Leaders who have lived through early days of a startup remember it vividly and fondly: fast decisions, deeply committed teams, real startup learning, and day-to-day momentum building progress. Innovation moved quickly, not because people worked harder, but because the company had little internal politics or friction. This resulted in an easy to maintain bought-in culture. Simply put; everyone was on the same page working towards the same goal.
Sadly, as companies grow, the startup magic fades. We never notice the day it changes—but over time, evolution quietly takes hold, and suddenly the startup era is behind us. Complexity and processes emerge; while many are necessary, the result is the erosion of the elements that made early performance exceptional. Over the years, I’ve seen leaders—much like those searching for the mythical fountain of youth—attempt to revive startup dynamics within maturing teams and institutions.
Over the last 25 years research consistently shows that the performance advantages of startups are not accidental. They are driven by specific, repeatable cultural attributes that enable faster decision-making, tighter feedback loops, and greater innovation. Examples include Edmonson’s studies on psychological safety and its role in accelerating learning and innovation. Lean startup research further reinforces that experimentation-driven cultures outperform planning-heavy ones in environments of uncertainty (Ries; Shepherd et al.). Together, these bodies of work and many others confirm that culture is a critical element of startup performance.
Much like the search for the fountain of youth, a quest to return to the startup days isn’t practical. What IS practical though, is the deliberate cultivation of the behaviors, inspiration and alignment that made that time so effective. The best way to examine this potential is through the lens of a cultural framework. We use DACR, a cultural framework tuned to examine organizations undergoing business transformations.
Startup Cultural Attributes and Performance Impacts
With DACR as a framework, we can objectively examine the key cultural attributes contributing to the startup performance phenomenon. A review of current literature allows us to map cultural attributes to the magical elixir of many young enterprises:
Decision-Making & Direction
Decision making and direction examines who is involved in decisions, the formality of decision processes, and recurring patterns by which decisions are initiated, debated, and finalized. They reveal authority, escalation, and consistency in decision behavior as drivers of speed, accountability, and execution reliability.
Adaptability
Adaptability measures how effectively an organization responds to change, ambiguity, and new information, including tolerance for risk, experimentation, and failure. It distinguishes resilient cultures that learn and adjust quickly from those that default to caution, rigidity, or blame when faced with uncertainty or negative outcomes.
Collaboration
Collaboration characterizes how work is coordinated both within and between teams, including influence modes and informal power patterns that shape how outcomes are actually achieved. It highlights whether collaboration is driven by trust and joint ownership or constrained by silos, avoidance or dominance.
Reinforcement & Feedback
Reinforcement & Feedback evaluates how behaviors are encouraged, rewarded, corrected, or discouraged, with particular focus on psychological safety and transparency. It surfaces whether feedback, recognition, and consequences consistently reinforce desired behaviors or suppress openness and learning.
Cultivating Your Cultural Attributes
The goal of recreating the efficiency of the early days of your company, should not be to recreate early-stage chaos or lack of process, but to amplify positive operating dynamics: fast decisions, rapid learning, deep collaboration, and meaningful reinforcement. We believe that it is about intentionally restoring the cultural attributes that reduce friction, based on where your organization is strong or weak today.
In pursuing this objective, many leaders jump to one-dimensional initiatives (“be more agile,” “empower teams”) without understanding where friction actually lives. Instead, start with a comprehensive cultural framework like DACR or others in the industry to encourage a more comprehensive perspective. Develop a profile of your organization, to understand
- Where decisions stall or demotivate team members with red-tape and onerous decision paths that discourage true ownership
- Where change, learning and improvement are hampered by blockages, real or imagined, or importantly fear of failure and reputation loss
- How collaboration happens in your team and where it breaks down; understand the key collaborators and amplify their efforts with leadership support
- Where opportunities to provide feedback and guidance exist on a regular basis to improve alignment and motivation
Compare this profile to known characteristics of high velocity early-stage organizations, hopefully you have a starting point above, to identify areas of focus. Always remember that cultural traits are interrelated and self-reinforcing, don’t try to adjust individual cultural elements in isolation.
Universal Drivers
While I always advocate for a solid understanding of current state in any transformational plan, I believe there are tactics which can help almost any organization move closer to that startup feel and performance; here are two that I have seen work in practice multiple times over the years.
Build More “Owners”
Most successful startups have multiple or even several key team members who wear the ownership hat, with or without shares. Why do we need these types of team members? How many times have you started a sentence with “Why doesn’t somebody…”, “Why do I have to …”? How frequently did you hear these questions in the initial stages of your business; almost never, because someone was already taking the initiative.
The answer to these questions is to build more owners. Leverage your cultural analysis to realize this objective:
- Refine decision making rules to distribute, where feasible, decision-making rights; remember that clarity is key
- Focus on recognition of positive outcomes and the learning advantage of undesirable results
- Encourage accountability and responsibility for outcomes
- Reinforce and reward demonstrated ownership traits; never, ever feel threatened
- Track your progress using real evidence and outcomes and be patient; cultural change takes time
Walk the Walk
Team members imitate leaders and as a result, the right culture starts with you. Internalize the profile of a startup culture and demonstrate aligned behaviors; start pushing what we call the cultural flywheel:
- Demonstrate and communicate confident decision making and a keen focus on client needs
- Demonstrate flexibility and an ability to pivot; manage and communicate the basis for change to make team members a part of the journey
- Build trust and work with your team instead of them working for you, own success and failure as a group
- Give and receive quality feedback regularly; leverage team perspectives in team course correction
Take Away
High-performance startup cultures excel not because they denounce structure, but because they foster behaviors that drive clarity, clear action, learning and not coincidentally results. Organizations that understand these cultural mechanics can selectively foster startup traits to unlock measurable gains in execution, resilience, and growth.
Properly managed and guided, organizational culture matures from an abstract concept into a lever for sustained outstanding organizational performance.
References
- Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
- Talaulicar, T., Grundei, J., & Werder, A. (2005). Strategic decision making in start-ups: the effect of top management team organization and processes on speed and comprehensiveness.
- Ries, E. (2011). The lean startup: How today’s entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses. New York, NY: Crown Business.
- Lopez Hernandez, A., Fernandez-Mesa, A., Edwards-Schachter, M. (2018). Team collaboration capabilities as a factor in startup success.
- Badriyah, N, Sulaeman, M., Nasrudin Wibowo, S., Anggapratama, R. (2024). The Role of Constructive Conflict Management in Fostering Team Collaboration and Innovation: A Perspective of Transformational Leadership.
- Nussbaum, J., Henning, E., Ostrowski, P., Kanbach, D. (2025). Start(up) with purpose: How goal- and duty-based purpose drive work engagement and performance in startups.
- Girouard, D., Speed as a Habit.
- Polzin, R. (2023). Why Creating a Culture of Feedback is Vital to Business Survival.