“That's Just How It Is:” What Your Workplace Culture is Telling You

When I work with teams and managers, especially in healthcare, I often hear the same feedback.

The conflict has gone on for years. Turnover is high. No one is appreciative. Incivility is up. It's management against staff, and teams against management. Conflict gets swept under the rug. Policies change rapidly and no one has input. There's a lot of blame and finger pointing. There's fear. There are accusations. This becomes the workplace culture.

Then I ask what has been done to try to remedy these problems. And I hear this:

"That's just the way it is." "It's always been like that." "That's just how she is." "You get used to it." "It's normal for here."

It is not just the way it is. It is just the way it is when things are broken.

A Trauma Informed Lens

I have spent the last several months in Thomas Hübl's Trauma-Informed Coaching and Consulting program. I did not go in looking for organizational theory. I went in because of a nagging sense that I could be doing better by some of the people I mediate and coach with, and because I had left rooms feeling not so good about how something had gone and could not always tell why.

What I found there did help with that, and it also gave me a name for something I had been hearing in organizations for years without having language for.

Let me deal with the word trauma first, because for a lot of people it lands as an accusation, and it is not one.

Trauma, in Hübl's definition, is not the event. It is the inner process that happens in a person, or in a group, going through something overwhelming. It is what a living system does when it meets more than it can take in at once. It develops a coping mechanism and that coping arises because the situation requires it. And that process is intelligent.

That reframe matters for how the rest of this reads. Trauma here is not a diagnosis of weakness and it is not an indictment of anyone's leadership. It is part of being human. It is the sum total of how we learned to respond when we were hurt or avoiding hurt, and that sum total shapes how we show up afterward, in every room, whether or not we know it is running.

And it does not stay in one person. Hübl calls it an interdependent property. We are always affecting each other, so one person's adaptations become part of the conditions for everyone around them, and when enough people work together those effects interact and accumulate into culture.

When our coping mechanisms and conflict management reactions become shared unconsciously across a group for long enough, he says, it crystallizes into language. It becomes how we behave and how we talk. And once it is how we talk, it gets fixed in place, because now it reads as a plain description of reality. His words for what comes next are nearly the words I hear in the field.

It begins to be, "Oh, that's just how it is."

Intelligent, and No Longer Useful

Think of a coping mechanism as a puzzle piece. It was cut to fit a specific puzzle, and in that puzzle it fit perfectly. The child who learned to read a parent's mood from across the room and get small before anything happened was not being weak. That was excellent work. It fit. The nurse who learned in her first year that you never bring a concern to that person directly, you go around, was not being passive. She'd learned to avoid the hard conversation and once upon a time, it protected her.

Then the puzzle changes. New family, new unit, new organization, new marriage, new problem. The piece stays exactly the same shape. It is the tool that worked when we needed it most, for what felt like survival, and often it's the only tool we have. There is no signal that arrives to say the context is different now. All we know is that piece worked in the past and that it worked when it mattered most.

So now, people bring the piece that fit the old puzzle into rooms where it does not fit at all. The scanning that kept someone safe reads as suspicion. The going behind someone reads as undermining. The getting small reads as disengagement. The taking charge that once held a chaotic house together reads as controlling. And we look at all of that and call the person difficult, resistant, checked out, not a team player.

They are not any of those things. They are using a skill that kept them safe once and might still work somewhere. It just does not work here.

This is what I mean when I say there aren't people problems, there are skills gaps. Not that people lack skills. Most people in a struggling system are extraordinarily skilled. They are running highly developed capabilities that were built under real pressure and are still running at full strength. What is missing is a different set of skills for a completely different puzzle.

And here is the part that took me too long to understand: You cannot get someone to put down the piece by telling them it does not fit. That reads as an attack on the thing that saved them, and the response is to hold it tighter.

Hübl says that nothing shifts until there is enough room around it for it to be held without judgement rather than pushed past. The hurt underneath has to be seen and acknowledged rather than managed.

My version, which I have been teaching for years without knowing his, is that people cannot move to problem solving until they feel seen, heard, valued, and validated. Not as a courtesy before the real work. As the thing that makes the real work possible.

Same claim, different vocabulary, and I find it useful that we got there separately.

"Nobody sets down their protection in a room that feels like the room they needed it for."

