Why is it important to have a scalable culture?

Cultural infrastructure helps companies operate better – culture isn’t just “a vibe”. While some elements of culture are intangible, effective cultures are embedded into systems, processes, and anchors in ways that position the organization to achieve its strategic goals more effectively.

If your culture can’t scale, your strategy won’t scale either – the saying that culture eats strategy for breakfast is not an exaggeration. If your culture and infrastructure aren’t entwined to create a strong operational foundation, your strategy won’t have the stability and consistency required to scale.

Alignment and structure reduce churn – it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain company-wide alignment as an organization expands. Scalable culture provides tools that maintain coherence amidst this growing complexity and keep employees of all levels moving in the same direction.

Scalable cultures create clarity, consistency, and trust – culture communicates who you are and what others can expect from you. This clear sense of identity matters both to internal and external audiences.

Building Culture

How do you identify your organization’s core values?

Values should reflect current company identity and future aspirations – core values capture who you are as a company and how you approach achieving your goals. Scaling companies should also use core values as a guide to who they need to become—and how they need to act—to succeed at scale.

Identify which values naturally appear in existing processes – look at your current operations (e.g., people processes, product development, etc.) and determine whether certain principles or patterns influence how you operate. For example, if your company takes a design thinking approach to product iteration, values like empathy might already be intrinsic to how your team works.

How to Identify Core Values Based on Leadership and Culture Carriers
Step	Key Activities
Step one: Create a values “first draft”	Use leadership as a model – value modeling starts at the top and can include founders, CEOs, and other company-wide leaders. Use a mix of observations and 1:1 conversations to identify values championed by leaders.   Incorporate input from culture carriers and the employee base as a whole – culture carriers (i.e., individuals who exemplify an organization’s cultural values) can sit at any level of an organization. Culture carriers might reflect core values through their ways of working or how they interact with others.   Supplement insights with survey data – use company-wide surveys and pulse data to identify behavioral patterns and cultural aspirations at larger organizations.
Step two: Pressure test and wordsmith your values draft	Workshop and scenario-test your values – ask if your values hold true when applied to how your company invests, develops products, and makes decisions. This process creates values that are practical and not merely aspirational.   Fine-tune your values to ensure that they are memorable, behavior-based, and customized to your organization – generic values like “collaboration” or “innovation” don’t provide clear guidance. Effective values help employees understand how to act in different types of situations
Step three: Tie your cultural values to business value	Anchor values to business outcomes – effective values shouldn’t just “feel” good; they should also drive specific behaviors that lead to desired business results. Employees are more incentivized to embrace values that help them perform better. If your core values can’t be tied to performance, you might not have identified the values that will allow your organization to progress to the next level.

What is an example of how to tie values to behaviors?

Behaviors represent a deeper manifestation of cultural values – behaviors should aid in the codification of values. Providing behavioral examples helps transform values from being 3-5 words on a page into something real and relatable against which you can evaluate performance.

Cultural Value	Corresponding Behaviors
“We are collaborators.”	“We gather input from at least 2 different sources for all of our decision points.”   “We actively seek external perspectives as we look to update our strategy.”

Note: value-driven behaviors are an important tool that managers use to make values more relevant to their teams – managers should be equipped to interpret organization-wide values in ways that make sense for their specific team context. This creates alignment while acknowledging the different ways values manifest across functions.

What is a cultural storyline? How do you create a cultural storyline?

A cultural storyline is a shared narrative that connects employees to the company’s purpose, values, and way of working – the storyline explains why your values matter right now and what’s at stake if you don’t embrace them.

You can take several approaches to crafting a storyline – while any of the below approaches can create effective storylines, the structure should always be guided by your values:

• Chronological connection – storylines often trace the company’s history from founding to present (or from previous values to current ones). This approach is especially effective for values rooted in organizational history.
• Outward-looking – some organizations frame their values as a response to current market conditions or societal needs, similar to how a “State of the Union” address embeds values in commentary. Forward-looking values often benefit from a context-focused storyline.

