Culture locates us in the world. It consists of stories we share with one another to breathe life into the empty vessel of “company.” But—and here’s the kicker—so powerful is our need for story, our need for communal sense making of the world, that we imagine that our company and its culture can explain our experience of work. And yet it can’t. So strong is our identification with our tribe that it’s hard for us to imagine that other people inside our company are having a completely different experience of “tribe” from ours. Yet they are—and these local team experiences have far more bearing on whether we stay in the tribe or leave it than do our tribal stories.

One of the simplest and best descriptions of culture is Google’s ‘how we do things

around here.’ An organization’s culture reflects its leaders’ values, particularly its founders’ values.

But at least if a cultural gap is identified, it can be bridged or even closed over time.

You can learn a lot about a place by paying attention to its words. The way people in an organization speak to others inside and those outside says a lot about how it sees itself.

Even though it’s crucial for a new leader to show that he or she fits into the culture and “gets” it, the paradox is that you don’t want to settle in too comfortably if the culture needs modification. But of course, changing a culture is never as simple as ordering it to be so, especially if the organization is very proud of its traditions. And what organization isn’t?

As Lou Gerstner says, “Changing the attitude and behavior of hundreds of thousands of people is very, very hard to accomplish. You can’t simply give a couple of speeches or write a new credo for the company and declare that the new culture has taken hold. You can’t mandate it, can’t engineer it.

“What you can do is create the conditions for transformation. You can provide incentives. You can define the marketplace realities and goals. But at some point you have to trust. In fact, in the end, management doesn’t change culture. Management invites the workforce itself to change the culture.