What I Mean by a System

A system is any group of people whose lives are connected over time. A nursing unit. A team. A board. A congregation. A family. A community. A healthcare system. A school.

What makes it a system rather than a collection of individuals is that what happens to one person does not stay with that person. It moves. It shapes how the next conversation goes, and the one after that, until the group has developed shared habits for how they act and interact, including when things are hard. 

Those habits become the system's culture.

Your culture is not the values on the wall. Your culture is what your system has actually learned about how to interact, especially in difficulty, accumulated over years, and it is running whether anyone is paying attention to it or not. 

And left to chance, it often outlives the people who formed it.

This is why a new nurse can arrive on a unit and know within a month which person you do not question, which topic does not come up in staff meeting, and which problem everyone has agreed to stop mentioning. Nobody taught her. Nobody could point to a policy. She read the system, the way people always do and adapted to it. The pattern is not located in any individual. It is in the space between them, and it teaches itself to whoever walks in. Systems develop their own rules and roles, and there can be comfort in them remaining stable, even when that stability is uncomfortable.

Families do exactly the same thing. So do boards. The family that never mentions the drinking. The board that has never once said out loud why the founder cannot be challenged. Same mechanism, different room. If you have ever sat with siblings deciding for a dying parent while the real issue stays unnamed, you have watched this.

So, when I ask whether your system is healthy, I am not only asking about your organization. I am asking about any group you belong to that has learned to work around something.

Stuff Happens

I am not saying your organization is broken because something overwhelming happened to it.

Something overwhelming always happens. In healthcare it happens constantly. Patients die. Families come apart in the hallway. Someone makes a mistake that cannot be undone. A unit runs short for the fourth week straight and everyone works past what a body should work.

Not stopping to feel all of that in the moment is not a failure. It is what allows a person to finish the shift and take the next patient. That is the intelligence I described earlier, doing exactly what it is for.

And every organization accumulates more than it can work through in real time. In some settings that is not a shortcoming, it is the nature of the work.  The difference between a healthy system and one operating from a trauma state is not whether this happens.

The difference is what comes next. The difference is how the overwhelm is processed.

Coping Is Not Thriving

A system that has worked through what happened to it grows. It gets more capable, not less. It handles the next hard thing better than it handled the last one, because it actually learned something. Energy that was tied up in self-protection becomes available for problem solving and for building.

A system that has not worked through what happened to it copes. And coping looks like functioning. That is what makes it so hard to see from the top. The work gets done. The patients get cared for. The metrics mostly hold. But nothing is developing. The people are grumbling. The gossip increases. It becomes us vs them. The same conflict comes back every few months wearing a different name. The same conversation happens in the same meeting. Three people leave every year for the same reasons and get replaced by three more who will leave for those reasons. 

That is stagnation, and it has a specific mechanism. When a system carries more unresolved conflict than it can hold, the process cannot move forward. Energy goes into holding things in place rather than into creating something new. It goes into protection, rather than growth.  Trauma freezes movement. That is not a metaphor about feelings. It is a description of why your organization has been trying to fix the same thing for years.

Coping systems are not lazy or badly led. They are working extremely hard. That is the point. They are spending their capacity on staying upright. They are surface level band aids until the healing can be done.

When Change is Relentless

There is a reason some systems never get out of coping, and it has nothing to do with willingness.

Working through something takes time. It also takes the same people, in the same room, long enough to get somewhere. And a great many organizations right now have none of that.

Think about what turnover actually does beyond the vacancy cost. When a third of a unit leaves in a year, the group never has the same room twice. The people who were present for the bad outcome in March are gone by September. The relational history walks out the door with them, and the new hires inherit the habits without any of the context that produced them. They learn that nobody discusses that case. They never learn why. Which means the thing can never be worked through, because the people who would need to work it through are no longer there.

What leaves with them is more than relationship. Institutional knowledge is lost. Who to call when the usual route fails. Why that policy exists, which is almost never in the policy. What was tried in 2019, why it did not work, and what it cost the person who tried it. New people inherit the rule without the reason. And a rule without a reason cannot be examined, which means it cannot be changed. Nobody can question a decision when no one still there knows why it was made. A good deal of "that's just how it is" is simply institutional memory that walked out.

