Culture by Design, Not Default: The Culture You Meant to Build vs. the One You Got
You built the business with intention. But did you build the culture the same way?
In this episode of The Heart of Leadership, Marderé Birkill explores a challenge that shows up in many growing technical businesses: the company grows, the team expands, but the operating culture stays stuck in habits that made sense when the business was smaller.
Decisions still climb to the top. Problems surface too late. Managers hesitate to act. Standards vary depending on who is leading.
None of that means your people are incapable.
It may simply mean your culture developed by default instead of by design.
In this episode, we look at four critical places where operating culture becomes visible:
Decisions: Are decisions made close to the work, or do they keep escalating to senior leaders?
Conflict: Are disagreements surfaced early, or do they appear later as rework, missed handoffs, frustration, or turnover?
Accountability: Are expectations consistently reinforced, or does accountability depend on the individual manager?
Standards: Does everyone understand what good looks like, or does quality vary depending on who happens to be doing the work?
Marderé also shares the story of a growing engineering firm where decisions increasingly landed on the founders’ desks, even though the managers were capable of making them.
The problem wasn’t talent.
The culture had simply trained people to wait.
You’ll also learn three practical moves you can make this week to start building culture more deliberately:
- Choose one behaviour or leadership norm you want to become true across the business.
- Identify where decisions are travelling higher than they should.
- Reinforce the behaviours you want in ordinary leadership moments.
Because culture isn’t your values poster.
Culture is how the work gets done when you’re not in the room.
And as AI accelerates how businesses operate, that becomes even more important. AI will not fix an unclear operating culture. It can amplify it. If decisions already bottleneck at the top, technology may simply help work reach that bottleneck faster.
The goal is to build a leadership operating system where capable people know what they own, decisions happen at the right level, problems surface while they are still small, and the business is no longer dependent on a few senior leaders carrying everything.
Take the Culture Capacity Assessment
Not sure whether your culture is operating by design or default?
Take our short Culture Capacity Assessment to identify where your culture is carrying the business well and where it may be quietly creating strain:
Bring one insight from the assessment into your next leadership meeting and start the conversation there.
Subscribe to The Heart of Leadership for practical conversations about leadership, organizational culture, accountability, decision-making, executive leadership, and building the culture that carries the business.
Culture is always being built. The question is whether you are authoring it or inheriting it.
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