The Culture You’re In Is the Culture You’re Creating

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Culture is shaped daily by the decisions, actions, and energy of every individual—not just leadership.
Silence and self-talk contribute to culture as much as words and visible behavior.
Feedback from cultural assessments isn’t criticism—it’s direction for alignment and improvement.

Culture isn’t something written on a breakroom poster or repeated in all-hands meetings. Culture is built—minute by minute—by the people who live it. It’s not about what the CEO says or what HR prints in a handbook. It’s about how you show up. The decisions you make. The energy you bring. The words you speak. And just as importantly, the ones you choose not to.

Every team, every department, every company has a culture. The question is whether it was built intentionally—or passively allowed to form. At MIT45, we've experienced explosive growth. But that growth didn’t happen by accident. It came because of the people who decided to lean in, take ownership, and lead with integrity, passion, and relentless dedication.

That means our culture isn’t static. It’s evolving—shaped by every individual’s contribution or withdrawal. Your silence matters. The stories you tell yourself when no one’s watching? Those ripple through your actions. And your actions either move us forward… or hold us back.

We’re not interested in platitudes. We’re interested in performance—and performance is always culture-driven. That’s why we invested in working with the Denison Culture Group. Not because we had a broken culture to fix—but because we know that feedback is the only path to alignment and excellence. If we’re serious about scaling, we have to be equally serious about refining the ecosystem we’re building inside.

What came out of that culture survey wasn’t surprising. We found strengths—areas where our core values shine through and fuel our progress. But we also uncovered friction points. Natural misalignments. That’s not failure. That’s feedback. That’s data we can use to calibrate.

The moment you understand that you are an active participant in shaping the culture you operate in, everything changes. You stop pointing fingers and start asking better questions: What am I modeling? What energy am I bringing? How am I contributing to the environment I want to be part of?

Leadership isn’t about title. It’s about impact. And every single one of us leads, whether we acknowledge it or not. Your behavior gives permission—up, down, and sideways in the org chart. If you want a higher-performing culture, bring higher-performing habits.

So the challenge is simple: Don’t wait for someone else to define the culture for you. Own it. Speak into it. Push it forward. Because if you’re not shaping the culture, the culture is shaping you.