What Reality Corrected 08 | Culture is not what you write on the wall. It is what your decisions repeatedly train people to do

Before Jevan Soo Lenox’s fireside at Draper U started, I had a fairly defensive posture towards the topic.

Anything labelled team, people or culture can become vague very quickly. By the end, everyone agrees that culture matters, hiring matters, feedback matters. All true. Also often too light to be useful. You leave with a tidy feeling and no clear sense of what, exactly, needs to change on Monday.

This conversation did not go that way.

Jevan started with a point that pulled the subject back to earth. Very early companies are obviously not hiring a Chief People Officer. If you have five people, eight people, twelve people, that is not the first role you add. But that does not mean you can postpone people questions. It only means they have not yet been given a formal title. The problems that later explode at 80 or 200 people are often planted much earlier.

That line stayed with me.

Because it corrected a lazy assumption I still see all the time: that culture is a later-stage problem.

You do not need a CPO yet. You do need to start thinking the way one would.

Jevan is now Chief People Officer at WRITER. When WRITER announced his appointment, they pointed to his experience across companies like Square, Stitch Fix and Blue Bottle, and framed his role around building a high-performance, people-first culture as the company scaled.

That kind of background can sound remote from a tiny startup.

What he said on stage was not remote at all.

The underlying point was simple.

You may not have a CPO yet, but you already have the problems a CPO would eventually be asked to clean up.

Questions like:

Who actually has decision rights?
What behaviour gets rewarded?
How does conflict surface here?
Do your stated values show up in promotion, delegation and error tolerance, or only in the slide deck?

Those are not 200-person problems.

Many teams do not suddenly become messy when they grow. They were already messy. Smaller headcount just made it easier to hide behind energy and goodwill.

I used to think culture was mostly atmosphere. I now think it is much closer to system design.

One distinction from the fireside landed particularly hard.

Process is not culture.

Perks are not culture.

A values deck is not culture either.

Those things may influence culture. They are not the thing itself. Culture shows up in decisions. How decisions get made. Who gets promoted. What behaviour gets tolerated. Which principles quietly disappear under pressure.

That is why the most useful version of the idea, at least for me now, is this:

Culture is not what you write on the wall. It is what your decisions repeatedly train people to do.

It is harsher than the usual version, but also much more predictive.

Plenty of companies say they value candour, ownership or speed. The problem is rarely the words. The problem is what happens when the situation becomes inconvenient.

If you say you value candour, but every uncomfortable disagreement cools the room and teaches people to stay quiet, then the real culture is not candour. It is silence.

If you say you value ownership, but every meaningful choice still has to travel upwards for permission, then the culture is not ownership. It is dependency.

That gap becomes expensive very quickly.

Is culture top-down or bottom-up? It is better understood as a tug of war.

Someone in the room asked the right annoying question: is culture top-down or bottom-up?

Jevan’s answer was the only sensible one. It is not binary.

Founders and leaders absolutely amplify culture. Teams watch how leaders respond to mistakes, disagreement, urgency and trade-offs. Google’s re:Work work on effective teams repeatedly points back to conditions such as psychological safety, dependability and clarity. Those are not slogans. They grow out of repeated interaction patterns.

But culture is not simply whatever the founder declares.

If the people you hire, the behaviour you reward and the shortcuts you tolerate all pull in another direction, that direction becomes the culture. Jevan put this bluntly in the fireside: at some point, what most people on the team actually do day to day is the culture.

That helps explain a founder complaint I hear often.

“We weren’t like this before.”

Maybe. But if the pattern has been repeating for six months, then in some meaningful sense, that is what the company is like now.

The thing I fear most is not bad culture. It is the illusion of alignment.

If I had to pick the most operationally useful idea from that session, I would pick alignment.

Not because the word is novel.

Because it is so often misread.

Many teams do not suffer from obvious disagreement. They suffer from the illusion that they are aligned.

A small team talks constantly. Everyone sits close together, or at least pings each other all day. Slack is lively. Meetings are frequent. It becomes very easy to assume that shared airtime equals shared judgement.

Then the first real trade-off appears.

One person thinks this quarter is about growth.
Another thinks it is about product quality.
Someone else thinks the fastest path is customer acquisition now, clean-up later.
Another assumes onboarding is still the binding constraint.

Everyone says they understand the strategy. Their decisions suggest otherwise.

This is what makes alignment dangerous. Early on, it does not always look like conflict. It often looks like friction, delay, low-grade frustration and slightly incompatible priorities.

Until one day you realise everyone is busy and the company is somehow still slower than it should be.

That is why I increasingly think one of a founder’s central jobs is not simply repeating the vision. It is repeatedly checking whether the vision is making it into actual decisions.

Those are very different kinds of work.

