My client stares at me. Her boss has told her to focus on building culture in her team. She has no idea where to start.
“What does that even mean?” she asks. “My people are already drowning.”
Her world runs on reactivity. Things happen on the daily. Incidents, breakdowns, emergencies. Plans change constantly. The workload is relentless. And her team is already stretched beyond what’s reasonable.
She feels like a mother hen. She wants to protect them, not pile on more demands.
But the pressure to do something is real. She and her boss used to work well together. Then her boss got a new boss, and everything changed. Now her boss only wants solutions. And she couldn’t see one. She’s felt abandoned and on her own.
So we start talking about what culture actually means when the work itself is reactive.
We’ve been solving the wrong problem
Most of us have been taught that good leadership means being proactive. Getting ahead of problems. Planning for the future. Having systems that prevent fires before they start.
But what happens when responding to crises is the work?
In reactive environments, chasing proactivity creates a corrosive guilt. You feel like you’re failing when you’re actually doing exactly what the work demands. Meanwhile, your team is running on adrenaline and willpower. Something has to give. Usually it’s people.
The real question isn’t how to be more proactive. It’s how to make reactivity workable.
That means building an adaptive culture.
What is adaptive culture?
It starts with adaptive leadership. That’s personal. How you think and respond when things don’t go to plan. Staying composed. Reading what’s happening. Adjusting in the moment.
But adaptive culture is collective. It’s how the system responds when something goes wrong. The shared habits and norms that help a team flex, recover, and keep learning together.
Culture is what keeps people steady when the next crisis hits.
Design for the work you have
A healthy culture doesn’t fight the work. It reflects it.
In reactive environments, that means accepting that reactivity isn’t a problem to solve. It’s a condition to design for.
I have a friend who’s an emergency doctor. She taught me the value of five minutes. I used to dismiss small pockets of time. She’d look at me and say, yes, there is time.
She was right. Once I stopped dismissing those moments, I saw them everywhere. Five minutes became enough to reset before the next thing.
That’s how she moves through her shifts. Between patients, between crises, she finds these tiny pauses. Not because the work is light, but because those moments let her stay present for the next person who needs her.
My client’s team needs the same thing. Different crises, same principle.
In reactive systems, those short resets matter more than long-term strategic plans.
So I gave my client a framework. Four areas to explore about her team and their reality.
We started by looking at where her team could pause to assess before reacting. Not in meetings, but in the work itself. Five minutes of scanning often saves hours of rework. What would make that possible?
Then what decisions people could make without escalating. Her team isn’t always ready for full autonomy yet, so what’s the smallest zone they could control? Small authority that grows as capability grows.
We talked about quick sense-making between incidents. Not hour-long debriefs. Quick huddles. What just happened? What did we learn? What’s next?
And finally, how people could step back when overloaded. Redistributing urgent tasks and sharing the load while acknowledging the toll. Most leaders skip this because it feels soft. But it’s what makes everything else possible.
Small adaptive habits woven into the everyday.
A way forward
When I reframe it this way, my client exhales. The relief is visible.
She doesn’t need a values statement or a team charter or an offsite. She needs to make their reactivity sustainable.
And now she has something to bring back to her boss. Not just ideas, but a clear framework. A way to show progress that makes sense. A solution.
She came in feeling abandoned, unable to see a way forward. Now she can. Not just for her team, but for the relationship she wants to restore.
The takeaway
We sometimes assume great culture looks like calm, planned order. But in reactive environments, that’s not just unrealistic. It’s the wrong goal.
Culture doesn’t have to be proactive to be effective. It just needs to match the work. And when the work is reactive, culture needs to be adaptive enough to keep people steady while the world keeps changing around them.
Sometimes that starts with designing for the work you actually have. Five minutes at a time.
Image by Tumisu from Pixabay