Scaling Culture 

Once your culture is built, how do you communicate it throughout your organization? 

Make your values visible, repeatable, and actionable – values are useless when they only exist in presentations. While materials like posters can make your values visible in a literal sense, embedding them into core systems and day-to-day operations drives a more practical visibility.

Embed values into all people processes:

• Onboarding – values are typically codified into onboarding before they permeate other people processes. Every new employee should have a strong understanding of the values and behaviors that they should strive toward in their new role. 
• Feedback processes – ensure that ad-hoc and formal feedback reflects your organization’s values in its delivery and content.
• Ongoing 1:1s – incorporate conversations between managers and their direct reports.
• Create cultural rituals that reinforce values – regular “value moments” during all-hands meetings, board presentations, or team gatherings make culture visible and signal its importance.
• Performance and compensation – recognize and reward value-aligned behaviors. Incorporate values into performance and compensation processes to demonstrate that success is about the “how” as well as the “what” that was achieved.

Leadership on culture is crucial:

• Managers are the biggest culture carriers – managers can make or break your culture because they amplify trends through your organization. Equip managers with tools and prompts that help them manage others in a way that is aligned with your culture and helps their teams understand how core values apply to them.
• Leadership modeling and storytelling sets the tone – the way leaders show up every day, talk about their work, and model values sends a powerful message about cultural priorities and whether management is serious about embracing core values.

What are cultural pulse points and how do you use them to infuse culture across an organization?

Cultural pulse points are the key people, moments, and processes that shape culture – these high-leverage touchpoints are opportunities for values to either shine or break down. Strong cultures are reinforced by pulse points.

Pulse Point	How to Use It to Infuse Culture
People	Incentivize value-aligned behaviors – make culture matter by connecting it to what employees value. Values might not factor into base compensation, but they could influence bonuses or promotions. For example, if you claim to have a value of collaboration but promote a top performer who achieved their results by steamrolling others, that decision signals that your organization doesn’t truly value collaboration.   Encourage managers to include values in regular feedback discussions – reinforce the importance of values by helping direct reports get in the habit of evaluating their own work through a values lens.   Create clear expectations about behavioral standards – employees are more likely to meet cultural expectations when they understand the behaviors required to do so.   Provide cultural resources to all levels of employees – help managers create team-specific rituals that reinforce values (e.g., incorporating value discussions into regular team meetings) and give new hires the tools they need to understand the culture.
Events	Incorporate “value moments” into company events  – use team gatherings to highlight achievements that exemplify company values.   Celebrate success through a values lens – explicitly connect accomplishments to the values-aligned behaviors that contributed to the success. For example, if you are celebrating closing a new deal, you might call out: • How a team of people worked together on this shared goal • How the team showed resilience when they hit challenges along the way • How multiple team members had a bias for action (and how that manifested) that helped them overcome those challenges • How individuals owned the outcome at various points along the way, even when they had setbacks   Create regular opportunities to reinforce values – repeatedly use values terminology in multiple contexts. The more often values are mentioned, the more they will remain top-of-mind.
Processes	Audit existing processes to identify where values are present or missing – values should be observable in the way your team approaches some of its processes. Evaluate whether values are being felt to the extent that they should be.   Augment processes to better reflect values – explore opportunities to amplify values that are present but not felt strongly enough. Consider whether you can improve a process by incorporating a value-driven component. For example, if your team struggles with hitting roadblocks in product development, consider whether one of your core values could provide guidance on how to push through these challenges.   Remember that value-aligned processes should make the organization function better – culture shouldn’t feel forced; it should feel aligned with work. If your values were chosen well, infusing them into important processes should make those processes more effective.

What is a microculture? How do you build and optimize microcultures?

