Culture Is Not What You Say - It’s What You Do

Building and Sustaining an Intentional Culture Through Growth

Every company has a culture. The question is never whether culture exists - it’s whether it’s one you built deliberately or one that emerged by default.

Culture built by default tends to reflect the personalities of early employees, the habits that formed in the company’s first year, and the behaviours that were implicitly rewarded regardless of what anyone said they valued. It can be excellent, dysfunctional, or anywhere in between - but because it was never intentionally designed, it can also drift as the company grows, change with leadership transitions, and become difficult to sustain or course-correct.

Intentional culture, by contrast, is designed. It starts with clarity about what your company believes, what behaviours you will and won’t accept, and how leadership is expected to model the culture you’re building. It’s reinforced through how you hire, how you recognize people, how you handle conflict, and how leadership behaves when no one is watching.

The companies that sustain strong cultures through significant growth and change are almost always the ones that made deliberate choices early about what kind of organization they wanted to be - and then built systems to maintain it. I can speak to this firsthand from across my entire career, having experienced rapid growth in startups/scaleups, personally supporting countless M&As, or feeling the change that new leadership inevitably brings. In my own SaaS startup, the palpable difference between 'old' and 'new' team members as we scaled was particularly acute - it was the flashing sign of when we needed to not just coast on the culture we organically grew, but to actively build it.

Where Culture Actually Comes From

Culture does not come from a values document or a company retreat, though both can be useful tools in shaping it. Culture ultimately comes from behaviour - specifically, from the behaviour of leaders and the behaviours that the organization consistently rewards, tolerates, or addresses. When a leader says transparency is a core value but withholds critical information from their team, the team doesn’t adopt transparency - they adopt the leader’s actual behaviour. When a company says it values work-life balance but consistently rewards those who work weekends, the unwritten rule becomes clear. Culture is what you do, not what you say. And the gap between the two is something every employee calibrates quickly and accurately.

Culture often begins forming before you think about it - from your first hire, your first client conflict, your first difficult decision. The question is not when to start building culture, but whether to shape it consciously or let it shape itself.

Remember: Corporate culture develops immediately from the organization's founders and core team - their personalities, beliefs, and practices set the path. But as it grows, the cumulative traits and shared beliefs of the people you hire continue to influence it. If not defined, your culture may go in a direction you do not intend - or want.

Designing Culture Intentionally

Building intentional culture is not about imposing a set of rules on your organization. It’s about being explicit about what you believe, making it visible, and then holding yourselves - starting with leadership - accountable to it.

The process involves four interconnected actions:

• Design: Explore the culture you want with genuine input from your team, not just leadership. What shared beliefs already exist? What behaviours do you want to amplify? What do you want to be true about this company that isn’t fully true yet?

• Define: Officially articulate the culture through your values, your norms, your stated expectations for how people treat each other and do their work. Write it down. Make it specific. Vague culture statements are just as ineffective as vague values.

• Demonstrate: Model the culture at every level of leadership. This is non-negotiable. Culture that leadership doesn’t visibly live is culture that employees won’t believe in.

• Demand and Display: Set clear expectations throughout the organization, hold people accountable to them, and make the culture visible - in how you celebrate wins, how you handle mistakes, and how you onboard new team members.

What Culture Touches

Culture is not a standalone initiative. It influences and is influenced by every part of how your organization operates:

• Communication: How information flows, how decisions are explained, how feedback is given and received.

• Performance: What gets recognized and rewarded, how issues are addressed, what’s expected of high performers.

• Team approach: How people collaborate, how conflict is navigated, what ‘good’ looks like on a team.

• Atmosphere: The feel of the environment - remote or in-person - and whether it enables people to do their best work.

• Org structure: Whether structures enable or inhibit the behaviours your culture is trying to promote.

A company that says it values collaboration but is structured in a way that siloes information and creates internal competition has a culture problem no amount of values work will fix. In cases like these, structural change will be required. Culture and operations are connected. You cannot change one without attending to the other. This is a critical element some organization's don't realize, with culture often residing in Human Resources/People teams with little to no connection to business operations teams or processes. To me, that's like saying 'smell and taste are separate" - clearly there is influence and impact between the two!

When Culture Needs to Transform

As a company grows and changes, continual check-ins should occur. Ongoing tweaks are normal and ensure health and resilience for your culture and team. It is very typical for a company to grow to a point where what worked in past is no longer functional today. What was great for 10 people can be chaotic for 100. What worked well for one team in one office doesn't translate to a diverse, remote workforce. Values that were previously understood and comfortable in one scenario (smaller, localized team) may need to be redefined (e.g. after a merger or scaling hiring).

Cultural transformation can be one of the most challenging things a company can undertake - but certainly one of the most important. It requires honest assessment of what’s not working, clear articulation of what you’re building toward, a deliberate rollout and communications plan, and consistent leadership accountability over time.

It also requires accepting some people will not make the transition. When culture shifts meaningfully, some staff may find that the organization they joined is no longer the one they’re working in. Some will embrace that change. Others won’t. The loss of team members who were a strong fit with the old culture but not new one is a natural part of the process, not a failure. Holding onto the wrong people in service of continuity is how cultural transformation stalls.

But overall, if done well, cultural transformation doesn’t just fix problems - it creates a stronger, more aligned organization with greater capacity for sustained growth. The investment is significant. So is the return.