Your Company Culture Is Hiding in Your Processes
Your processes are a mirror of your leadership. If your team is constantly chasing approvals, digging for the right version of a doc, or unclear on who owns what, that isn’t their own shortcomings. It’s just a reflection of how you’re choosing to run the business.
And make no mistake: your team notices. People don’t trust leaders who ignore the chaos, or leaders who don’t seem to value how the day-to-day work gets done. Respect is built in the details, specifically in the systems that govern the work.
Mission statements and values decks don’t define culture. The way work gets done does. If you want to know your true company culture, don’t look at the all-hands slides or the custom Slack emojis — look at your processes!
Process ≠ Restriction. Process = Respect.
A clear process doesn’t hem people in; it gives them a map. When everyone follows their own route, the most reliable result isn’t innovation, it’s duplication and confusion.
Processes tell your team: we respect your time enough not to make you reinvent the wheel every week. Chaos masquerading as “flexibility” tells them the opposite: your time is expendable, and you’re on your own.
If Everyone Owns It, No One Owns It
When a process has no owner, it has no accountability. Lessons go unlearned, fixes never surface, and frustration piles up.
“Shared ownership” usually means no ownership at all. The fix is simple: assign an owner. Sometimes two, but only if their responsibilities are clearly divided. Ownership isn’t about control or ego, it’s about accountability, recognition, and making sure the process keeps improving.
When you dodge the responsibility of assigning ownership, the message is clear: you don’t care enough to make the system better.
Stop Making People Chase. It’s Demoralizing.
Few things drain morale faster than chasing leaders (or each other) for resources, approvals, or updates.
Chasing says: your time doesn’t matter as much as mine does. It’s exhausting, it’s disrespectful, and it slows everything down.
The fix isn’t “just be better about responding.” The fix is to design systems that make chasing unnecessary:
Async approvals with checkboxes and automatic notifications.
Automated reminders for overdue sign-offs.
Clear, lightweight pathways for delivering feedback and approvals.
Why would you want people stuck waiting around for permission when they could be moving your business forward?
“Managing Up” Isn’t a Culture. It’s a Coping Mechanism.
Some leaders (especially in startup culture) treat “managing up” as a badge of honor. Employees are expected to nag, nudge, or organize their boss’s work.
Here’s the problem: outside of roles specifically built for it (like Executive Assistants or Chiefs of Staff), expecting everyone to manage up actually signals weak leadership. It erodes trust and makes you look disorganized.
Managing up should be a specialty, not a company-wide survival skill.
Trust Is Built in the Smallest Details
If you want your team to trust you, start with the basics:
Give them access (password managers, shared resources, updated SOPs).
Create resources: don’t gatekeep knowledge, don’t make people guess.
Keep processes current so no one has to wonder if they’re using the wrong version.
Your team members are organized and meticulous in their own work. If your SOPs are sloppy or outdated, why should they see you as a competent leader worth following?
Process Debt Always Comes Due
The longer you avoid creating a process, the harder it becomes to fix later. What could have been one clear SOP turns into months of untangling shadow systems, old habits, and worst of all: workarounds.
That’s process debt, and like technical debt, it compounds fast. When you let it pile up, you’re telling your team you’d rather keep living with chaos than do the work of fixing it. And they notice.
Good Processes Kill the Bad Ambiguity
Ambiguity is inevitable in a growing business: markets shift, priorities change, experiments flop. Good teams can thrive in that kind of uncertainty. But wasting energy on avoidable ambiguity — like chasing down approvals or guessing which doc is real — isn’t resilience, it’s dysfunction.
Clear processes kill the bad ambiguity so your team has energy for the real unknowns that come with growth.
The Bottom Line
Your processes are your culture. If they’re chaotic, your leadership looks chaotic. If they’re careless, your team assumes you don’t care. Respect your team’s time. Assign ownership. Kill chasing. Stop expecting everyone to manage up. Show trust in the details.
When you govern the work with clear processes, you don’t just keep things organized — you prove to your team that you deserve their trust.
Want help designing processes that build trust instead of chaos? I’d love to help!