There is also grief and loss that goes unaddressed. People lose friends and relationships through turnover, promotion, or demotion. There is a card, maybe, and a cake in the break room, and then the next shift starts.

Healthcare has more experience with loss than any field I know and almost no practice at mourning its own. So the loss goes somewhere. It usually goes into a slight withdrawal, a decision people make without deciding, to invest a little less in the next person. That is a coping mechanism too, and an intelligent one. It also means the team never quite forms again.

And then there is the work of learning the new person, which is real work and gets counted nowhere. Every arrival changes the ecosystem. A team has to relearn who is steady under pressure, who needs information a certain way, who will speak up and who will go quiet. Trust does not transfer from the person who left. It gets built again from the beginning, while the work continues at full speed. Do that three times in a year on the same unit and people are spending most of their capacity on orientation rather than on the job.

The same is true when people are pushed out rather than choosing to leave, and it is worse, because everyone remaining is watching. Every exit teaches the people who stay something about what happens here.

Policy does this too. Policies arriving faster than anyone can absorb them produce the same effect at the structural level. You cannot adapt to something you never finished adapting to. Staff stop bothering to understand the reasoning behind a change because they have learned it will be replaced before it matters. That is not resistance. It is a reasonable conclusion drawn from experience.

Layer restructures and leadership turnover on top and you have a system in permanent readjustment. It is not working anything through. It is bracing.

I am not arguing against change. Change is not optional in any field. What I am arguing is that change without stability between the changes is not development. It is churn, and churn produces exactly the culture people describe when they say things have always been like this. Nothing has been like anything long enough to become otherwise.

Systems need some stability. They need some breath. There has to be a stretch of time where the same people, doing the same work, under conditions that hold still, can finish something. Without that, I am not sure how a system gets better at anything.

What Gets Built

Hübl uses a metaphor that resonates so well because it's so easy to picture, and it names something I have watched organizations do without having a clean word for it.

Scaffolding.

When you renovate a house, you put scaffolding around it. The scaffolding is not the house. It holds things up while the actual work happens underneath, and when the work is finished it comes down. In systems, we're putting up a lot of scaffolding without doing the renovations. We add more and more scaffolding to hold up what's leaning, what might be leaning, or what we are trying to prevent from leaning. We often have so much scaffolding up that there is no room for people to move.

Organizations put up scaffolding constantly, often for good reason. A team is struggling, so you add a weekly check-in. Communication is breaking down, so you install an escalation process. People are exhausted, so you offer a wellness stipend. Turnover is climbing, so you run an engagement survey. Morale is low, so you form a committee. Staff are burned out, so you bring in a resilience training.

Any one of those can be the right call. Structures like these exist because something underneath is not yet able to function on its own, and that is a legitimate reason to build support. The point is what happens next.

And it matters a great deal what kind of structure we are talking about.

Some of it supports people, and it should stay. A daily huddle. A standing check-in. A debrief after a hard case. Those are not compensating for anything missing. They are how a team stays in contact with itself, and they earn their place permanently.

The scaffolding I am describing is a different animal. It is the policy written in response to a single incident. One person is late three times, so we rewrite the attendance policy for four hundred people. One documentation error, so now everybody completes an additional form. One family complains, so there is a new script.

Notice what those have in common. Every one of them targets behavior, and not one of them goes anywhere near the cause. Nobody asks why that person was late. Nobody asks what was happening on the unit the night of the documentation error. The team doesn't have input. The policy is faster than the question, it applies to everyone, and it can be announced in a meeting. So it gets written, and then it stays, long after anyone remembers the incident that produced it. What is left is a rule with no reason attached, which is where we came in.

This is what happens when good intentions become policy. The intention is real. The policy changes the behavior and never touches the problem, and now everyone carries it. And the question with all of the scaffolding: is it still doing work, serving the people of the organization well, or is it only still standing?

And that second kind is where a great many organizations are living. Not one bad decision. A decade of reasonable ones, each added on top of the last, until people spend real energy managing the support structures instead of doing the work.

"That's just how it is" is what people say about the thing the scaffolding was built around.

Is Fear Operating Your System?

When I get underneath "that's just how it is," I almost always find fear.

Fear of feedback, in both directions. Managers who will not name a performance problem until it is a termination, because the conversation feels dangerous. Staff who will not tell a manager what is actually happening, because they watched what happened to the last person who did.

