Why culture and cult share the same Latin root, and what this means for the leaders responsible for building one instead of the other.
A cult built one rep at a time
For seven years, I did CrossFit. My family and friends called the gym a cult, half joking, more than once. Enough people said the word enough times that I started paying attention to why.
The workouts were never the reason. The reason sat in what surrounded them:
• A shared language and shared rituals
• A scoreboard everyone saw, showing who turned up at 5am and who did not
• An unspoken rule that this training method was the right one, and other approaches looked wrong, or at least less serious
• Friends outside the gym, without the same commitment, slowly seen less often
A cult works this way. Not a group of strange people in robes, but a group bound by identity, conviction and belonging strong enough to close the door on anyone outside it, without a word being said.
Where the word actually comes from
Culture and cult share a Latin root: colere, to tend, cultivate or devote yourself to something. That verb left two words behind it: cultura, the noun for the act of tending, and cultus, the tending itself, given as worship.
colere → cultura → culture: the deliberate tending of land, later extended to the mind, then to the customs of a people
colere → cultus → cult: the deliberate, ongoing devotion Romans gave their gods
The two words are not opposites. Both describe the same instinct, applied differently.
A cult devotes itself inward, toward the group, at the cost of anyone outside it. A healthy organisational culture uses the same instinct without the cost: deliberate, ongoing attention, given not to a closed group but to the way work gets done and the way people treat each other.
Why this matters for quality management
ISO 9001:2026 names leadership's role in shaping culture directly, in Clause 5.1, Leadership and Commitment.
Gallup's article, Organisational Culture: What Leaders Need to Know, looks at what happens when leaders treat culture as a deliberate, measurable responsibility instead of something left to grow on its own. Lifting the share of employees who strongly agree their work matters from 40% to 80% tracked against a 41% drop in absenteeism, a 50% drop in patient safety incidents, and a 33% improvement in quality, according to Gallup's research.
The Tending Grid
Two questions place an organisation somewhere on this grid.
Does leadership tend the culture on purpose?
Does the group stay open to outside challenge, or close the door instead?
The combination decides which of four outcomes an organisation actually gets.
Cult
This is the CrossFit box from the opening story. Leaders here invest real, deliberate effort: rituals, language, recognition, a scoreboard everyone watches. The effort is real, but the group has stopped listening to outside voices. Loyalty goes unquestioned, and dissent gets pushed out rather than heard.
Quality culture
The same deliberate effort as a cult, aimed differently. Leaders still tend the culture on purpose, reviewing, resourcing and modelling what matters, but the group stays open to challenge, dissent and outside perspective. This is the quadrant ISO 9001:2026 asks leaders to build under Clause 5.1.
Silos
No deliberate attention here, and the group still ends up closed off from outside challenge. Cliques and silos form without anyone deciding to build them, and outside perspective stops arriving. Quality teams recognise this quadrant well: work duplicated without anyone noticing, problems solved in one corner and repeated in the next.
Drift
Open, but with nothing steering. No shared identity, no direction leaders have deliberately set, so the culture absorbs whatever is loudest in the room from one week to the next. Openness without tending leaves an organisation with no cult, and no real culture either.
Every organisation tends something. The only question worth asking is what kind of culture the tending builds.
Next steps for you
• Place your team on the grid. Look honestly at whether your leadership tends the culture on purpose or leaves the culture alone, and whether challenge gets welcomed or pushed out. Most leaders assume Quality culture and land closer to Cult or Silos than expected.
• Pick one driver, not four. Based on where the team landed, choose one specific behaviour to shift: more deliberate review and resourcing on the untended side, more openness to challenge on the closed side. One change, not a full rebuild.
• Look through the quality culture deck. The deck builds directly on this grid, showing what tending looks like in practice, step by step. View the quality culture deck
Lead the Standard
