Brand is culture
Culture is like a living, breathing forest ecosystem.
When you look at a thriving forest from above, you instantly recognize what kind of forest it is—tropical rainforest, redwood grove, arid desert canyon. Each has a distinct identity, just like a brand. But that identity isn’t created by any single tree or plant. It’s the result of an intricate web of life—soil, roots, water, fungi, animals—all working together, sometimes unseen, to create the forest’s unique character.
Culture works the same way.
It’s always present, shaping everything your company produces, whether you actively cultivate it or passively and apathetically let it exist.
Culture Is Felt
Culture isn’t just a mission statement or a set of corporate values written down somewhere. It’s not free snacks in the break room, a foosball table, or a happy hour on Fridays. Those perks can be nice, but they don’t build culture—they just create the illusion of it.
Culture is felt, like the humidity in the air—it surrounds you, but you can't see it. It’s sensed in the way people collaborate, make decisions, communicate, and show up every day.
And make no mistake—everyone is sensing it.
Culture determines how people approach their work:
Do they show up with innovation or mediocrity?
Do they feel safe to bring their best ideas forward, or do they play it safe?
Are they energized and aligned, or are they just going through the motions?
Just like the health of a forest determines the kind of life it can sustain, the strength of your culture determines the kind of brand you build.
Culture Is Leadership’s Responsibility
The most vibrant ecosystems have balance—predators and prey, roots and canopies, decay and renewal. When something goes out of balance, the entire system suffers. The same is true for culture.
If only one leader is trying to cultivate a strong culture while others treat it as an afterthought, the organization will struggle with inconsistency. It’s like introducing a foreign species into a delicate ecosystem—at first, it might seem manageable, but over time, it competes with what’s already there, causing the entire system to suffer. When two separate ecosystems try to coexist in conflict, the one with the most authority will eventually dominate. Culture needs to be the primary responsibility of senior leadership—not just one person, but the entire leadership team. If the senior leader, the one who everyone looks to when it comes to the highest level of decision-making, does not actively make culture design their responsibility, then it will likely suffer an identity crisis at some point.
And because culture isn’t just a set of words—it’s who you are. It’s the 'why' behind the actions you take, the stories you tell to reinforce your identity and leaders need to design it the same way they would design a product.
Reflection of Your Culture
If you care about your brand, you have to care deeply about your culture.
The feeling customers get when they interact with your brand? That comes from your culture.
The experience of your product or service? A reflection of the culture that built it.
The trust you build in the market? It starts with the trust and alignment within your team.
So, you need to ask yourself:
What do you want your brand to be known for?
What is the feeling you want customers to have when they engage with your brand?
Does your internal culture actively reinforce that experience?
Culture Audit
To get clear on your culture, you have to assess where it stands today. Here are some key questions to evaluate:
Note: This exercise is only as helpful as you and your team are honest about the current reality. Not what you would like it to be, but what’s really there. If your team is already operating out of fear, your results are gonna be skewed. The safer you can make the team feel the more honest they will be in the clear reality will become.
What gets celebrated in your company? What wins are recognized and rewarded?
What gets tolerated? What behaviors, even if misaligned, are allowed to persist?
What gets shut down? Are there things people are afraid to speak up about?
How do people feel about leadership? Do they trust leadership to make decisions in alignment with the company’s stated values?
How does the company handle failure? Is it a learning opportunity or a source of fear & punishment?
Your answers will reveal a lot about the current state of your culture.
Bringing It All to the Table
After completing the culture audit, the next step is to sit down as a team—including employees at all levels—and explore the results together. It is the leadership's responsibility to create a space for vulnerability, empathy, and deep listening. Remember, you cannot transform what you're not aware of, and more than likely, there's a lot you're not aware of.
This process isn’t about immediately solving problems but about surfacing reality. When people feel truly seen, heard, and understood, the real work of culture-building can begin. Without this openness, conflicting ecosystems will continue to exist within the organization, making alignment and growth impossible.
Designing Culture
Now, let’s shape the culture intentionally. Start by defining:
1. Core Values (3-4 max)
These should be real, not just words that sound good. Values should reflect the behaviors that define how work gets done.
Here is a real-world example of what it could look like to build out your core values along with the behaviors. When we built out these core values, we actually gathered the team and did an exercise to identify behaviors that we could all agree were necessary for that core value to be alive.
What’s important about this is that we created shared ownership with the core team from the beginning. It wasn’t something just handed down to them—they were a part of shaping it. As new people joined the team, they could immediately recognize that there was something different about us. And as we worked alongside other brands, partners, and agencies, they too saw that there was something radically different about our team compared to others they had worked with.
The culture was contagious. Everyone wanted to be around it, and quite frankly, people were asking how they could be a part of it.
Being this clear about who you are is vital—not just for culture but for identifying and attracting the people who truly belong.
