Well-being and healthy relationships are defining characteristics of strong, long-lasting teams, and yet they are too often thrown into that bucket of qualities we think of as nice-to-haves. The typical company culture puts qualities like excellence, innovation, knowledge, financial performance, or industry leadership at the top, while losing sight of the fact that these are the result of strong and healthy people working well together. Perhaps the team will perform well for a while, but it won’t reach its full potential or remain on top for long.
The typical company culture puts qualities like excellence, innovation, knowledge, financial performance, or industry leadership at the top, while losing sight of the fact that these are the result of strong and healthy people working well together.
We picture the dynamics of a workplace according to how much it values well-being and strong relationships. You can see how these influence workplace culture by laying them over a simple four-quadrant grid, with the x-axis representing the degree to which a culture values individual well-being, and the y-axis representing the degree to which it values relationships among employees.
The interplay between these values—strong and weak on each axis—creates quadrants that represent workplace cultures familiar in organizational life. We’ll describe each below, counterclockwise from top left. Each description includes the characteristics of the quadrant, its results for people and the organization, ways to address the situation, and (to make it memorable) a mascot and nickname representing the quadrant.
As you read the descriptions, ask yourself “Which of these cultures is most like my team, my division, and my company?”
4 Common Types of Company Culture
1) School of Sharks
In the School of Sharks, relationships matter but well-being is unimportant. This workplace is characterized by focusing relationships entirely on their utility for getting business results, regardless of their genuine qualities. It’s the height of workism: people work unmanageable hours and are expected to suck it up and not complain. Relationships are transactional—with others on the team, with people in the wider organization, and even with customers. Relationships are valued for their utility: acquiring money, success or prestige. The School of Sharks is characterized by zero-sum thinking and a scarcity mindset; people react to limits on promotions and bonus money by grabbing the most they can for themselves.
This is a stereotypical version of a hard-driving workplace, where winners win and anyone who falters is lunch. The mascot of this workplace is the shark, always cruising for its next meal, with a few pilot fish clinging onto its sides hoping to pick up the leftovers.
The School of Sharks can deliver business results, but its human cost is burnout, low morale among all but the biggest sharks, high turnover among the lesser sharks (or other fish) and high cost on health. When the culture is transactional, the most talented people are often the least loyal, and competitors can lure them away.
2) The Doom Loop
If you’ve ever been in a workplace where neither relationships nor well-being matter, you probably shudder at the memory of participating in the Doom Loop. People might work very hard, disregarding their well-being, or just do the bare minimum, without a sense of purpose other than getting by. Business results on most metrics, from profits to employee engagement, are below average, and attempts to change such a culture are usually too little, too late. Apathy, cynicism, low performance, and a sense of drift characterize this workplace. This workplace has inspired decades of mordan