Let's stop talking about culture and get clear on communications

The startup "awakening"

I was deep in the academic theory of grad school when a streaming startup introduced me to "culture" in practice. They were in the early "fail fast and break shit" days, and the atmosphere was unlike anything that I had experienced before.

I had come from a glossy Time Square job where you didn't make eye contact with certain editors to a CEO who regularly ate lunch with interns; from hallways so pristine you could see your reflection in them, to nerf gun bullets littering the floor; from leaders who inhabited bougie corner offices in a tower to a CEO who sat out in an open warehouse space with his monitor propped up on fruitsnack boxes.

It felt revolutionary at first – this "start-up" innovators culture that everyone talked about. Democratic. Different. Flat.

But in reality, office politics were disguised under fraternal vibes, and if you peeled back the layers it was just as rife with hierarchies as the corporate gig.

Unspoken Rules

In the corporate office, you quickly learned that speaking to a superior in the elevator might get you iced out; at said startup, you learned that real decisions were made during extracurriculars, and if you weren't part of those clubs, your vote probably didn't matter.

In both environments, there were unspoken rules you were just supposed to know. Although there are many varying definitions of culture, it is widely defined as "tacit" and "implicit". You absorbed it via osmosis and observation.

Theatrical Culture

Culture is one of these words that everyone likes to throw around as being the foundation of a make or break business. Glassdoor thrives on reviewing "good, bad and toxic" cultures. HR loves to do culture surveys, and enable culture committees that often die soon after their proponents realize they are expected to act as champions of a cause that the executives may not believe in – and alongside a myriad of other duties.

And often, the louder the proclamation of "culture", the more fraught it is (more on why culture's not a campaign here).

Culture is NOT a "Believe" sign in the cafeteria (Ted Lasso style), blasting ACDC to summon employees to the morning meeting, or saying "we're all family here" while throwing people under the bus when they leave the room. 

Culture is not optics or messaging, much like a brand isn't just a logo.

So if culture isn't about underground rules, or a campaign, then what the heck is it? Is it just another bullsh*t term we should throw out the window alongside our other favorite corporate buzzwords?

Maybe. Or maybe the problem isn't culture itself - it's that we've been approaching it backwards.

We keep asking "what kind of culture do we have?" when we should be asking "how clearly are we communicating what matters here?"

One question leads to vague mission statements and committees that go nowhere. The other leads to people actually knowing where they stand.

So what does communication-centered culture actually look like?

It means valuing direct communication over shadow organizations. No one cares if you have a "disruptive culture" if real decisions still happen in meetings after the meeting, or if speaking up requires decoding who's actually in charge.

It means consistency over performance. Companies love to frame values on walls, but culture is what happens when no one's watching or when there are things at stake – budgets get tight, someone makes a mistake, leadership changes.

And it means writing things down instead of assuming people will "just know." Especially now, when hybrid and remote work have made implicit rules even more problematic. You can't absorb culture through osmosis when you're not in the office, or pick up on social cues through Zoom – no matter how clear the resolution is.

What does that look like in practice? Not the unwritten rules. Not the secret handshakes. The clear, articulated, embedded understanding of what's expected, what's valued, and what's at stake. 

The Toddler Test

I have a five-year-old. Like all little people, she thrives with boundaries. Not at first – there may be resistance, even tantrums. But ultimately, she feels safer because she knows what's at stake. I tell her – oftentimes ad nauseum – what behavior is acceptable (and not). She understands the boundaries, and while she tests them (sometimes productively, sometimes in brain-melting ways), she always has delineations. And if I asked her to repeat back to me what she heard, with her "listening" ears, she'd reluctantly do so.

Can people in your organization articulate what you stand for? Could your engineer in Brussels explain the mission in the same way your accountant in New York does?

Culture is not "family vibes" or ping pong tables. It's clear expectations. Articulated values. Consequences that align with what you claim to believe.

Both of those early jobs I had - the corporate tower and the startup warehouse - had culture. One wasn't better than the other. But neither one told you the rules. And that's the problem with most organizations: they have culture by default, but communication by accident.

When culture stays unwritten, you lose good people who never cracked the code. You scale to hundreds or thousands and wonder why things feel chaotic. You hire for 'culture fit' in ways that keep power concentrated with whoever was there first.

When you write it down, people know where they stand. New hires ramp faster. Decisions align with values. The culture you claim becomes the culture you have.

The shift is inevitable - companies change, grow, merge, scale. The signal is how you communicate through that change. How you turn unwritten rules into clear expectations. How you make culture something people can actually understand, not just 'feel.'

That's not culture work. That's communications work.

And it's too important to leave unwritten.