Fear of stepping on each other's toes. This department will not raise it with that one. Everybody knows there is a problem at the seam between two teams, and nobody owns the seam, so it stays.

Fear of being the one who says it. The meeting ends with nods. The real meeting happens in the parking lot. None of this is irrational. People know what happens here when someone speaks.

Fear of liability. This one is especially but not limited to healthcare, and it is powerful. An apology gets read as an admission. A candid debrief gets read as discoverable. So the honest conversation about what went wrong on that shift never happens in the open, and the learning that would have prevented the next one never happens either. The legal exposure gets managed. The clinical exposure gets worse. We can't admit we are wrong when the price for being wrong is too high.

And it is worth saying plainly what that fear costs patients, not only staff. Tests ordered because they will read better in a chart than in a deposition. Consent conversations built to protect the institution rather than to help a frightened person understand what is about to happen to them. Waiting, while everyone lets the documentation catch up. Anyone who has worked a floor knows the difference between what gets done for the patient and what gets done for the record and knows how often the second one wins. We do not usually call that a trauma symptom. It is one.

An industry organizing itself around the worst thing that could happen is a system in a defensive posture, and the people it was built to serve are paying for the posture.

And we all built it. Not the lawyers alone, not the regulators alone. Every one of those protections was chosen by someone inside the building, in good faith. Sometimes in response to something that actually happened. More often in response to what might, and the cost of guarding against the worst case often gets paid by the typical one.

The more defensively an institution behaves, the less honest it can afford to be when something goes wrong. And the less honest it is, the more a grieving family is left with a lawsuit as the only available way to find out what actually happened to the person they loved. Nobody in that loop is behaving unreasonably. No one is actually resolving the problem.

And that fear is what most of the scaffolding is made of. The protections accumulate. Staff are no longer navigating the job. They are navigating everything built around the job. And each layer costs a few minutes and a little judgment, taken from people who have neither to spare.

I do not think leaders are being cynical about this. Most leaders I work with are responding in good faith to what they can actually see. What they can see is the symptom. What they cannot see is that the behavior they are watching is an adaptation, and that the adaptation is a response to conditions we have built.

A structure cannot do the job of a conversation. A process can route a complaint. It cannot make a person feel heard. A stipend can pay for a yoga class. It cannot value someone.

Healthcare has one example so old that nobody questions it anymore. "Healthy professional distance." Individuals and organizations use a different word - "boundaries." But ask why distance is necessary. What we actually need is steadiness, the capacity to stay present with something difficult without being knocked over by it. The ability to work through our differences and disagreements; to communicate honestly.

Distance is what we install when we have not developed that capacity. It is scaffolding, and we have been living on it so long that we teach it in orientation.

What Really Builds Resilience

If the response to overwhelm is intelligent, and if every system accumulates more than it can handle in the moment, then the question is what happens to what accumulated.

William Ury told me once, “Problems are not in the way. They are the way.”

What builds real capacity is working through it. Noticing it first. Then having room to feel it. Then having time and support enough to actually finish it. What gets worked through becomes something usable: energy, curiosity, the ability to do the thing better next time. What does not get worked through stays stuck, and the system keeps spending to hold it there.

Resilience is not built by protecting people from discomfort. It is built by going through discomfort with enough support to come out the other side of it.

Some organizations have resilience training, a module or program so that people can tolerate conditions that nobody intends to change. That is not resilience. That is endurance under load, and it is the most reliable way to burn out your best people, because the ones who endure longest are often the ones you praise most.

And here is the cost of getting it backwards. Sometimes structures built to avoid discomfort prevent the exact processes that would have produced the capacity. The debrief that stays superficial. The meeting where hard things cannot be said. The apology legal will not allow. Each one keeps the system comfortable today and keeps it fragile permanently.

The high-reliability fields worked this out a long time ago. Aviation and surgical teams built structured debriefs into their routine not because it feels good to revisit a bad outcome, but because strain that never gets worked through compounds into the next error. They are not eliminating stress. They are processing it.

Systems Are Made of People

This is the truth that is exciting and hopeful to me.

A system is not a weather pattern. It is made of individuals, and individuals are more than the products of the system they are in. Every one of us is making choices every day about whether to play the role that fits the current system.

