Why Your Culture Problem Isn't at the Top — It's in the Seams
I've had a lot of great conversations on the TrustBuilt Podcast. But every once in a while, a guest says something that reframes the way I've been thinking about a problem — and Steve Blair has now done that to me twice.
Steve is someone I'd describe as a master at culture, people, and community. He works inside organizations—not as an outside consultant, but as an embedded member of leadership—helping them build the kind of culture where the best people don't just stay; they thrive.
In our first conversation, we covered the surface: what culture is, why trust matters, and what it looks like when it breaks down. This time, I wanted to go deeper. More application. Less concept. And Steve delivered.
What came out of that conversation is something I haven't stopped thinking about.
The Question I've Been Asking Wrong
Most business owners I work with know when they have a culture problem. They feel it. Turnover picks up. Team members seem checked out. The values they spent time writing down start to feel hollow — because what's posted on the wall isn't what's happening in the hallway.
And when they decide to fix it? Almost universally, they start at the top. They revisit the values. Rewrite the mission statement. Maybe bring in a speaker for the all-hands. They assume the culture problem lives where they have the most visibility — at the organizational level.
Steve's insight hit me square in the chest when he said it: “Cultures don't usually break at the top. They break in the seams.”
That one line changed how I'm thinking about this entirely.
The Culture Stack
Steve introduced what he calls the “culture stack,” and I'll be honest, the tech metaphor clicked immediately. Just like a tech stack has layers (hardware, operating systems, software, users), culture operates in layers too. And what happens at each layer either reinforces or quietly erodes everything above it.
Here's how he broke it down:
Layer 1 — The Organization architects the culture. This is where mission, vision, and values live. Where the business model decisions get made. Leadership at this level is setting the tone and the structure. Most organizations spend the bulk of their culture energy here.
Layer 2 — Departments and Geographies translate that culture into something relevant to their context. The values stay consistent, but how they're expressed in sales looks different than how they're expressed in accounting. How you do business in Northwest Arkansas is different than how you do it in New York. This layer is where culture begins to develop a personality — and where misalignment can start quietly.
Layer 3 — Teams integrate culture into ways of working. Meeting cadences, how email gets handled, process flows, how decisions get made day to day. This is where culture stops being abstract and starts being lived.
Layer 4 — The Immediate Manager is, as Steve put it, the foundational level of any culture. There is no more direct shaper of how a person actually experiences the culture of an organization than their immediate manager. Not the CEO. Not the values poster. Their manager.
And here's the thing — most organizations have a lot of people at that fourth level. A lot of managers carrying the entire weight of cultural translation, often without the tools, training, or clarity to do it well.
Where It Actually Breaks Down
When Steve laid out the four levels on the whiteboard, something I've seen in client after client suddenly had language.
An organization spends years building a great culture at the top two levels. It works. And then, slowly, it starts to drift. The values are still on the wall. The mission statement hasn't changed. But something is off. So what do most organizations do? They go back to the top. They tweak the values. They commission a new culture initiative. They host another retreat.
But the break isn't up there. It's in the seams — the handoff between levels. A rogue team operating out of alignment. A manager who's doing performance reviews differently from everyone else. A department that stopped translating the culture intentionally and started defaulting to whatever felt comfortable.
Steve's prescription was direct: if you have a culture problem, train your managers. Help them paint the picture for every person on their team — how their role connects to the organization's values, how their work contributes to the goals. You'll get more mileage from that than from rewriting the mission statement for the fourth time.
I believe that. I've seen it play out.
Knowing Who You're Working With
Before we got into the culture stack, Steve made the case for something he considers foundational to it all: understanding how people are wired.
He's a believer in assessment tools — not as labels or a way to manage people into boxes, but as a shared vocabulary that creates permission for honest conversation. When a manager and a direct report both understand their Enneagram types, DISC profiles, or have worked through StrengthsFinder together, it changes the dynamic. You're not giving feedback based on opinion. You're working from a shared framework.
Steve's preferred approach: don't rely on one tool. Layer three or four of them and look for the common threads. What motivates this person? What are their natural strengths? Where do they get their energy, and where do they drain? When you can answer those questions, you can stop trying to manage people and start figuring out how actually to leverage what they bring.
I’ve seen this wisdom when using my own coaching tools with organizations. I find that organizations that invest in understanding not just each other’s communication styles (DISC profiles), but their driving forces and EQ, are best equipped to build strong teams.
He was also clear about the danger: these tools can be weaponized. A leader who uses assessment results to stereotype, control, or dismiss people will do more damage with this knowledge than without it. The best leaders use what they learn to unlock potential — not to explain away why someone doesn't fit.
As Steve put it, the goal is to figure out how to get the most out of a person because they're unique, not to manage them around their uniqueness.
The Culture You Deserve vs. the Culture You Designed
There was a line near the end of our conversation that I keep coming back to.
Steve said that if you're not intentional — if you don't invest the energy and resources to make culture translate all the way down through the layers — you'll get the culture you deserve. Not the one you designed. Not the one you spent time crafting. The one that fills the vacuum left by neglect.
That's not a comfortable truth. But it's an honest one.
Culture isn't pizza Fridays or a kegerator in the kitchen. It's not the values on the wall or the speech at the annual meeting. It's the lived experience of what it actually feels like to work there — at the intersection of what you say you believe and what your managers do on a Tuesday afternoon.
If those two things are aligned, you've built something real. If they're not, no amount of organizational-level culture work will close the gap.
Listen to the Full Conversation
Steve Blair is someone who has spent decades inside organizations watching culture succeed and fail. The frameworks he brought to this conversation — the culture stack, the role of assessments, the power and the danger of understanding people's wiring — are the kind of practical thinking that business owners and leaders can actually use.
This was Steve's second time on the podcast. I told him at the end there'd be a third. There's more to unpack, and we're just getting started.
Or connect with Steve directly: LinkedIn | Fulcrum Collective
Want to build a business that runs on trust — at every level of the culture stack? Connect with Alan at TrustBuilt.
