How to build team culture that sticks

Corporate culture isn’t built by policies. It’s built by moments—the unscripted experiences that catch us off guard, bring us closer, and quietly shape how we show up for one another. 

But many efforts labeled “culture-building,” including onboarding programs, leadership retreats, and all-hands meetings, still feel like productivity theater: tightly scheduled and heavy on performance. Today, it’s worth asking whether that model has simply run its course.

Consider this: what if the future of culture-building isn’t about managing people, but about designing experiences that allow people to feel something real together? What if awe, story, and shared creativity weren’t treated as indulgences, but as foundational elements of how trust, courage, and belonging actually form?

Beyond the Mission Statement

While leaders like to bring up the idea of team culture, few can describe what theirs feels like in practice. That’s because culture doesn’t live in a mission statement or a values deck. It lives in the stories people tell when no one is watching. It lives in how they feel after a team gathering. It lives in the space between intention and lived experience.

The data reinforces this gap. Deloitte reports that only 23% of organizations believe their employees are strongly aligned with corporate purpose. Gallup finds that just two in ten employees feel connected to their company’s culture on a daily basis. 

These aren’t engagement or communication problems; they are failures of experience design. When culture is reduced to language and artifacts, it stays abstract. When it’s shaped through shared experience, it becomes something people carry with them.

Designing a Culture People Can Actually Feel

Imagine replacing a traditional all-hands meeting with a creative exercise in which each team member contributes a visual expression of what matters most to them at work. Or imagine a leadership offsite that trades breakout rooms for a story circle, where leaders share pivotal moments that shaped how they lead today. People may forget the fourth bullet on slide 37, but they remember the moment they felt genuinely seen. That’s where culture actually forms.

Across my work with teams and leaders ranging from early-stage companies to established organizations navigating change, the most durable cultural shifts don’t come from tighter processes or clearer messaging. They come from intentionally designed experiences built around three elements humans have relied on for connection long before modern organizations existed: art, ritual, and awe. These lay the grounds for emotional experiences—which can determine trust, risk-taking, and follow-through.

Art as a Medium for Meaning

When teams create something together—without relying on words—hierarchies soften, safety increases, and unspoken dynamics surface naturally. Art invites play and perspective, two capacities most workplaces quietly suppress.

At a recent leadership offsite, I facilitated a collaborative art experience where each participant expressed a core value visually, without explanation. What emerged was more than a collective artwork; it was a shared mirror. People recognized one another in new ways. Long after the offsite ended, the exercise continued to shape conversations. Art creates space for truth to surface without requiring debate or performance.

Ritual as Emotional Architecture

Ritual has a way of slowing us down and signaling significance. Simple, intentional gestures—opening a meeting with a shared intention, closing an offsite with a moment of gratitude, marking transitions with presence—turn routine interactions into moments of coherence.

In my Campfires of Connection work, gatherings begin and end with ritual: lighting a fire, sharing a single word, or pausing together in silence. These gestures don’t demand belief or explanation; they communicate something more fundamental: this moment matters.

One of my clients began opening weekly meetings with a 60-second pause and a single prompt: “What are you bringing here today?” Over time, that slight shift deepened trust more effectively than any formal team-building program. Ritual isn’t soft; it’s the emotional structure. It creates the container in which change becomes possible.

Awe as a Catalyst for Connection

Modern workplaces are loud, fast, and cognitively overloaded. Many people aren’t disengaged because they don’t care; they’re overstimulated and starved of wonder. Awe interrupts that pattern. It resets the nervous system and expands perspective.

In one of my facilitation sessions, participants were invited to sketch places from their childhood and share the stories behind them. The drawings were simple and imperfect, yet deeply personal. As each was revealed, the room changed. Colleagues who had known one another only through polished professional roles suddenly encountered one another as whole people with layered histories.

That collective pause created a sense of awe. These moments don’t happen accidentally. They’re carefully designed to allow people to encounter something beyond their roles. In environments driven by metrics and deadlines, awe reminds us why collaboration matters and why people choose to stay, contribute, and stretch together rather than simply comply.

When Culture-Building Falls Flat

To understand why this approach matters, it helps to consider the alternative. I once observed a leadership retreat that checked every conventional box. The agenda featured well-known speakers, the breakout sessions were smartly facilitated, and participants left entertained, informed, and exhausted. But within weeks, nothing had changed. The retreat generated momentum but not meaning. 

What was missing wasn’t effort; it was emotional resonance. There was no moment when people could set aside the performance of leadership and engage with one another more honestly. The experience was efficient, but forgettable.

Months later, a much smaller intervention with the same group, a single evening structured around reflection, had a disproportionate impact. Leaders spoke openly about uncertainty, named tensions they had been avoiding, and listened without trying to fix or impress. That evening reshaped how they worked together more than any previous retreat had. Culture doesn’t shift because information is delivered; it shifts when people feel something together that changes how they see one another.

For leaders designing their next team gathering, the most useful questions may not be logistical at all. What do we want people to feel when they leave this room? What truth needs space to surface here? What has been rushed past that deserves reverence? What might become possible if we slowed down just enough to let meaning catch up?

The organizations people love working for aren’t those with the slickest branding or the most polished values decks. They’re the ones where people leave a meeting or retreat feeling more alive, more trusted, and more willing to take risks together.

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