There was another very good question in the room: should a company think of itself as a family, or more like a sports team?

Jevan was fairly categorical about his discomfort with the family metaphor.

So am I.

Not because work should be cold. But because “family” often makes necessary things harder to say. Families are not built through hiring. They are not sustained through performance. They do not use role clarity, exit decisions and formal feedback in the same way. Once you blur those categories, difficult conversations tend to become even muddier.

That said, I do not love the pure “NBA team” metaphor either. Used lazily, it becomes another excuse: optimise for the strongest current player, swap people out fast, and call it excellence. That can work in bursts. It is also an easy way to build a high-burn organisation.

Jevan’s version was more useful. Strong teams are neither family nor just a collection of stars. They make deliberate talent trade-offs. Some roles demand proven operators. Some roles justify developing someone over time. That is not sentimentality. It is talent strategy.

That framing matters because it drags the conversation back out of metaphor and into management.

The earliest version of culture is how you handle difficult conversations

The most portable lesson I took from the fireside was not a formal system. It was a capability:

Can your team talk about difficult things directly, and still do it with respect?

That sounds ordinary. In practice it is one of the hardest things to build.

Early teams often run on enthusiasm, goodwill and a kind of mutual overextension. That can be productive for quite a while. Boundaries are loose. Everyone does more than their job. Decisions happen quickly.

Until a real disagreement appears.

Then all the previously unspoken assumptions start charging interest.

No one wants to be the difficult person.

So the issue gets deferred. Deferred again. By the time it resurfaces, it is no longer just a work problem. It has picked up resentment.

Google’s re:Work work on team effectiveness places psychological safety near the centre. The term gets softened too often. A more practical reading is this: can people raise uncertainty, point to risks, admit they do not know, or challenge a plan without being instantly humiliated or cast as disloyal?

That does not require softness.

It requires a shared way of being direct without becoming destructive.

Many culture failures begin right there.

You do not need a full people system yet. You do need a few foundations.

I do not think an eight-person company should rush to imitate a large company’s full management stack. Formal performance systems, elaborate competency matrices and process-heavy rituals can easily become premature drag.

That does not mean doing nothing.

If I put Jevan’s fireside alongside the external research, there are a few things I would start early.

1. Make decision rules explicit

Who proposes, who decides, who gives input, and how disagreement is resolved. Without this, teams often mistake discussion for alignment.

2. Do not let feedback age too long

Gallup’s long-running work on engagement consistently links clarity, feedback and manager quality with stronger outcomes. In smaller teams, the effect is even more immediate because you do not have layers of process to absorb the cost of delay.

I used to think feedback culture was a later-stage management problem. I no longer do. The smaller the company, the more useful it is to make feedback short, fast and concrete.

Otherwise work errors quickly become relationship costs.

3. Hire for reaction to ambiguity, not just obvious competence

This is not about recruiting clones. It is about understanding how someone behaves under unclear ownership, rapid change, direct challenge and thin support. Google re:Work emphasises structured interviewing for a reason: consistent questions and scoring tend to predict performance more reliably than freeform charm-based conversations.

Early teams are not usually hurt most by imperfect résumés. They are hurt by hiring people whose working style simply does not fit the operating tempo of the company.

4. Separate core principles from local style

Jevan also touched on distributed teams and national differences in communication style. Some environments are much more direct than others. You cannot force everyone into the same tone.

That does not mean everything becomes relative.

A more durable approach is to align on core principles while allowing local variation in style. You standardise the bottom layer, not the surface accent.

I increasingly think good culture is not comfort. It is clarity.

I used to imagine a healthy culture in softer terms.

Good atmosphere. Trust. People who like working together.

Now I trust a different picture.

Good culture is not necessarily comfortable. Often it carries a certain pressure because high standards are rarely comfortable.

But it should be clear.

You know how to question. You know how to disagree. You know what gets rewarded. You know what cannot be deferred. You know who decides. You know feedback will come, and that it usually will not arrive three months too late.

That kind of clarity matters more than comfort.

Comfort is easy to fake. Plenty of teams feel comfortable before the real constraints arrive.

So culture is not a soft extra. It is part of the operating system.

That was probably the biggest correction I took from the session.

I used to file culture under “important, but softer than product, sales and cash”.

I do not think that anymore.

Culture behaves much more like infrastructure.

How you hire, how you give feedback, how you surface disagreement, how you avoid alignment turning into theatre — none of that is merely about whether people enjoy working together. It shapes organisational friction, decision speed and error accumulation. Which means it eventually shows up in product quality, execution and commercial outcomes anyway.

So if your company is still small, my view is now fairly simple.

You do not need a complete people system yet.

But you should start paying attention to what your small, repeated decisions are training the company to become.

Series | What Reality Corrected