Culture Is What Happens After the Founder Leaves the Room

In the previous article, I wrote about how purpose gets tested when following it starts costing the company something. It is easy for any organisation to say that customers matter, employees matter or quality matters when everything is going well. You understand what the company actually believes when you see the decisions it takes when things are difficult. When those kinds of decisions keep happening in a similar way over time, people inside the company slowly start understanding how the organisation thinks. They begin to know what is acceptable, what is appreciated and what is usually not encouraged. For me, this is where purpose slowly starts becoming culture.

When a company is small, the founder is usually involved in almost everything. If a customer has a problem, somebody asks the founder. If the sales team wants to make an exception, it probably comes to the founder. If there is confusion about a product decision, that also comes back to the founder. This is quite normal in the early stage because the team is small and the founder probably knows most of what is happening in the business.

But this cannot continue as the organisation grows. At some point, there are simply too many customers, employees and daily decisions for the founder to be involved in every situation. People have to start using their own judgement. If every small decision still needs the founder's approval, then the company may have more people and more departments, but in reality it is still dependent on one person.

This is where I feel culture starts becoming important. If people understand how the organisation normally thinks about customers, quality, commitments and people, they have some direction even when the founder or a senior manager is not available. They may not know the exact answer to every situation, but they understand enough about the company to make a sensible decision.

Take Raj, the software developer I used in the earlier articles. Suppose he is working on a feature that needs to go live the next morning. During final testing, he notices a problem. The feature technically works, but he also knows that the issue may create a poor experience for some customers. His manager is not available at that moment and the founder probably has no idea that this problem even exists.

Raj can still release the feature because the deadline has been met and deal with the issue later. Or he can delay it slightly, fix the problem and explain to the team why the release was held back. What he chooses to do in that situation tells us much more about the culture of the company than any value written on the wall.

If Raj has repeatedly seen that the company protects customer experience even when it creates some inconvenience internally, then he already has some idea of what to do. He does not need the founder to personally tell him that a bad customer experience is not worth meeting a deadline by a few hours. He has seen enough examples around him to understand how the organisation normally looks at such situations.

The same thing applies to Pooja, the junior designer from the earlier article. Suppose she receives a brief for a real estate campaign and while working on it she realises that one part of the requirement is not completely clear. She can make an assumption, finish the design and send it. Nobody may even know that she was unsure about something. Or she can speak to someone who knows the client better, understand the requirement properly and then complete the artwork.

You cannot really create a process for every small situation like this. There will always be moments where somebody has to make a judgement call. If Pooja has seen people around her care about getting the final outcome right instead of simply completing their own task, she is more likely to ask that extra question. She has learnt through experience that finishing the task is not the only thing that matters.

I think this is how culture shows up in a company. It is often visible in very small decisions which senior management may never even hear about. It is not always some big leadership decision or company-wide initiative. Sometimes it is simply what an employee chooses to do when there is nobody senior around to guide them.

As a company grows, there is another change which becomes very important. Most employees stop working directly with the founder. Their manager becomes the person through whom they experience the organisation. That is why I feel managers have a much bigger role in culture than we sometimes realise.

A founder may talk about customer experience, but if a manager only keeps pushing the team to finish tasks faster, employees will naturally respond to what their manager is asking for every day. The company may say that people should take ownership, but if every independent decision is questioned afterwards, people will slowly stop taking independent decisions. They will wait for instructions because that feels safer.

The same thing happens with mistakes. A founder may say that honest mistakes are acceptable, but if managers immediately start blaming people whenever something goes wrong, employees will learn a very different lesson. Instead of thinking about what is best for the company, they will start thinking about how to protect themselves if something goes wrong.

This is why I don't think a manager's job is only about delivering targets. The way a manager reacts when there is pressure, how feedback is given, what kind of behaviour gets appreciated and what happens when somebody makes a mistake is constantly teaching the team how the company works. A manager can deliver excellent numbers and still create a bad culture if those numbers are being achieved in a way which goes against how the organisation says it wants to operate.

Most companies already have some values written somewhere. They may talk about ownership, teamwork, customer focus, integrity or excellence. There is nothing wrong with any of these words, but employees do not understand the culture of a company by reading them once during onboarding. They understand it from what keeps happening around them every day.

People notice who gets promoted and why. They notice what kind of behaviour is appreciated. They notice whether someone who delivers great numbers is allowed to behave badly with everyone else. They notice what happens when somebody takes responsibility for a mistake. They also notice whether the leadership behaves differently when the company is under pressure.

Over time, these experiences become the employee's actual understanding of the culture. This is also why the founder may sometimes believe that the company has one culture while employees experience something completely different. The founder may be thinking about the values that have been communicated, while employees are looking at what actually happens around them. Naturally, people will believe their own experience.

This is how I see the connection between purpose and culture. Purpose gives people some understanding of why the organisation exists and what everyone is trying to achieve together. Initially, the founder has to show through his own decisions what that purpose actually means. As the company grows, managers carry that thinking into their teams and employees slowly start applying the same thinking in their own work.

After some time, Raj may naturally think about the customer before releasing a feature. Pooja may automatically clarify something when a brief does not make sense. A salesperson may think twice before making a promise which the delivery team may not be able to fulfil. Someone in customer support may care about whether the customer's problem has actually been solved rather than simply closing the ticket. Nobody has to keep reminding them of the company purpose every time because it has slowly become part of the way they work.

Of course, this does not mean everybody in the organisation will behave in exactly the same way. Different people have different roles, personalities and ways of solving problems. A developer and a salesperson will face very different situations. Culture does not mean making everyone think exactly alike. For me, it simply means there is some consistency in the thinking behind the decisions people make.

I also feel founders influence culture not only through what they encourage, but also through what they allow to continue. People notice these things more than founders sometimes realise. If a founder regularly gives commitments and then changes them, employees learn something about how seriously commitments are taken. If the founder says people should speak openly but reacts badly whenever somebody disagrees, the team will quickly understand that disagreement is probably not welcome.

The opposite is also true. If the founder takes responsibility when something goes wrong instead of immediately looking for someone to blame, people notice that. If a junior employee disagrees and the founder actually listens, people understand that speaking openly is acceptable. These may look like small moments, but when they keep happening, they slowly shape how others in the company behave.

If I really wanted to understand the culture of a company, I would probably not begin by asking the founder to explain the company's values. I would rather observe what happens when senior leadership is not around. I would look at what Raj does when he finds a problem before a release, what Pooja does when the requirement is unclear, how a manager reacts when somebody makes an honest mistake and whether a salesperson still sets the right expectation with a customer when nobody senior is listening to the call.

These everyday situations probably tell us much more about the company than anything written in a presentation. A founder can start by defining the purpose and showing through his own decisions what it means. Managers then carry that thinking into their teams, and employees learn from what they repeatedly see and experience. Over time, people start making decisions without needing the founder to personally guide every situation.

For me, that is when culture has actually started forming. It is not about how people behave because the founder is sitting in the room or because a manager is watching them. It is about the way people continue to work, make decisions and deal with each other when nobody senior is there to tell them what to do.