For each value, work with your team to define key behaviors that brings it to life.
Example: If “Radical Transparency” is a core value, a key behavior might be “We share honest feedback in real time rather than waiting for formal reviews.”
Example: If “Obsess Over the Customer” is a value, a behavior might be “Every major product decision must include direct customer feedback.”
2. Making Values Actionable
Culture isn’t just about words—it’s about actions. Embed core values into:
Hiring: Do your interview questions assess for cultural fit and alignment with values?
Performance Reviews: Are values part of how success is measured?
Product Development: Do teams ask, “Does this align with our core values?” before launching?
Internal Communication: Are leadership and team meetings reinforcing cultural values?
3. Clear Culture Foundations
Beyond values, a strong culture thrives on clear expectations for how people interact and work together. Consider defining:
Clear Communication Norms: Establish guidelines for how teams communicate, including expectations around responsiveness, transparency, and feedback.
Defined Decision-Making Processes: Clarify how decisions are made, who has authority, and how different perspectives are considered to prevent bottlenecks and confusion.
Psychological Safety Practices: Create an environment where employees feel safe to speak up, share ideas, and make mistakes without fear of punishment.
Onboarding & Cultural Immersion: Ensure new employees are introduced to cultural expectations early, making them feel included and aligned from day one.
Recognition & Reinforcement Mechanisms: Build formal and informal ways to celebrate behaviors that align with company culture, reinforcing key values in action.
4. Creating a Culture Deck
A culture deck is a powerful tool to visually and simply communicate who you are as a company. This document doesn’t have to be overly complex—it should fit the scale and nature of your brand. A great example is the culture handbook Duolingo recently released, but yours can be as simple or as detailed as necessary.
The culture deck isn’t just a document—it’s a tool that anchors your team in shared mission, vision, and values. It should be used in training, referenced in meetings, and serve as a guiding framework for decision-making. Every choice made at the senior leadership level—and all the way down—should align with these values. If those values start to erode, the entire ecosystem weakens. Eventually, the company drifts from its mission, the people you set out to serve feel the shift, and even the products themselves will reflect that misalignment. Your team, your customers, and your broader community will sense when something is off.
5. Rituals
Just as a forest relies on a continuous flow of natural elements to sustain life, your culture requires consistent, intentional actions to keep it vibrant and growing. Consider:
Weekly: A “Culture Check” in team meetings to call out examples of values in action. The leader should take the lead in highlighting these examples, but culture truly starts to grow when everyone is empowered to recognize and appreciate each other’s contributions. Creating space for team members to express gratitude and acknowledge each other’s work is crucial. For example, if transparency is a core value, a team member might share a situation where open communication helped resolve an issue more effectively.
Monthly: Deep dives into how teams are living (or not living) the values, creating space for the team to speak up and highlight areas where alignment with those values could be improved.
Quarterly: Instead of just reviewing KPIs, take a qualitative approach by assessing how well team members are growing in the core values. Values aren't rigid pillars—they are practices that develop over time. Evaluating behaviors that reflect these values helps determine whether individuals are growing, stagnant, or struggling. This shouldn’t be binary but rather a discussion of progress. Team members complete a self-evaluation, while leaders conduct their own assessment, then they compare notes. Similarly, leaders receive feedback from their teams on how they are developing in these core values.
One of the most important investments you can make in your team is bringing in outside training to help develop these core values. This should never be an afterthought. Get clear about the behaviors that need investment and identify the right experts who can help your team grow.
Just remember—if a new framework or process is introduced, your team needs time to absorb and put it into practice. That means avoiding an overemphasis on pure productivity and output. What you put in is what you get out. If you’re always squeezing for productivity and not investing in your team, there won’t be much capacity left for them to practice these values, let alone grow in them.
Yearly: A full culture audit by the team—how well did the company embody its values? What specific behaviors need further investment? What decisions over the past year did not reflect our values, and why were they made that way? Is there anything in the ecosystem that is starting to compete with our values? Identifying these challenges is key to ensuring long-term cultural integrity.
If you can’t create enough space in your meetings, your week, your month, and your year to build cultural rituals, then you aren’t truly building culture. Culture is just as important as any product—without it, the ecosystem will become unbalanced.
Nurture It
A company’s culture is like a forest ecosystem—either thriving and full of life or neglected and slowly deteriorating. The best cultures don’t just survive; they flourish, and naturally expand because they are actively nurtured, shaped, and reinforced.
And just like a forest, when the culture is strong, it creates something unmistakable—an identity, a presence, a brand that people recognize and trust.
If your company isn’t where you want it to be, don’t just focus on the brand—focus on the culture. A strong, aligned culture will naturally produce a brand that is consistent, compelling, and powerful.
Because at the end of the day, your brand is what people feel. And what they experience starts with what you cultivate internally.
