Culture Architect: Values to Behaviors
Turn values into behaviors wired into hiring, reviews, promotions, and rituals, and see how culture breaks near 10, 50, and 150 people.
Before & after
Same prompt, same agent — the only difference is the skill.
Growing from 12 to 60 people is a significant transition, and culture challenges are very common at this stage. Here are some things to think about: **Define your values explicitly.** At 12 people, culture is transmitted by osmosis. At 60, it needs to be written down. **Communicate more than feels necessary.** What was obvious in a small team becomes invisible as you scale. **Empower middle management.** You likely have managers now who need to carry culture forward. **Create rituals.** All-hands meetings, team retros, and onboarding programs help reinforce culture. **Listen to your team.** Run engagement surveys or skip-levels to understand what's actually happening. Culture isn't a poster on the wall — it's the behaviors you reward and tolerate. What specific symptoms are you seeing?
CULTURE DIAGNOSIS — 12 → 60
WHAT ACTUALLY BROKE
Nothing broke. At 12, culture transmitted by proximity — everyone watched
the founders decide. At 60, most people have never seen a founder make a
decision. The transmission mechanism disappeared; the culture didn't.
That distinction decides the fix: you need mechanisms, not values.
CULTURE HEALTH — assess these six before changing anything
1. Can a random employee name a decision made last month and why?
2. Do managers say no using a value, or using "leadership decided"?
3. What behavior got someone promoted most recently?
4. What behavior got tolerated that shouldn't have been?
5. Does onboarding transmit norms, or just tools and logins?
6. Where do the 12-person originals sit relative to the other 48?
Q3 and Q4 are the real diagnostic. Whatever you promoted and whatever you
tolerated IS your culture — the values doc is a hypothesis about it.
VALUES → BEHAVIORS (the step everyone skips)
A value nobody can violate isn't a value.
"Move fast" — unfalsifiable, delete it
BEHAVIOR: "Ship the reversible decision without consensus.
Escalate only the irreversible ones."
COSTS US: Some rework. We accept that.
VIOLATION: Waiting a week for sign-off on a feature flag.
Write all of them this way. If you can't name what a value costs you,
it isn't operational — it's decoration.
RITUALS FOR THIS STAGE — 60 needs different ones than 12
Weekly Decision log, public. Fixes Q1 directly. Highest leverage
single change on this page.
Biweekly Manager forum — culture now transmits through them, not you
Monthly All-hands with one real tradeoff explained, not just metrics
Quarterly Behavior-based review, not just outcomes
Drop: the all-team lunch that worked at 12 and is now logistics.
CULTURE CODE
Write it after the assessment, not before. A code that describes an
aspiration nobody recognizes does active damage — it teaches 60 people
that the written word and the real place are different.
FIRST MOVE
Start the decision log this week. It's the cheapest thing here and it
addresses the actual failure: not values drift, transmission loss.About this skill
Values only matter when they change who gets hired, promoted, and let go. This skill turns your values into behaviors and wires them into the systems that shape how people actually act.
What it does
- Extracts values from real decisions and tests each one for a real tradeoff
- Writes observable behaviors and anti-behaviors for every value
- Builds structured interview questions and rubrics that screen for values, not likeness
- Audits recent promotions against stated values to find culture debt
- Maps how culture typically breaks around 10, 50, and 150 people, and what to put in place first
What you get
A values draft with behaviors, interview questions, and rituals tied to each value, or a culture health check based on your own signals. Stage breakpoints are labeled as rules of thumb.
Best for
Founders and people leaders at 10 to 300 person companies defining values, scaling fast, or merging teams.
SKILL.md preview
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name: culture-architect
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