Every company I’ve worked at had values written down somewhere. Integrity. Innovation. Collaboration. Respect. They were on the website, in the onboarding deck, sometimes literally on the walls. And in most cases, they told you almost nothing about what it was actually like to work there.

Culture isn’t what you say you value. It’s what you do, especially when things go wrong. Ines Sombra puts it perfectly: “Culture is what happens when what we want to believe about ourselves is challenged. Culture is what we do when we get things wrong, when we witness a violation of trust, or when we stay silent when an inappropriate comment is said in our presence.”

The Reveal

Culture is revealed in the moments that test it. When a deployment goes wrong at 2am, does the team rally together or does the blame game start? When someone misses a deadline, does the manager ask “what happened?” or “whose fault is this?” When an engineer raises a concern about the product direction, is it welcomed or dismissed?

These moments are the real culture, and they’re visible to everyone. The team watches how leadership responds to failure, to conflict, to bad news. Those responses set the norms far more powerfully than any values document.

Sombra makes a sharp observation: “If your reaction when people elevate problems or concerns to you is to chastise the reporter for not being more positive, congratulations, you have created a culture of spin and nontruths in which Pollyanna thinking is encouraged.” I’ve seen this pattern in organisations that claimed to value transparency. The stated value was transparency. The actual culture was “don’t bring bad news.”

Defining Culture That Means Something

Mike Pappas argues that vague culture statements convey no information. “We value innovation” tells you nothing. Every company values innovation. The question is: what are you willing to sacrifice for it? What trade-offs are you making? What behaviour would you not tolerate even from a top performer?

The test I’ve found most useful comes from Pappas: you haven’t defined your culture until you can imagine turning away a world-class candidate who doesn’t fit it. If your culture values collaboration and a brilliant but aggressively competitive engineer applies, would you actually say no? If the answer is “well, they’re really talented, so we’d make an exception,” then collaboration isn’t actually a cultural value, it’s a preference that yields under pressure.

Larson’s framework for useful values reinforces this. A useful value is reversible (the opposite isn’t nonsensical), applicable (it helps navigate real trade-offs), and honest (it describes actual behaviour, not aspirational behaviour). “We value quality” fails all three tests, nobody values the opposite, it doesn’t help you make decisions, and it’s aspirational in most organisations. “We ship incrementally and fix forward rather than seeking perfection before release” passes all three, it has a meaningful opposite, it guides real decisions, and it describes actual behaviour.

Culture Across Different Organisations

Having worked at both start-ups and large corporates, I’ve observed that culture operates differently at different scales, but the principles are the same.

At a start-up, culture is set by the founders and the early team. It’s transmitted through proximity and reinforced through shared experience. The danger is that it’s implicit, everyone “just knows” how things work, which means new hires have to figure it out through trial and error, and the culture can drift without anyone noticing.

At a large corporate, culture is more formal but also more fragmented. Different teams and departments develop their own subcultures, which may or may not align with the stated company culture. The danger is that the official culture becomes performative, something that exists in documents and all-hands presentations but doesn’t match the lived experience of most employees.

In both cases, the leader’s behaviour is the strongest signal. Kellan Elliott-McCrea’s advice on designing rituals intentionally, like Friday Wins sessions that celebrate learning, shipping, and cross-functional collaboration, is a practical way to reinforce the culture you want. But rituals only work if they’re backed by consistent behaviour the rest of the week.

The Manager’s Role

Arjun Anand makes the point that people leave bosses, not companies. The manager is the primary cultural interface for most employees. A great company culture means nothing if your direct manager creates a toxic microculture within their team.

This means that manager training, selection, and accountability are cultural investments. Every manager you hire or promote is making a statement about what your culture actually values. If you promote someone who delivers results but treats people badly, you’ve told the entire organisation that results matter more than people, regardless of what your values document says.

Fournier’s advice on bootstrapping culture is practical: define values, reinforce them through recognition, spot values conflicts early, and use values in interviews and performance reviews. But the most important thing is consistency. Values that are enforced selectively, applied to junior employees but not to senior leaders, or invoked when convenient but ignored when inconvenient, are worse than no values at all, because they add hypocrisy to the mix.

Building It

Culture isn’t built in offsites or workshops. It’s built in the daily interactions that accumulate over months and years. How you run meetings. How you handle mistakes. How you give feedback. How you make decisions. How you treat people when nobody important is watching.

The leaders who build strong cultures are the ones who are relentlessly consistent in their behaviour, who hold themselves to the same standards they hold others to, and who are willing to make difficult decisions, including letting go of high performers, to protect the culture they’ve built.

It’s slow work. It’s often invisible. And it’s the most important thing you do.