Is your company culture having an identity crisis?

This is an issue of The Performance Review, written by our CEO Latesha Byrd. This newsletter is for leaders who want to cut through the noise to examine how performance, leadership, and culture intersect.

🧵The quiet unraveling

I’ve been in rooms with executives focused on growth, but frustrated that their teams aren’t delivering. I’ve coached leaders who are celebrated for setting the vision, but can’t get employees to rally behind it.

And I’ve been that leader too. Trying to hold it all together, working nonstop while wondering, “Is anyone still with me?”

This drift is a slow unraveling that happens when you’re moving so fast, you don’t realize what’s slipping until it’s already broken.

And it’s easy to lose yourself in the process.

Some leaders have become unrecognizable to their teams and to themselves. They’re praised for their visibility, applauded for their messaging, and rewarded for staying calm under pressure.

But somewhere in the process of navigating endless change, you stopped leading and started performing.

Maybe you’re managing brand optics while performance dips behind the scenes. You’re launching new initiatives while employees disengage. And the culture you’re responsible for no longer feels grounded in anything real.

Culture doesn’t collapse all at once. It begins to drift when decisions are made without clarity, when transparency is replaced with vague reassurance, and when leadership habits become disconnected from the values they were meant to reinforce.

In this moment, many companies are in the middle of that drift.

There’s been a leadership shakeup, restructuring, or a round of layoffs. There’s a polished memo, a town hall, and maybe even a refreshed set of values. But beneath those surface-level signals, people are left with questions that never seem to get answered:

What just happened?

What does this actually mean for me?

Can I trust what leaders are telling me?

When there’s no space to process change, people stop participating in culture and start performing inside of it. They go quiet and assume the worst to protect themselves accordingly.

Eventually, the values that once anchored your team are meaningless. The culture feels less like a shared experience and more like a slogan.

And because these breakdowns are gradual, leaders often don’t notice until the damage is already done: The best employees leave, no one is meeting their performance goals, and the company is losing money during cycles of rehiring and retraining for the same roles.

That’s what a culture identity crisis looks like.

It’s disorienting, and if you can’t name it, you can’t tame it.

🔎 What’s under review

Leaders tend to forget culture is shaped by the systems they work within: the communication loops, the performance metrics, the unspoken rules about who gets rewarded, who gets heard, and what gets ignored. When culture starts to drift, it’s because employees respond to the cues they’re getting from those systems.

Here are some of the patterns that quietly take root and begin to reshape your culture, often without anyone saying a word.

1. Misalignment between what’s said and what’s experienced

Culture breaks down when values are preached but not practiced internally or externally. If the people being promoted contradict what the company claims to value, or if the public image feels disconnected from day-to-day reality, employees notice.

2. A pace of change that outpaces reflection

Innovation is necessary, but constant change without pause creates confusion and burnout. When you’re always rolling out new tools, new initiatives, or new org charts without giving teams time to process, integrate, or reflect, you create a culture of instability. People don’t feel momentum, they feel motion sickness.

3. Leadership transitions without cultural translation

New leadership often brings new vision, new language, and new ways of operating. But if those expectations aren’t communicated clearly, people are left to guess. And when people don’t know what’s expected of them, they retreat, fill in the gaps with assumptions, or double down on old behaviors that no longer align with the new leadership’s vision.

4. Systems that scale dysfunction

Sometimes it’s not the leader, it’s the system they’re working within. Outdated performance metrics, misaligned incentive structures, broken communication loops, and unclear decision rights can all undermine even the best intentions. When leaders are forced to operate inside systems that prioritize output over clarity or control over trust, they end up reinforcing the very culture they’re trying to change.

Each of these patterns has a ripple effect. On their own, they may seem manageable. But together, they create a culture that feels unsteady, unpredictable, and misaligned with the very goals it’s trying to achieve.

That’s why we’re reviewing not just leadership, but the systems and signals that shape what people believe, how they behave, and how well they perform.

✔️ Your next 60 days: From identity crisis to culture reset

If your culture feels unsteady, more employee perks and company-wide emails won’t fix it. You need a reset rooted in presence, clarity, and leadership that models the culture you actually want to build.

Here are four priorities to focus on in the next 60 days:

1. Get present before you plan.

Too many leaders try to future-proof a culture they haven’t paused to understand. Before making your next big move, take a step back and observe what’s happening in real time: how your team is showing up, how people are reacting to change, and where your leadership may be sending mixed signals.

✅Your action: Block time to meet with five people across levels for candid, off-the-record conversations about how the culture actually feels right now. Listen without defending. Capture the patterns.

2. Name the cultural disconnects.

When values aren’t reflected in daily behavior, people notice and they adapt. The longer this misalignment goes unnamed, the more it becomes normalized.

✅Your action: Identify one specific place where the culture feels out of sync—whether it’s how decisions are made, how people are promoted, or how feedback flows—and share it transparently with your team. Let them know what’s shifting and why.

3. Examine your leadership habits.

Culture doesn’t follow your mission statement, it follows your behavior. Whether you realize it or not, your tone in meetings, your urgency in Slack, and your visibility in tough moments all teach people what to expect and how to respond.

✅Your action: Choose one habit that may be unintentionally eroding clarity or trust (e.g., vague communication, inconsistent follow-through) and commit to shifting it. Tell your team what you’re working on and ask them to hold you accountable.

4. Reconnect with your leadership identity.

You can’t guide others through uncertainty if you’re unclear on who you are in this season. Self-clarity is a leadership responsibility. If you’ve been leading reactively, now is the time to recalibrate.

✅Your action: Schedule one dedicated session with a trusted advisor, coach, or peer to get honest about what’s working, what’s not, and what kind of leader you want to be next. Make a personal leadership commitment and write it down.

Culture doesn’t lose its way overnight. It drifts through silence, misalignment, and well-meaning leaders who are too overwhelmed to notice the shift.

But drift can be corrected. What matters now is whether you’re willing to stop performing long enough to lead with intention again.

Take it a step further: Assess your culture with Perfeqta’s free Performance Pulse Check

The Performance Pulse Check is not a test, it’s a mirror. A way for senior leaders to step back, reflect with honesty, and assess what's needed in your culture to build more resilience and navigate whatever’s ahead.

Inside, you’ll explore Perfeqta’s 5Cs of Company Culture: Clarity, Confident Communication, Credible Leadership, Connected Teams, and Change Readiness.

➡️ Download your free copy here!