How to Lead Through Culture Building

Culture gets built whether you’re intentional about it or not. The question isn’t whether to build culture, it’s whether you’ll shape it deliberately or let it emerge by accident from whoever shouts loudest.

Startups implode because founders assume culture would just “happen” if they hired smart people and got out of the way. Others scale brilliantly because someone took responsibility for defining and reinforcing the behaviours that mattered.

The uncomfortable truth is culture building isn’t about ping pong tables or Friday drinks. It’s about the decisions you make when they’re hard, the behaviours you reward, and the ones you tolerate. Everything else is theatre.

The teams that get this right understand that culture is how you make decisions and solve problems when nobody’s watching. Build that foundation early, and it compounds. Neglect it, and you’ll spend years trying to retrofit values into a team that’s already formed different habits.

The Startup Reality

Resource constraints

Culture building at a startup is paradoxical. You have neither the time nor the resources to focus on it properly, but you also can’t afford to ignore it because early patterns are sticky.

At an early-stage startup I joined, the founder’s view was “we’re too busy building product.” The team was dysfunctional. People worked in silos, blamed other teams when things went wrong, and optimised for individual wins rather than collective outcomes. Good people who left because they “didn’t like the environment.”

The pattern was set early: founder rewarded whoever shipped fastest, regardless of how they got there. People learned that collaboration was punished (slowed you down) and individual heroics were rewarded. That behaviour became embedded.

The key insight: Culture isn’t a separate work stream. It’s how you do the work you’re already doing. Every decision about hiring, feedback, prioritisation, and conflict resolution is a culture decision.

With resource constraints, you can’t afford formal culture programmes. What you can afford: being intentional about the behaviours you model and reward. At another early-stage startup, we had one cultural principle: “disagree and commit.” When decisions were made, everyone got to voice their opinion, but once we decided, everyone committed fully, no undermining, no “I told you so” if it failed.

That single principle prevented most of the political nonsense that kills early-stage teams. Didn’t cost anything except discipline to enforce it.

Speed vs quality tradeoffs

This is where culture shows up most clearly in startups. How does the team make speed vs quality tradeoffs when nobody’s looking?

At another company, the implicit culture was “ship fast, fix later.” Sounds pragmatic, but it led to a codebase so fragile that every feature took three times as long to build. The speed-at-all-costs culture eventually made the company slower.

Compare that to where the culture was “ship the simplest thing that could work, done properly.” They moved fast but didn’t accumulate technical debt. The culture prevented shortcuts that would cost more later.

The tradeoff isn’t speed OR quality. It’s being explicit about which tradeoff you’re making and why. Culture determines whether those tradeoffs are made thoughtfully or reactively.

At another startup, we had a simple forcing function: before cutting quality to hit a deadline, you had to explicitly state what quality you were cutting and why it was worth the tradeoff. Just making it explicit eliminated most of bad quality decisions. When you had to say out loud “we’re skipping testing to ship two days faster,” people realised it was usually a bad trade.

That’s culture. Not values on a wall, but a behavioural norm that shapes how decisions get made.

Building Early Foundations

What to prioritise

You can’t build comprehensive culture from day one. You need to pick the 2-3 behaviours that matter most and reinforce those relentlessly.

At a B2B startup, we prioritised: customer obsession, ownership, and candid feedback. Everything else was secondary. When hiring, we looked for those traits. When giving feedback, we referenced them. When someone exhibited them, we called it out publicly. When someone violated them, we addressed it privately but directly.

This worked because it was narrow enough to remember and broad enough to cover most situations. Three principles beat ten every time.

The prioritisation question: What behaviours, if adopted by everyone, would most increase your odds of success? Not “what sounds good” but “what actually matters for your specific context.”

For a deep-tech startup, that might be intellectual rigour and collaboration. For a consumer app, it might be speed and user empathy. For an enterprise company, reliability and professionalism. Context matters more than copying what worked somewhere else.

At one startup, we picked “defaults to action”. When uncertain, do something, learn, adjust. This prevented the analysis paralysis that killed their previous attempt. Was it right for every company? No. Was it right for them? Absolutely.

Quick wins

Early culture wins build momentum. Here are the ones that worked for me:

Weekly team demos: Everyone shows what they shipped, what they learned, what didn’t work. This reinforced transparency, learning from failure, and celebrating progress. Took 30 minutes, created massive cultural value.

At one company, this ritual became the heartbeat of the culture. People prepared for it, felt accountable to have something to show, and learned from each other’s work. When a new joiner asked “what’s the culture here?” the answer was “come to Friday demos and you’ll see.”

