When Culture Becomes Theater: Why Organizations Mistake Noise for Progress

Some organizations move through the world with the grace of a well-rehearsed orchestra. Others resemble a middle-school band concert where everyone is technically playing the same sheet music but the performance somehow manages to be both confident and completely off-key (no disrespect to my middle school band colleagues!). The strange part is that both groups think they’re sounding great. Performative culture in organizations presents the same trap: chaos feels like harmony when you’re the one making the noise.

Performative culture happens when organizations prioritize looking good over doing good. It’s the difference between having a strategic plan and actually using it, between saying you value employee voice and providing a platform to amplify employee voice, between talking about innovation and creating conditions in which innovation can breathe. Few organizations set out to build a façade, but façade-building is what grows in the space left behind when honest reflection is uncomfortable or inconvenient.

No place reveals this more clearly than the modern meeting. I’ve seen it far too many times. In one remote role, someone suggested that we spend the first 15 minutes of every one-hour meeting on non-work chatter. I raised a concern: our lead client might not appreciate billing 25% of our time to “non-work.” The response: “But this is the human side of our work and we’re all humans.” Okay… humans burning daylight, I guess. I recall weekly virtual “fireside chats” where the same three people jumped in and made jokes while everyone else tuned out, multitasking with our cameras off. In another organization, we held org-wide events during off-hours. Attendance seemed to hover around 30%. And then there were the half-day senior staff meetings every single week (on top of off-site retreats every couple months), which were supposed to be “valuable collaboration sessions” but were structured in such a way that we tended to throw ideas against the wall for hours, with no planning, framing, expectations, or follow-up. The result was that time intended for collaboration became chaos sessions, mostly serving as a stage for the boss to air grievances.

The meeting has become a ritual with an almost liturgical rhythm. There are the nods of performative agreement, the status updates no one needs, the “quick shares” that expand infinitely like a heat death of the universe, and the obligatory round-robin question whose answers carry no weight outside the room. Meetings are now often less a tool than a stage. And once a meeting becomes a stage, the performance begins.

Research reminds us that the number of meetings in organizations has ballooned over the past two decades, with employees reporting that around 70% of meetings prevent them from doing productive work (Harvard Business Review; Rogelberg, 2019). The cost goes beyond lost time to include an erosion of focus, the diffusion of accountability, and the quiet message that showing up matters more than doing meaningful work. Worst of all, these meetings communicate one unmistakable message: You can not be trusted to do any work without the boss’s constant oversight. This is culture, all right – a toxic one.

Performative meeting culture and performative organizational culture reinforce each other like two mirrors reflecting the same illusion. If the goal becomes appearing aligned, informed, busy, or collaborative, then meetings become the most efficient vehicle for the performance. After all, it’s easier to gather everyone for four hours than it is to revise a flawed process or examine a dysfunctional assumption.

The problem is that performance masquerades as progress. Rather than addressing structural issues like unclear strategy, weak internal communication, unexamined habits, or low trust, organizations create a steady cadence of meetings to signal that something is happening. Something is discussed. Something is noted. Something is “taken offline.” Something is put on the parking lot, where ideas go to die in peace. And in the end, when you look closely, nothing of consequence has moved.

Why it matters

Performative cultures are both inefficient and unsafe. They create psychological environments where candor feels risky, dissent feels impolite, and innovation feels like too much work. When employees pick up on these cues, they stop offering the uncomfortable truths that organizations most need. The very people closest to the problems go quiet. The show continues.

Meanwhile, leaders who rely on meeting-driven communication inadvertently amplify the noise of performance. Meetings, especially frequent, unfocused ones, pull attention upward and outward, away from the real work and toward the appearance of coordination. Over time, this conditions staff to prioritize participation over contribution.

There’s research to back this up. Studies on “organizational silence” (Morrison & Milliken, 2000) show that when employees believe truthful input isn’t genuinely valued, or worse, carries social or professional risk, they withdraw. When combined with “meeting overload,” which correlates with increased burnout, reduced job satisfaction, and lower perceived effectiveness (Luong & Rogelberg, 2005), you end up with a workplace that is both noisy and quiet in all the wrong ways.

The paradox is that performative cultures often crank up the noise believing it creates progress, when in reality, it tends to drown out the few genuine signals that could actually help people improve. Leaders sometimes mistake activity for momentum, and volume for clarity.