A microculture is the unique way work gets done within a specific team, function, or geography, aligned with the broader company culture – microcultures allow for healthy variety without undermining the organization’s core values. Well-anchored microcultures:

• Enhance team engagement – teams feel a stronger sense of ownership when they shape their own culture.
• Foster innovation and adaptability – microcultures encourage creativity and new ways of working.
• Improve performance and retention – employees thrive when they can balance company-wide values with team-specific practices.
• Strengthen organizational culture – well-managed microcultures reinforce the company’s broader culture, not dilute it.

Example of How to Create a Microculture
Scenario: A Sales Manager wants to reinforce the company’s culture while creating a high-performing, engaged sales team.
Step 1 – identify how company values apply to Sales (use a sentence connecting each value to Sales priorities or operations).	• Bias for Action – encourage reps to proactively reach out to prospects instead of over-analyzing. • Transparent AI – sales team prioritizes educating customers rather than just closing deals. • Customer-Obsessed – reps spend time learning client pain points before pitching solutions. • Own the Outcome – reps follow through on commitments and ensure smooth onboarding.
Step 2 – create team rituals and systems that reinforce those values.	• Monday Kickoffs – each rep shares one bold outreach strategy they’ll test that week. • Friday Win/Loss Roundtable – team openly discusses sales wins & lost deals, focusing on what they learned. • Customer Story Sharing – every week, a rep shares a customer success story that highlights how the company  solves real problems. • No ‘Blame Game’ – if a deal falls through, focus on what can be improved rather than blaming marketing, product, or pricing.

The ideal number of microcultures depends on the size of the organization – there is no “right” or “wrong” quantity, though you should avoid creating unnecessary microcultures. If a company has the appropriate quantity of microcultures, each manager will feel equipped to effectively manage their team.

What are the biggest culture challenges that are driven by scaling? What are best practices for handling some of those challenges?

Inconsistency
Why it matters	Inconsistency is the biggest culture challenge – this is true for companies of all sizes, but cultural inconsistency amongst leadership poses an especially high risk for companies that are scaling at speed.
Example	A new CEO replaces a founder and has a mandate to scale the organization with a new strategy. Since the rest of the leadership team has been with the company since the beginning, the CEO is in a “fish out of water” situation. The team has a set of values, but they were never operationalized.   The new strategy doesn’t work because each leader is interpreting those values differently according to their opinion of how the company should grow and change.
How to handle it	Refine your culture strategy alongside your growth strategy – values should evolve with the strategic needs of the business. Questions should be asked in this order: • What are our future business needs? • What are behaviors that align with those needs? • Do our values encourage those behaviors? If not, which values do? • What skills and tools do our managers need to handle that kind of work?   Get leadership on board with a single narrative – leaders will interpret the same values differently if they lack clear guidance. Alignment starts at the top, so you should ensure that your full leadership team is on the same page before disseminating new values throughout your organization.   Give managers what they need to support your culture – managers at most startups don’t have access to the training and tools that will help them manage their teams in a values-aligned way. For example, providing managers with culture training can help them modify weekly team meetings to reinforce core values.

Poor communication
Why it matters	When companies grow quickly, they risk leaving people behind – high-growth companies often prioritize action over communication about culture and company values. While this mindset can support or even energize growth, it risks causing confusion, frustration, a lack of awareness that expectations are shifting, or even uncertainty amongst employees.   Note: poor communication is rarely a conscious choice – it typically occurs because growth outpaces communication infrastructure and the company doesn’t yet know when or how to communicate important updates.
How this might manifest	• Slow communication – a company’s priorities have changed, but it takes months for the full organization to realize this has happened, resulting in misalignment, confusion, and performance issues. • Lack of frequency of communication – ways of working are changing rapidly as a company grows, but updates aren’t shared often enough and key updates get missed, causing teams to move in different directions and processes to become less efficient. • Complete lack of communication – important updates and decisions are never shared with the broader team, contributing to general anxiousness and an ever-increasing gap between what leadership is striving toward and what the rest of the company thinks they should be doing.
How to handle it	Be relentlessly repetitive – people typically need to hear a message 7 different times in 7 different ways before they internalize it.   Err on the side of frequency – regularly articulate your vision, goals, and how the company will achieve them. Constant and consistent communication might feel “boring” in some situations, but you shouldn’t assume that your audience already knows what you will say simply because you said it before.

