Your culture can’t live in your head anymore.
When you’re a team of twenty, culture spreads naturally. People pick it up through daily interactions, watching how decisions get made, seeing what gets celebrated and what gets called out.
But when you’re hiring ten people a month… culture becomes a game of telephone. New people learn it from other new people who learned it from someone else who might have gotten it wrong in the first place.
And before you know it, different pockets of your company are operating with completely different assumptions about what matters here.
The values on the wall problem
Most companies have their values written down somewhere.
Innovation. Integrity. Collaboration. Customer-first. All the usual suspects, probably displayed nicely in the office or listed on the website.
But here’s the thing… values on a wall aren’t culture. They’re just words.
Culture is how you actually make decisions when things get complicated. It’s what you do when two good options conflict with each other. It’s how you treat people when no one’s watching.
And you can’t scale that through osmosis.
The mistake I see companies make is thinking that if they just communicate their values clearly enough, people will figure out how to apply them. But that’s not how it works. Two people can read the same value statement and interpret it completely differently based on their past experiences.
What systematizing actually means
Systematizing culture doesn’t mean turning your company into a rigid, soul-crushing machine.
It means creating clear examples of what your values look like in practice. Real situations where people had to choose between good and good… and here’s what we chose and why.
It means documenting the reasoning behind decisions, not just the decisions themselves. So when someone joins your team six months from now, they can understand how you think, not just what you decided.
It means making the invisible visible. All those unspoken rules about how things work here… how we give feedback, how we handle disagreements, what “moving fast” actually means in your context… those need to exist somewhere other than in the heads of your founding team.
This isn’t about creating a manual that covers every possible scenario. It’s about giving people the framework to make aligned decisions when you’re not in the room.
The rapid hiring test
Here’s how you know if your culture is actually systematized…
Can someone who joined two weeks ago explain to a new hire why you made a recent decision? Not just what the decision was, but the values and thinking behind it?
If the answer is no, your culture is still stuck in the informal phase. And informal doesn’t scale.
When you’re hiring rapidly, you don’t have time for everyone to absorb culture through months of observation. They need to be making decisions and taking action quickly. And if they don’t understand the framework they’re operating within, they’re going to make choices that feel right to them but might be completely misaligned with how you actually want things to work.
Beyond the founder filter
The real test of systematized culture comes when your first employees start hiring their own teams.
Because that’s when things fragment. Each manager brings their own interpretation of your values. Each team develops its own micro-culture. And suddenly you’ve got silos forming based on who people learned from, not what the company actually stands for.
Systematizing culture means your values can travel through multiple layers of people without getting distorted. Someone joining your company in year three should be learning the same fundamental approach as someone who joined in year one… even if they’re in different departments, different locations, reporting to different people.
The living system
Here’s the important part… systematizing doesn’t mean freezing your culture in time.
It means creating a system that can evolve while staying coherent. You document how you think and work today, knowing that it will shift as your company grows. But at least now you have a baseline. You can see what’s changing and make intentional choices about what to preserve and what to let go.
Culture in a box isn’t about control. It’s about consistency. Making sure that everyone who joins your company has access to the same foundational understanding of how things work here.
Because if culture lives in people’s heads, it walks out the door when they do. But if it lives in a system… it compounds as you grow.