Public recognition of cultural behaviours: Catch people embodying the culture you want and call it out. “I really appreciated how Sarah challenged my assumption in that meeting—exactly the kind of candid feedback we need” is worth ten values posters.

This works because it’s specific and timely. You’re not praising the person; you’re praising the behaviour and making it visible to others. That’s how norms spread.

Founder/leader transparency: Share the hard stuff. Near misses, mistakes, uncertainty. This gives permission for everyone else to be honest.

At one startup, the CEO started every all-hands with “here’s what I’m worried about this week.” Made it safe for everyone else to surface concerns rather than pretending everything was fine. That transparency became cultural.

Clear consequences for culture violations: This is the hard one. If someone’s brilliant but violates your culture, you have to address it or the culture dies.

I’ve seen founders tolerate “brilliant jerks” because they were productive. Every time, it destroyed culture. The message everyone received: performance trumps culture. Within months, everyone optimised for performance over collaboration, and the culture was toxic.

The quick win: address the first culture violation quickly and fairly. Sets the precedent that culture matters, not just output.

Scaling for Growth

When to formalise

There’s an inflection point: usually around 20-30 people, where implicit culture stops scaling and you need explicit articulation.

Up to 15 people, everyone osmose the culture from founders. At 25 people, new joiners have no idea what the norms are. Some guess right, some guess wrong, and the culture fragments.

The fix: articulate the principles explicitly, make them part of onboarding, and reference them in every context (hiring, feedback, prioritisation). Not because you want bureaucracy, but because osmosis doesn’t scale.

Signs you need to formalise:

• New joiners ask “how do we do things here?” and get different answers
• Teams are making decisions that feel culturally inconsistent
• You’re hiring faster than people can absorb culture informally
• Founders/leaders can’t personally interact with everyone regularly

Formalisation doesn’t mean complexity. Ours was one page: three principles, examples of what each looked like in practice, and examples of violations. Took an afternoon to write, saved months of cultural drift.

Team evolution

Culture needs to evolve as the team grows, but not too fast. The principles should be stable; the practices can adapt.

“Move fast and break things” works brilliantly up to 10 people. At 50, it is causing chaos—breaking production, frustrating customers, burning out engineers. The underlying principle - bias to action - is still right. The practice — ship without adequate testing — needed to evolve.

Keep “bias to action” but add “within guardrails.” Now it means: automate testing, have monitoring, ship frequently but responsibly. Same spirit, different implementation.

The evolution question: Are our cultural principles still right, or have they become liabilities? And are our practices aligned with current scale?

I’ve seen teams cling to “scrappy startup” culture long after they needed operational discipline. And I’ve seen teams add process too early and lose the agility that made them successful. The trick is evolving practices whilst keeping principles stable.

At another company, we did quarterly “culture check-ins”. Small group discussions about whether our stated culture matched lived reality. When gaps emerged (e.g., “we say we value work-life balance but everyone’s burning out”), we addressed them. That feedback loop kept culture healthy.

Key Takeaways

• Culture emerges whether you build it or not: The behaviours you reward and tolerate become your culture. Better to shape it deliberately than inherit it by accident.

• Pick 2-3 principles and over-index: You can’t prioritise everything. Choose the behaviours that most increase your odds of success and reinforce them relentlessly.

• Culture isn’t separate from work: It’s how you make decisions, give feedback, prioritise, and solve problems. Model the behaviours you want in every interaction.

• Quick wins build momentum: Team demos, public recognition, founder transparency, and swift consequences for violations. These create visible culture early.

• Formalise around 20-30 people: Osmosis stops scaling. Articulate principles explicitly, make them part of onboarding, reference them constantly.

• Evolve practices, stabilise principles: As you scale, practices need to adapt (e.g., more process, clearer roles) but principles should remain stable. Don’t optimise for stability too early or agility too late.

Final Thoughts

The companies I’ve seen with the strongest cultures aren’t the ones with the cleverest values statements. They’re the ones where leaders consistently made hard decisions aligned with principles, even when it was costly.

Letting go of a high performer who was toxic to culture. Turning down a lucrative deal that required behaviour you didn’t want to normalise. Admitting mistakes publicly rather than covering them up. These moments define culture more than any all-hands presentation.

Culture compounds. Invest early, when it’s cheap and easy to shape. Neglect it, and you’ll spend years trying to retrofit it into a team that’s already formed different habits.

This week, ask yourself: what behaviours do you want to see more of in your team? Now look at your actions over the past week. Are you modelling and rewarding those behaviours, or sending mixed signals?

Culture is what you do, not what you say. Make sure they’re aligned.

Have questions or thoughts? Get in touch - I’d love to hear from you!