The Culture Mirage: When Warmth Hides What Hurts

“A kind culture without clear rules is just avoidance with better manners.”

Every Friday at The Workshop, the town hall ended the same way: smiles, a joke, a round of claps that sounded honest enough to keep the week stitched together.

Questions were “welcomed,” though few were asked. Surveys said engagement was high. New hire videos looked happy. On paper, culture was working. And yet … people were tired. Not from work, but from what wasn’t said.

Meera, the recently promoted team lead we met last week, had learned the new choreography: soften the truth, cushion the ask, round the corners. She wasn’t lying; she was being “nice.” But each kindness postponed a conversation. Each postponed conversation became a quiet tax on the whole company.

That’s the Culture Mirage: when visible warmth and surface harmony mask the real frictions underneath. It feels good. It looks good. It slowly breaks execution.

How a Mirage Forms

Mirages form in heat. So do these.

Nostalgia Heat: A team tries to preserve the old “we’re family” feeling long after the work has changed shape. Warmth becomes a ritual. Accountability becomes optional.

(Part 1 traced how the “family” metaphor stopped fitting modern belonging.)

Promotion Heat: First-time managers (and founders themselves) avoid clean feedback because authority still feels new on their tongue. (Part 2 showed how competence outruns capability when the system doesn’t train the new layer.)

Metric Heat: eNPS(employee Net Promotor Score survey) scoreis up, emoji reactions bloom, but cycle time stalls and handoffs wobble. Sentiment wins the slide; delivery loses the week. No one is faking. Everyone is coping.

Rituals Without Rules

At The Workshop, the team had rituals standups, town halls, retrospectives. But rituals without rules become theatre.

• Standups drifted into status monologues.

• Retrospectives turned into gratitude circles.

• “Open door” became “open loop” where issues floated in, decisions never landed.

In that gap, polite sentences did the work clear sentences should have done.

The Niceness Inflation

When clarity is scarce, niceness gets louder. People over-thank, over-explain, over-emoji. Critique is wrapped so carefully it arrives as a compliment. Underperformance is managed through “support,” not standards. In time, a new equation emerges:

Belonging = harmony – honesty.

And yet the real equation that sustains scale is the opposite:

Belonging = safety + truth.

(Safety to speak; truth about expectations.)

The Human Moment

One Friday, after the applause, a young engineer stopped by Meera’s desk. “Am I doing okay?” he asked. “Everyone says yes. My tasks keep coming back with ‘small tweaks.’ I don’t know what good means here.”

Not I’m unhappy. Not I’m overworked.

I don’t know what good means here.

That’s the sentence every Culture Mirage produces.

The Reframe

Culture isn’t what happens at the town hall. It’s what happens between town halls.

• Warmth without rules becomes avoidance.

• Rules without warmth becomes fear.

• Warmth + rulesbecomes trust.

Design the rules. Protect the warmth.

What Breaks the Mirage

Three visible moves, done consistently:

1. Define “what good looks like.” Not a poster but examples. Before/after screenshots. Acceptable ranges. A public “definition of done.”

2. Install a rhythm that carries truth. Short, factual review loops (weekly 1:1s; project midpoints) where evidence precedes emotion.

3. Rename rituals to refresh intent. If “town hall” means performance, call it “decision review.” If “retro” means gratitude, add “one fix per theme” as rule.

None of this is anti-warmth. It’s pro-clarity.

Quiet Reflection

The Culture Mirage doesn’t form because people stopped caring.

It forms because caring replaced clarity. The Workshop didn’t need a tougher tone. It needed visible rules so kindness could do its real job: make truth easier to carry.

Next week, the mirage meets its hardest test of The Talent Mismatchwhen early loyalists and new professionals collide, and the company must choose between history and fit.

(Rahul Kulkarni is Co-founder at PPS Consulting. He helps growth-stage leaders design systems where people and performance evolve together. Views personal.)