A different path

Shifting away from performative habits doesn’t require a sweeping cultural overhaul, but it does require attention, curiosity, and simple structural choices that make honest work easier than performance. For example:

• Cutting recurring meetings forces organizations to clarify their essential work.

• Replacing status updates with asynchronous tools shifts emphasis from telling to doing.

• Inviting genuine critique instead of praise dressed as critique rebuilds trust.

• Perhaps most transformative, rewarding people not for attendance but for impact reshapes the gravitational pull of the entire system.

Organizations that break out of performative patterns tend to become quieter in the best way: fewer meetings, fewer façades, fewer unspoken anxieties. What fills the space is clarity, genuine connection, and a way for actual work to move forward.

The most striking finding from workplace research over the past decade is not about productivity; it’s about meaning. When people feel their time is respected and their contributions matter, motivation rises. When they’re asked to perform busyness or compliance, it drops. It turns out that thriving cultures are not built on spectacle, but on substance.

When leaders stop trying to stage culture and start tending to it, people finally get the space to do their best work. Culture settles into place when leaders stop choreographing it and start navigating it.

A quick gut-check: Performative or authentic?

If you want to know whether your organization is doing the work or performing the work, scan these contrasts. You’ll know exactly where you land before you reach the bottom.

1. How do decisions actually get made?

Performative cultures talk about collaborative decision-making; no one can name who made the decision or why.

Authentic cultures reveal the reasoning, the tradeoffs, and the decider.

2. How do meetings feel?

Performative culture uses meetings to broadcast updates that could’ve been a paragraph.

Authentic culture uses meetings sparingly and for work that requires shared brainpower.

3. (How) do people speak up?

Performative culture praises “feedback” but punishes the uncomfortable kind through subtle social cues.

Authentic culture hears dissent, considers it, and shows how it shaped (or didn’t shape) the outcome.

4. What are people rewarded for?

Performative culture rewards visibility: attendance, enthusiasm, polished slides.

Authentic culture rewards impact: solved problems, clearer systems, better outcomes.

5. What happens to bad news?

Performative culture buries it, reframes it, or uses standardized language to minimize it.

Authentic culture surfaces it early so it doesn’t grow teeth.

6. How much trust exists sideways, not just upward?

Performative culture has “alignment” that collapses as soon as leadership leaves the room.

Authentic culture has alignment that survives Thursday afternoons when no one is watching.

7. How does energy feel at the edges?

Performative culture has a glossy center and disengaged boundaries.

Authentic culture has questions, ideas, and initiative coming from surprising places.

8. How often people say, “Why are we doing this?”

Performative culture assumes the question is dangerous.

Authentic culture assumes the question is healthy.

9. Can people name what matters most?

Performative culture produces documents full of priorities and spreadsheets of activities.

Authentic culture produces behavior that reflects actual priorities.

10. Does change stick?

Performative culture launches new initiatives like seasonal fashions.

Authentic culture doesn’t launch much at all—because work already flows from real needs.

Conclusion

If you’re trying to shift from performative to authentic culture, leadership is the fulcrum. Leaders shape culture through every decision, interaction, and expectation they set. Authentic culture emerges when leaders:

• Model the behaviors they want to see repeated (Kouzes & Posner, 2017)

• Embed relational awareness and feedback in everyday work

• Hold people accountable for norms, not appearances

• Design structures and rhythms that allow connection, reflection, and alignment

The key distinction is practice versus performance. Performing culture (running events, posting recognition messages, or scheduling forced “check-ins”) signals engagement but rarely cultivates it. Practicing culture (attending to relational currents, reinforcing desired behaviors consistently, and responding to context) creates the lived experience of a healthy organization.

This is relational, iterative, and continuous work. Edmondson (2018) highlights that psychological safety—the foundation of learning and innovation—requires sustained leader behavior, not one-off events. Leaders must navigate complexity, model resilience and humility, and ensure that organizational rhythms support, rather than substitute for, authentic connection.

At HB3, I guide leaders over this subtle terrain by emphasizing navigation over control: embedding relational intelligence and reflective practice in daily work, cultivating the currents that give culture life, and avoiding the trap of the “culture performance.” Real culture is built, not staged; it is experienced, not observed.

Get in touch if you’d like to assess your organizational cultural and analyze how you might improve your outcomes by focusing on your environment.