I have watched a single person change what a room is capable of. A manager who starts saying out loud what everyone else avoids. A charge nurse who responds to a mistake with curiosity instead of blame, once, in front of everybody. A physician who asks a question rather than issuing a correction. None of them had the authority to change the culture. All of them provided an option for change, because what they did became available to everyone watching as a thing that can be done here.

There is a mechanism under that. Culture is transmitted by demonstration, not by policy, which is exactly why the old patterns propagate so efficiently. That same channel runs in both directions. One person behaving differently is new information moving through the system, and information changes what is possible next.

One person can make a system considerably worse just as fast. A new leader who punishes the first person to raise a problem has taught the entire room in a single meeting, and it may take a long time to unteach. Someone who arrives unsteady and stays that way reorganizes everyone around managing them, and the whole unit quietly adjusts. The person who changes a system for the better and the person who makes it crazier are using the same mechanism. Demonstration is not a moral force. It just transmits.

So yes, you get to choose. You can play by the old rules and roles, or you can push back with something better. Not because it is guaranteed to work, but because the alternative is agreeing that nothing can change while being one of the people who make up the thing that is not changing.

I want to be honest about the limit, though. Individual courage is not a substitute for structural repair. If one person keeps holding a healthier standard in a system that will not meet them, that person burns out. That is not a character failure.

Which is the argument for the commitment in the first place. A healthy system is not undone by one difficult arrival, because it has ways to address the situation. Note that I said the situation, not the person. Someone can behave badly in a system that names it early, deals with it directly, and does not ask everyone else to quietly reorganize their days around it. A system without that capacity has no options, so one person becomes the weather. The difference is not the person. It is what the system can do when a person is hard to work with.

That capacity is not luck. It gets built on purpose, before it is needed, which is the whole reason it takes commitment. Nobody builds it in the middle of the crisis. By then everyone is just coping.

Deciding to look honestly at a culture is not just a leadership initiative. That responsibility runs from every end of the system and taking it up is a choice anyone can make.  How I show up in a system that is not serving me well is a decision, whether or not I ever experience it as one.

We Have to Build the Room

If we want people to stop operating from protection, we have to build a place where protection is not required.

I said earlier that nobody sets down their guard in a room that feels like the room they needed it for. That is true of one person in a mediation. It is equally true of four hundred people in an organization, and it is the part we skip.

Look at what we routinely ask of staff. Speak up. Be candid in the debrief. Bring concerns forward. Be resilient. Every one of those requires that it be safe to do the thing we are asking for, and safety is not a quality we can request. It is a set of conditions that either exists or does not.

And we do not get to declare it. The people in the system decide whether it is safe, and they decide on evidence. What happened to the last person who raised something. Whether the concern from six months ago ever came back around. Whether anyone with authority has ever changed their mind out loud. Everyone doing that calculation is running it on our track record, not on our intentions.

Which means the responsibility sits heaviest with whoever holds the most power in the room. The person with the least power cannot make it safe for themselves. They can only assess it and adapt, and if they adapt by going quiet, we have our answer about the room.

This is the whole point. We cannot ask people to be healthy inside conditions that are not. We can only build the conditions and let people discover, over time and with evidence, that the old piece is not needed here.

What Healthier Systems Seem to Do

I can't help thinking of the law of entropy when working with systems. What we don't actively work to hold together will fall apart. The systems I have seen do this well are not lucky. They are maintaining something on purpose, and a few things tend to be true of them.

They stay focused on "us." The moment a system splits into us and them, everything afterward gets read through the split. It is where conflict escalates.  Management vs staff. Nursing vs medicine. Days vs nights. Corporate vs the field. The line is easy to draw and easier to join, because it explains everything and asks nothing of you. It also builds its own fractures, and once they exist people start acting from them. Healthier systems work hard to keep the frame on all of us.

They are transparent, including about what they cannot say. People handle bad news considerably better than they handle silence. Silence gets filled, always, and usually with something worse than the truth. The systems that do this well tell people what they know, tell them what they do not know yet, and tell them what they cannot share and why. That last one matters more than it sounds. "I can't tell you that yet, and here is the reason" preserves trust. Saying nothing spends it.

