Company Culture: How It Is Built and Preserved Through Growth

Every company has a culture whether it designed one or not. The difference is that an undesigned culture forms haphazardly around the behaviour of the loudest voices, and is usually not what you wanted.

1. Define values as behaviours, not slogans

"Transparency," "excellence," and "teamwork" are words that fit any company, which is precisely why they direct no behaviour.

The practical form: for each value, write an observable behaviour and its rejected counterpart.

• Instead of "transparency" → "We share bad news the same day; we don't hold it until we have a solution."
• Instead of "customer focus" → "Everyone on the team speaks to a customer at least once a month."
• Instead of "ownership" → "Whoever finds the problem owns it until it's solved or explicitly handed over."

The test of a real value: does adhering to it cost you something? A value that never forces a difficult decision isn't a value — it's a comfortable description.

2. Mechanisms embed culture; speeches don't

Culture is built by what you reward and what you tolerate, not by what you announce:

• Hiring: the criteria you actually assess on determine who joins.
• Promotion: who gets promoted is the clearest message to the whole team about what really matters.
• Meetings: who speaks, whether dissent is permitted, and how decisions are made.
• Celebration: what do you celebrate — the outcome, the effort, or the behaviour?
• Exit: keeping a high performer with destructive behaviour invalidates everything you wrote about values in a single day.

A decisive rule: a company is run by the worst behaviour it tolerates, not the best value it declares.

3. Founder behaviour is the culture

In a twenty-person company, culture is a direct reflection of founder behaviour. If you send messages at midnight, that becomes the norm however much you say otherwise. If you cut someone off once in front of the team for disagreeing with you, no one will disagree with you again.

This means founder alignment is a precondition for culture — two founders behaving by contradictory logics produce a confused, divided team. Detail in Founder Alignment.

4. What breaks during growth

• Communication. What was resolved in a side conversation now needs a documented channel. Treat it with a written weekly update and declared quarterly objectives.
• Cultural dilution. Every hire dilutes concentration. Treat it with explicit hiring criteria including fit for how you work, and onboarding that explains values through real examples rather than slides.
• Loss of context. New employees don't know why past decisions were made. Treat it by documenting decisions and their rationale.
• Emerging management layers. The first manager changes the team's dynamic. Choose carefully — someone who builds with their own hands first and manages second.
• Distributed team drift. If work is remote or hybrid, write explicit rules: overlap hours, expected response times, and what is discussed in writing versus in conversation.

5. Culture in the regional context

• Respectful directness requires deliberate construction in environments that tend to avoid open confrontation. Make dissent explicitly wanted, and thank someone publicly for disagreeing — once is usually enough to shift the behaviour.
• Multinational teams are common in the region; settle the official working language and the language of documentation early.
• Account for varying working hours during seasonal periods, and state expectations in writing rather than leaving them to interpretation.

6. How is it measured?

• Employee retention and average tenure.
• Referrals from the team — someone recommending their company to friends tells you something real.
• Exit interviews, conducted candidly and read for recurring patterns rather than individual cases.
• A short periodic survey with a few fixed questions whose trend can be tracked.
• A practical indicator: do people openly disagree with the founders in meetings? Its total absence is a warning sign, not harmony.

Common mistakes

• Values written as slogans rather than behaviours.
• Tolerating destructive behaviour from a high performer.
• Relying on speeches instead of mechanisms.
• Defining culture fit as similarity, producing a homogeneous team with no range.
• Neglecting to document the context of decisions.
• Assuming culture transmits automatically past twenty people.
• Reading the absence of dissent as agreement.

Checklist

• Three to five values defined by behaviours and their counterparts
• Values embedded in hiring and promotion criteria
• Explicit mechanisms: weekly update, quarterly objectives, decision log
• Written rules for remote work where applicable
• Working and documentation language settled
• Destructive behaviour addressed regardless of performance
• Periodic measurement with fixed indicators
• Exit interviews read for patterns

FAQ

When should I start caring about culture?
From the first hire. Culture forms whether you design it or not.

Should I write a values document?
Yes — one page with specific behaviours. Long documents are neither read nor applied.

What do I do with a high performer whose behaviour is destructive?
Address it explicitly and quickly. Keeping them costs more than they produce, and it strips everything you declare about values of credibility.