Culture is a word that gets tossed around easily inside the workplace. Think Tanks study the keys to building a strong employee culture because an effective culture improves performance. And yet few employees feel connected to their company’s culture.    

I’m not surprised at the disconnect. As any CEO and founder knows, culture is a heavy lift. For founders, the commitment to creating a real culture (beyond “scrappy start-up mode”) can be even more intense because the business is the founder’s baby.  

The pressure to keep a culture cohesive is getting even more intense in 2026. Businesses are scaling through acquisitions, hiring across broader talent pools, still figuring out how to manage hybrid working models, and grappling with the impact of AI on the organization.    

Maybe the problem isn’t that culture comes from the top, but that too often it stops there. What if culture was caught instead of mandated? 

This question has been on my mind a lot. I’m a CEO of a European business where we strive to build a corporate culture that operates across 12 European micro-cultures, from France to Finland.   

This might seem like an insurmountable challenge, but I’ve realized that each micro-culture is a gold mine of ways of working and communicating that our company can draw from to build something that endures.   

Designing Culture without Freezing It in Place 

When you accept that culture is caught, you stop trying to script behavior from the top down and start paying closer attention to how people actually work, communicate, and make decisions. Culture doesn’t live in decks or handbooks. It lives in habits.   

Every company has a culture, whether it’s designed or left to default. Leaving culture to chance doesn’t produce neutrality; it produces inconsistency. That doesn’t mean everything is up for interpretation, or that every way of working can coexist. Leaders still have a responsibility to notice what works, absorb the best ideas from different backgrounds, and embed them deliberately into how the company operates. Those choices settle into a shared operating rhythm.   

One of the most effective ways to accelerate this process is by investing serious time together in person. We spend hundreds of hours each year in rooms, over dinners, and in long conversations with teams and leaders, especially new hires. That’s where people see how decisions really get made, how disagreement works, and what we actually value when no one is presenting slides. The return on that time is culture.   

Those moments are difficult to engineer deliberately, but they are impossible to replace entirely.    

A Culture Where the Best Idea Wins 

Few moments reveal culture more clearly than how ideas are shared and challenged. The process of proposing an idea, pushing back, refining it, and landing on a better answer is a white-hot crucible where culture is caught in real time.   

In this environment, titles don’t decide outcomes. Arguments do. If someone has a better idea than mine, we go with it. But they have to make the case. That expectation changes behavior. People come prepared. They think more deeply. They engage not as employees executing orders, but as builders shaping a company together.   

For this to work, leaders need their antennae up. Not just to listen for the strongest idea, but to pay attention to how ideas are offered, challenged, and received. Who speaks first? Who hesitates? Who gets interrupted? Who retreats after pushback? These signals matter as much as the decision itself.   

Handled well, debate doesn’t slow execution. It sharpens it. When people see their ideas taken seriously and tested openly, buy-in follows naturally. Momentum builds not from authority, but from shared conviction.   

Those moments also form something more durable than values, statements or policies. They show people, repeatedly, how this organization thinks, listens, and decides; and that is culture being caught at full speed.   

Culture Starts With Who You Hire 

But catching culture in its many forms doesn’t work unless you have confidence in who you bring into the organization.   

This was one of my hardest lessons as a founder. Early on, I made a series of hiring mistakes that eventually required painful corrections. That wasn’t the fault of the people I hired. It was mine. I didn’t yet understand what the culture required, and I hired without enough clarity.   

Culture amplifies whoever you hire. If you bring in people who resist accountability, culture bends toward avoidance. If you bring in people who value openness and ownership, culture strengthens quickly.   

Recruitment is culture design in slow motion. You cannot build a culture of trust and responsibility if you don’t vet for it at the door. With the right people in place, culture is no longer enforced through rules, but shaped through what leaders notice and respond to in real moments.   

The Power of Micro Moments 

Culture isn’t set in grand speeches. It’s set in small, sometimes uncomfortable moments when expectations become clear.   

I remember a company trip to Cannes shortly after a new team joined from a central European market. They had received a long email from a major agency about a potential partnership. When I asked how they planned to respond, they said they had received it a week earlier and were still considering their response. That pause was cultural, not malicious.   

At that moment, we had to address a mismatch directly. I explained that our business depends on speed and responsiveness. Waiting several days to acknowledge a commercial opportunity simply wasn’t acceptable for us.    

That conversation mattered more than any policy we could have written. It was a micro moment where culture was caught. We didn’t shame anyone. We clarified how this company works and why.   

These moments happen constantly. How fast do we respond? How directly do we speak? When do we escalate? When do we push back? If leaders avoid these moments, culture defaults to inconsistency.   

Clarity Without Mandates   

One of the biggest misconceptions about organic culture is that it means leaders shouldn’t set standards. The opposite is true. Organic culture still requires shared agreement on how work gets done.   

The difference is intent. If you tell someone, “You must respond to emails immediately,” they hear control. If you explain that responsiveness is how trust is built with clients and with each other, they understand the purpose. People don’t resist clarity. They resist unexplained authority.   

Culture hardens when expectations are tied to outcomes people care about. Speed matters because it affects revenue. Transparency matters because it reduces friction. Accountability matters because it builds trust inside teams.   

When leaders take time to explain why, standards stop feeling arbitrary. They start feeling like part of a collective effort.   

When expectations are clear and shared, teams gain the freedom to relax, joke, and speak honestly without wondering where the boundaries are.   

Fun Informs Work   

Tone is one of the hardest elements of culture to formalize, and one of the easiest to feel. How people joke. How they challenge one another. How safe they feel being themselves at work. This is where culture is most human and least transferable through documentation.   

I remember working closely with clients in Sweden. We didn’t speak perfect Swedish, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that we were direct, open, and genuinely enjoyable to work with. Clients trusted us because there was no second-guessing, no hidden agenda.   

That trust didn’t come from a training session. It came from being in meetings together, sharing meals, and seeing how people behaved when things went wrong and when they went right.   

A few months after one of our country managers joined the company, she shared a reflection on LinkedIn about her first six months. At the top of the list, before any professional milestones, she wrote that she had laughed at work more during those six months than at any other point in her career. She went on to describe the work itself, but that first observation stood out. It captured something difficult to quantify: the sense that people felt relaxed enough to be themselves while doing serious work.   

Fun isn’t a perk layered on top of work. It’s a cue that tells people how safe it is to speak, how honest they can be, and how much they belong.   

That familiarity is what makes disagreement productive instead of political.   

Culture as an Operating System   

At this point, culture starts to look less like a set of beliefs and more like an operating system. It governs how quickly decisions move, how honestly people speak, how conflict is handled, and how accountability is shared. The mistake many leaders make is treating culture as something soft and separate from execution. In reality, culture is execution.   

When culture is caught through behavior and reinforced through clear agreement, it stays human. It doesn’t collapse into bureaucracy or drift into ambiguity.   

That balance is harder to maintain as companies scale. But it’s also more necessary than ever. If culture is left unattended, it defaults to confusion. If it’s over-engineered, it loses the very qualities that make people care.   

The work of leadership is holding that tension and choosing, again and again, not to let culture default, but to design it in a way people can catch through everyday behavior, without stripping away what makes it human.