How should culture play into the interviewing/onboarding process and the employee experience?

Use value-based rubrics to assess values fit during the interview process – while a lack of “culture fit” can be a valid reason to not hire someone, this criterion is highly subjective and creates problems from an equity and consistency standpoint. Instead, evaluate whether a candidate exhibits “values fit” based on how they answer direct behavioral-style questions about whether they have behaved/performed in certain ways in the past.

Translate values into behavioral expectations during onboarding – most companies limit cultural onboarding to a single slide deck that covers core values and the company’s founding story. However, managers should also explain what each new hire is expected to do and how they are expected to do it.    

Immediately involve new hires in cultural rituals – include new team members in regular activities that bring values to life.

Protecting Culture

How do you know if your organization’s culture needs to change? How often should you review your values/storyline?

Always take a proactive (not reactive) approach to culture – culture should change when your strategy requires that change, not when problems arise in your company. If you realize that you need to change your culture because problems emerge, your culture shift is too late.  

Look for warning signs – common indicators include:

• Business friction (e.g., processes slowing down, people working in different or strange ways, processes that used to work are no longer able to keep up with your growing size)
• Consistent misalignment between teams, amongst leaders, or amongst managers
• A sudden drop in morale

Reassess your values each strategic planning cycle – this could be every 3, 5, or 10 years. Core values shouldn’t change frequently, but they should be adjusted to ensure that the way you operate will allow you to achieve your strategic goals.

How do you support employees who struggle to adjust to the company’s culture?

You either change people or you change people – there are 2 ways to ensure employee-culture fit. Try the first approach before pursuing the second:

• Change hearts and minds – offer coaching, consider refining rituals that are out-of-date or stale, and reframe expectations to try to help the employee embrace your values.
• Recognize when you need a different person – if misalignment persists after you provide support and clarification, the employee’s values might be fundamentally different than those of your company. If this is the case, it might be appropriate to have an exit conversation. 

Treat employee struggle as valuable feedback – struggle is not failure. When employees struggle with culture, their friction points provide an opportunity to identify potential issues and diagnose root causes before they permeate the entire organization.

Supplement pulse data with stakeholder interviews to determine the nature of the misalignment – common root causes include:

• Clarity issues – do people understand expectations?
• Trust issues – are there concerns about leadership or management?
• Capability issues – is this a performance challenge masquerading as a culture problem?
• Fit issues – is there a fundamental misalignment between the employee’s values and the company’s values?

How can you tell if your culture is thriving or is at risk?

Look for retention and turnover patterns – rapid departures, especially in key positions or teams, can signal cultural issues.

Monitor cultural health indicators – use annual pulse surveys and other feedback mechanisms to track morale, trust in leadership, manager approachability, and psychological safety.

Note: poor psychological safety is highly concerning – if employees are scared and don’t feel like they can share their opinions, your culture is at risk and you are likely to experience significant churn.

Look for drift between stated values and lived experiences – people might say that values and behaviors are aligned, even if that alignment has eroded over time. Regularly observe how values are being lived on a day-to-day level. For example, if your organization claims to value collaboration but nobody actually collaborates, a disconnect has emerged between your stated values and your lived culture.

Overall

What are the most important things to get right?

Culture should be intentional – there is no bad culture; there is just unintentional culture. A good culture will help your organization get to where it needs to go, but it won’t necessarily ensure that every employee is happy.

What worked before won’t necessarily work in the future – culture changes because the strategies that get a company from Point A to Point B are rarely the same strategies that get a company from Point B to Point C. This evolution is an inevitable process that can be facilitated by proactively building a culture strategy and giving your team the tools to embrace your emerging culture needs.