Build Company Culture—and Built a Mission Instead

Introduction: The Illusion of Culture-Building

Many business leaders obsess over building company culture—team bonding activities, virtual happy hours, and forced camaraderie. But what if culture isn’t something you create artificially? What if it’s a byproduct of something deeper?

Coming from the military, I never saw culture as something you had to manufacture. In that environment, culture forms organically from shared hardship, clear objectives, and the collective effort to accomplish the mission. I carried this mindset into my business, and I quickly realized that traditional culture-building efforts often do more harm than good.

I believe most employees don’t apply for a job because they’re looking for a place to socialize. They’re there for a paycheck, professional growth, and stability. Forced social interactions like happy hours or corporate outings often breed resentment rather than connection. Leaders who rely on perks and social events confuse giving gifts with fostering meaningful relationships. Just because someone smiles and accepts free drinks or company swag doesn’t mean they feel truly connected to their team or invested in their shared success.

My leadership approach is different because I believe in absolute honesty, clear objectives, and measurable success metrics. I hold people accountable when they fail and reward them when they exceed expectations. The key to real team cohesion isn’t artificial bonding but setting objectives that force collaboration—missions that can’t be accomplished alone.

Through my consulting work, I’ve seen firsthand how traditional culture-building fails. The claims people make during these activities rarely match their real behaviors during daily operations. The biggest myth about company culture is that an employer can single-handedly shape the mental well-being of a team and make them as invested in the mission as the leader is.

Instead of trying to build culture, I learned that the real solution is to focus on mission clarity and alignment—because when people truly believe in the mission, they build the culture themselves.

1. Why Traditional Culture-Building Fails

Most companies try to create culture through social activities, corporate perks, and vague values. But these efforts often fall flat for several reasons:

• It’s just theatre. Traditional culture-building is often performative—employees say what’s expected and do the bare minimum to get through it.
• It doesn’t create accountability. When people feel personally accountable for the mission, they take ownership because they know the company’s success directly impacts their fair compensation. No forced happy hour can replicate that.
• It’s expensive and ineffective. Culture-building fails just as much in in-person environments, but companies spend more money hosting elaborate events to capture attention without creating real engagement.

I once had a Scrum Master organize a “zombie attack” workshop, where we used the analogy of surviving such an event to identify team members’ strengths and weaknesses. The problem with these exercises is that they lower the stakes—discussing team roles in a hypothetical scenario isn’t the same as failing to deliver a product and facing real-world consequences like losing your job and struggling to pay bills. Because the stakes are artificial, employee engagement is proportionally reduced.

Employees build trust and camaraderie when they solve real problems for one another. When the obstacles that make it difficult to do your job are suddenly removed because of a teammate’s actions, that’s when real gratitude and connection happen. Not during a company retreat, but in the trenches of real work.

2. The Shift to a Mission-Driven Approach

Instead of asking, "How do we build a strong company culture?" I started asking, "What is our mission, and how does every role contribute to it?"

A mission-driven company doesn’t need to manufacture culture because the mission itself creates alignment, motivation, and ownership.

A strong mission has a few key components:

• A clear purpose—Team members must understand what they are working toward.
• Direction—Without a clear path, employees won’t know how to measure progress.
• Clear stakes—If failure has no consequences, employees won’t feel a deep commitment to success.

I make sure my team understands this mission by holding monthly all-hands meetings where I communicate my intent and how it connects to our overarching mission. Additionally, I meet with my managers weekly to align on execution strategies.

Too often, companies define their mission vaguely, saying what needs to be done but failing to communicate the where, when, who, why, and how. This creates teams that “plod along” without true engagement or urgency. In contrast, a mission-driven organization builds highly productive teams because success is clearly defined.

3. What This Looks Like in Practice

• Hiring: We communicate our mission in one sentence and our current intent in one paragraph, making it easy to align any hire. If someone has the necessary skills, they will accomplish the intent—there is no need to "align" them in a vague or subjective way. The mission must be objectively accomplishable by people with the right technical and soft skills.
• Leadership: We embrace top-down management but ensure that every individual only focuses on problems two layers up and monitors execution one layer down. This ensures clarity in execution without micromanagement.
• Accountability: Course correction is constant because organizational drift happens naturally. A mission-driven approach provides objective, quantifiable metrics to measure whether individuals and teams are progressing the mission.
• Camaraderie: Clear missions with the right talent always build camaraderie naturally. Depending on the intent, sometimes competition between teams is valuable to drive innovation and uncover the best workflows.

4. The Results: How Mission Creates Culture

Productivity and engagement are the key differences in a mission-driven approach. Being a remote-first, cloud-native, and AI-first organization already filters for individuals with a specific mindset. But being mission-driven further self-selects the right people for our roles.

There is zero cost to communicating clearly and being honest about expectations, while it is unclear how much benefit is achieved for the cost of a pizza party or other artificial bonding events. Mission-driven teams naturally build cohesion because they trust their colleagues to get the work done. When they can rely on their teammates, collaboration happens organically, strengthening the team’s dynamic without forced interaction.

Conclusion: Mission First, Culture Follows

If business leaders believe in traditional culture-building, I challenge them to ask: Can you name a single team-building exercise that changed the way you worked the next week? The biggest misconception is that simply doing things as a team makes you a team.

Mission-driven organizations solve missions; culture-focused organizations discover their culture. But which one leads to profitability and growth? Our customers don’t pay us to have a good culture—they pay us to deliver results. A mission relates directly to what you are doing, and it must evolve to suit new challenges and changing circumstances.

Ultimately, culture is not created at work—it comes from how you live your life. Your company isn’t responsible for defining your culture. It’s responsible for executing a mission.