Cultural Decay Takes Root in One Excuse
Culture is more about what you tolerate than what you celebrate.
I talk about culture with my founders often. How to define it. How to instill rituals around it. The upside of committing to a set of values. The enormous risk of leaving culture unattended.
But many of my founders prioritize only half the story.
They think values are all about celebrating good behaviors: the employee who pushes through on a weekend to deliver a critical feature, the teammate who jumps in on someone else’s project to lend a hand, the colleague who surfaces a risk no one else wants to face.
One Exception Matters
Make no mistake, those are all commendable actions that deserve the CEO’s callout in the all-hands meeting or the public praise in a Slack thread.
But we’re wired to remember the bad more than the good. Psychologists call it negativity bias. Every time a poor performance gets rationalized, or worse, ignored, it burns into the memories of everyone around it. Those impressions can drown out all the good stuff you worked so hard to build.
One of my portfolio companies is thriving right now. Customer growth is strong. The team has expanded significantly. Revenue is healthy. By most measures, the business is going exceptionally well.
But they’re not being careful about culture.
Ask anyone on the team what stands out, and they won’t mention the long list of people doing exceptional work. They’ll quickly point to the familiar exceptions: the exec who misses every deadline, the engineer with a terrible attitude, the marketing employee who hides when things go south.
The issue isn’t that these people exist. Every company has employees who miss expectations or need coaching. The issue is that everyone knows who they are and assumes nothing will be done about it. That’s when a performance issue becomes a culture problem.
Celebrating the good stuff is easy. Confronting the bad stuff is the real work.
Values Need Definitions, Not Posters
Founders, your values need to be more than words. I imagine you have values that speak to integrity, honesty, reliability, speed, urgency, or some combination of those. But the words themselves aren’t enough; they need specific definitions.
Take speed as a value.
A real definition might read: We value speed over perfection. We do all we can to meet our commitments, even if that means working unorthodox hours. We never take a month for something that can be done in a week. We commit to alerting our teammates the moment a deadline is in jeopardy so we can revise accordingly. No surprises.
That’s a high standard. Across a diverse team, someone is bound to fall short of it.
To be clear, startups are messy. Priorities change, new information emerges, and an occasional miss is unavoidable. The value isn’t necessarily that every commitment gets met 100% of the time; the value is that no one is blindsided by a preventable surprise.
If someone raises the risk early, communicates clearly, and works with the team to adjust, that’s the value operating exactly as intended. But if someone sees the problem coming, stays quiet, and reveals the miss only after the deadline has passed, that’s something else entirely.
In that situation, what happens next is critical. Does the manager address it? Discuss it directly? Hold the employee accountable? Or does the manager just move on and rationalize the behavior away?
That’s the moment when cultural decay begins.
Protect the Floor, Raise the Ceiling
You must protect your culture. Values are the societal rules keeping the organization healthy. When those rules are ignored, culture weakens.
So when that deadline gets missed, I suggest:
- Have the conversation immediately. Not a week later. Not a month later. Immediately.
- The purpose of the conversation is not to crush someone’s spirit or explode in blame; it’s to address directly that a value was missed.
- The outcome is a shared understanding of what happened and why. Be specific, direct. Focus on the behavior, not the person. A simple hack: Use “we” more than “you.”
- The learning is then documented and shared with the right stakeholders, not to embarrass but rather to make clear the importance of the miss and the seriousness of the value.
If that sounds like a lot of effort for a simple and explainable miss, that’s because it is. Culture rarely collapses all at once; it erodes one rationalization at a time.
Practice and discipline deliver sustained results.
Those not living your culture are the crabs in the bucket pulling down those reaching for freedom. But when zero tolerance for breaches becomes the norm, the crabs take a different posture. They lift each other up until every one of them is free.