They make hard decisions and are clear about expectations. Not every decision can be consultative and not every outcome can be good for everyone. But a hard decision named clearly, with the reasoning attached, costs a system far less than a hard decision softened into ambiguity. Ambiguity does not spare people. It just makes them guess.  And just like above, in the absence of knowing, our brains are hard wired to make up a story and that story is rarely correct or generous.

They are purposeful about how they show up. How a meeting opens, who speaks first, what happens to the person who disagrees, whether leadership answers the hard question or deflects it, how they treat people – all people. None of that is atmosphere. It is instruction, and people take it as such.

They adapt rather than prop. When conditions change, the structure changes. The less healthy version keeps the old structure and adds supports to hold it upright. If every new pressure produces another layer, the layers may be part of why nothing feels like it is improving.

They do not need everything resolved. Some disagreements are permanent. Two departments will always want different things. A physician and a nurse manager will always see the same shift differently. The healthier systems I have seen do not require those settled. They keep them workable, out in the open, and revisit them when circumstances change. Where resolution is required before anyone can move, people tend to manufacture agreement instead, and manufactured agreement is what produces the parking lot conversation.

Discomfort is not treated as a malfunction. Someone says the hard thing in the meeting and the meeting continues. Nobody needs to be managed afterward. People know how to be curious, ask questions, and understand more. Where discomfort itself becomes the emergency, people learn to prevent it, and preventing it is often why the real conversation happens somewhere else.

People know they matter and their voice matters. They know the doors are open to them for conversation, and they are able to co-create solutions when possible. There is a direct relationship between upper management and teams. I hear over and over how much respect teams have for managers who are visible, who understand what their teams struggle with and what they do well, because they are present. Likewise, one of the most common complaints I hear is management telling teams what they need without ever checking whether that is true or possible.

The scaffolding gets named. When a structure goes in, someone says what it is compensating for. "We are adding this check-in because we do not have a reliable way to surface concerns right now, and we are going to work on that." That sentence turns permanent architecture back into temporary support. A review date helps too, not to remove it automatically, but to force the question of whether it is still holding something up or has quietly become furniture.

None of this requires tearing supports down tomorrow. Pull the scaffolding off a system that still needs it and people get hurt. What it requires is that somebody is still doing the renovation.

What Culture Are You Building?

I do not mean to make this sound easy.  Quite the opposite. Real systems are more complicated than any one lens, and plenty of what I have described here has ordinary explanations too. Budgets are genuinely tight. Regulators genuinely do give you thirty days. Sometimes people are just difficult in that moment.

I love and appreciate this lens for this reason: it recognizes that people are complex and we are often using the skillsets and tools that served us well in another context. These same people, us, are building systems and carrying what we hold onto from the past into the present, whether the puzzle piece still fits or not. We are human and this is what it looks like.

Your system is not broken because hard things happened to it. Hard things happen to every system, and in this field they happen daily. The question is whether your people are growing from them or only surviving them.

You do not get a vote on whether you are creating culture. You are creating it constantly. Every time a concern is raised and nothing happens, that teaches. Every time someone gets praised for absorbing what should have been fixed, that teaches. Every time a difficult conversation gets postponed into a policy, that teaches. Those lessons accumulate, and in five years someone will describe them to a consultant as just the way things are here.

So the real question is not whether you have a culture. It is whether you built the one you have on purpose.

A culture built on purpose has a few recognizable features. People know where a disagreement goes and trust that it goes somewhere. Information from the floor reaches the people making decisions before those decisions are made rather than after. People are taught the skills to handle hard conversations themselves instead of routing every difficulty upward to be managed. And the whole thing gets revisited, because a purposeful culture assumes it will need to change.

A culture built by accident has scaffolding. Layer after layer of reasonable responses to problems nobody had time to solve, until the structures are the only thing holding it up and everyone has forgotten what they were built around.

Both are cultures. Both took years to make. Only one of them was chosen.

And the next time someone tells you that's just how it is here, understand what you have been handed. Not an explanation. A location.

Kimberly Best, RN, MA, is a court-listed mediator in Missouri and Tennessee, FINRA Arbitrator, and founder of Best Conflict Solutions, based in St. Louis and serving clients nationwide. She is adjunct faculty at the Lipscomb University Institute for Conflict Management and the creator of the Best Conflict Conversation Cards.

Sources

• Hübl, Thomas and Amy Elizabeth Fox. Foundations of Trauma-Informed Coaching and Consulting (2026)