Organisational culture: what it is, the types, and how it changes in a growing company

Organisational culture is the pattern of behaviour a company repeats whenever it has to decide something: who decides, what can be said out loud, what gets corrected and what gets let through. It is not the statement on the wall or the founder's speech at the summer party; it is the set of decisions everyone in the company has already watched being made.

For anyone running a company of twenty to three hundred people, that has an uncomfortable consequence. Culture does not change through an internal announcement, an away day, or a new set of values. It changes when the decisions people can observe change.

What organisational culture is, in practice

Every company has two cultures: the stated one and the practised one. The stated culture lives in the values page and the onboarding deck. The practised one lives in what happened the last time a strong salesperson treated the team badly, and in who got the promotion when two people were equally competent.

People learn the practised culture within weeks, and nobody teaches it to them. They watch three things: who gets promoted, what goes unremarked, and what makes a manager change their mind. That is why a company can hold an immaculate values document alongside a culture of quiet fear, of individual heroics, or of meetings where nobody disagrees.

A company culture is the sum of the decisions already taken in front of its people. Everything else is intention.

In a small company, culture travels by contact: people watch the founder decide and copy what they see. Past thirty or forty people that stops working, because most of the company is no longer in the room. From then on culture is carried by middle managers and by the systems around them, or it is not carried at all.

Company culture and climate: the difference that matters

Culture and climate get used interchangeably, and they are not the same thing. Climate is the mood of the organisation this quarter: how people feel about their workload, their manager, and how clear their objectives are. It is measured with a survey and it moves quickly, often for reasons that have nothing to do with culture.

Culture is slower and deeper. It is what would still be true if half the team were replaced tomorrow, because it is written into how decisions get made. A good climate can mask a fragile culture: contented teams in a company where nobody tells the truth about a delivery date until it is too late. Treat the climate survey as a thermometer, not a diagnosis.

Four types of organisational culture

The academic models of types of organisational culture, of which the Competing Values Framework is the best known, give a leadership team shared language, as long as they do not become a label. No company is a pure type, and most companies of this size run different cultures in different departments. The practical way to recognise yours is to look at three things: how decisions get made, how conflict is handled, and what gets rewarded.

Each of these has a real advantage and a bill attached. The common mistake is not having the wrong culture; it is keeping one that no longer matches the size of the company. Founder-carried works beautifully at fifteen people and jams at a hundred. The results-first culture that grew the company is the same one that loses good managers once there are teams to look after.

A ten-minute diagnostic for a CEO

These questions do not measure opinions, they measure behaviour that has already happened. Answering them honestly takes ten minutes and tells you more than a survey.

1. In the last promotion, did the best results win, or the results obtained the way the company says it values?
2. At the last leadership meeting, did anyone disagree with the founder out loud, and what happened to them afterwards?
3. When a project last slipped, how long passed between the team knowing and the leadership team knowing?
4. When was someone last corrected for how they treated colleagues rather than for what they delivered?
5. Of the people who left in the last twelve months, how many did the company want to keep?
6. How many of last week's decisions needed your approval for a reason that survives being said out loud?
7. In a team meeting, who speaks first, and who has never spoken at all?
8. To learn what is expected of them to move up, can someone look it up, or must they ask their manager?
9. What was the last bad result discussed openly across the company, with its name and its cause?
10. What would a manager joining tomorrow learn about this company by watching only the next three meetings?

How culture changes: three levers

Culture changes where it is carried. Three levers are within reach of any leadership team, and none of them needs a budget. What they need is consistency over a few months, and a willingness to pay a visible price at least once.

Who gets promoted. The most closely read signal inside a company, and the hardest to contradict with words. Take the shape of the decision: two candidates for a team lead role, one with stronger numbers and a trail of burnt-out colleagues, the other with solid numbers and three people he has visibly developed. Choosing the second and saying publicly why teaches more than any values session. Choosing the first teaches something too, and faster.

What gets decided in the open. Closed cultures are rarely built in bad faith; they form because the decisions that matter drift into corridor conversations and email. A concrete change: quarterly priorities that used to be agreed between the CEO and each director separately are now set in one meeting, with written criteria and an explicit list of what did not make the cut. Within two quarters, teams stop negotiating priorities through influence, because influence has stopped working.

What managers do in one-to-ones. This is where culture reaches an individual employee, or fails to. A small example: replacing "is everything OK?" with two fixed questions, asked by every manager, every week. What blocked you this week, and is there anything I should know that I do not know yet? When fifteen managers ask the same two questions, problems arrive earlier, and arriving early with a problem stops being risky.

None of these shows an effect next month. All of them show one next quarter, if they are repeated on the occasions when repeating them is inconvenient. The sign that it is working is unglamorous: people start citing criteria instead of citing people.

Common questions about organisational culture

What is organisational culture?

It is the set of shared behaviours and assumptions that determine how a company decides, communicates and treats people day to day. In practice it is what remains when you take away everything written down: who gets promoted, what is tolerated, what makes someone change their mind in a meeting. Every company has one, whether or not anyone designed it.

Culture and climate: what is the difference?

Climate is how people feel about working here right now, and it shifts within weeks as workload, managers or structure change. Culture is how the company decides and behaves in a stable way, and it shifts over quarters and years. Climate is measured with a survey; culture is observed in decisions.

How do you change a company's culture?

By changing visible decisions and repeating them: align promotion criteria with the behaviours the company says it values, move decisions that were being taken privately into a shared meeting with written criteria, and give managers two or three fixed questions for their one-to-ones. An internal campaign without those three things changes nothing, and it spends the credibility you will need for the second attempt.

Where to start

The order that works is unremarkable. First understand the culture you have today, with evidence rather than adjectives. Then choose two or three behaviours the company is willing to defend when defending them costs something. Only then write anything down. Writing first is the most common sequence and the most expensive in credibility.

This is the substance of culture and values work: translating the culture a company wants into decisions its managers can actually take. If the next step is turning values into observable behaviour, start with values and behaviours that change decisions. If the culture still depends on one person being in the room, start with reducing founder dependency.