Last year, a coach I deeply respect told me a story I often keep going back to whenever the topic of culture comes up.
For several years, she had worked with a founding CEO whose journey is the kind that gets told at start-up conferences. She bootstrapped the company from nothing and, over a decade, built it into a team of three hundred people. The people who had been there through the early grind had stayed with her. They were loyal, capable, and proud of what they had built together.
One Sunday, the company held a lunch for employees and their families. Somewhere in the middle of that easy, warm afternoon, the founder learned in passing that her CTO of nine years had never taken a family holiday.
The realisation came in layers. First came the shock. Then a harder question: why had she organised this lunch on a Sunday at all? The one day she had set aside to honour her people’s families had been carved out of the only time those families had left in the week.
Nobody had told her CTO not to take a holiday, and no policy discouraged it. In the early years she had worked every hour there was, because survival demanded it. The company survived, and the habit stayed on long after the need for it had passed.
She had been the mould, and the organisation had taken its shape around her.
Within a month, she planned a proper holiday for herself. Within two, she began leaving the office between 4:30 and 5:00 in the evening, deliberately, where people could see her go.
What the research says
Her story is far more common than it should be.
In a study titled Exhausted, but Unable to Disconnect, researchers Liuba Belkin, William Becker and Samantha Conroy examined after-hours email. They found that employees were worn down by the anticipatory stress of expecting to reply, over and above the time they actually spent on email. The study was the first to identify these email expectations as a job stressor, alongside established ones like heavy workload, interpersonal conflict and time pressure. The CTO in this story was responding to exactly that kind of unwritten expectation, one he had absorbed from years of watching his founder.
Leaders are often the offenders. A US survey of more than 7,000 workers by Project Time Off found that 61% of senior managers left vacation time unused, compared with 52% of non-managers. The report’s authors saw this gap as a failure of communication from the top. Whatever a leader says about rest, their calendar says more.
Put the two together and you have the mechanism behind “culture starts on day zero.” Founders rarely sit down on their first day and design a culture. They work, and the people around them take note of how they work. Those early habits become the expectations everyone else carries, often for years.
Culture is survival habits nobody retired
Nothing in this story was anyone’s fault. The grind was probably necessary in the early years. Most companies that make it through their first few years do so because someone refused to stop.
The trouble is that habits that help a company survive are rarely the ones that help it thrive, and nobody formally retires them. They pass from the founder to the first team, and from the first team to everyone who follows. Ten years and three hundred people later, an instinct from year one has quietly become “just how we work.”
The same is true for a new CEO taking over an established business. Your day zero is the day you arrive.
Where to start
List the survival habits you’re still running.
What did you do to get through the hard years that you are still doing, and that others are now copying? Be specific: the late replies, the weekend calls, the problems you fix yourself instead of letting others solve them.
Change what people see before you change what the policy says.
The founder in this story skipped the wellbeing programme and the memo. She understood that nobody would believe a message about rest from a leader who didn’t rest, so she changed what people could watch her do.
Check on the people who’ve been there longest.
Your earliest team carries the original culture most deeply, and they are often the last to ask for anything. The CTO never complained, which is exactly why nobody noticed.
Find someone to hold up the mirror.
It took a family lunch and a chance conversation for this founder to see what a decade had built. Most leaders can’t see their own shadow without help. A coach, a trusted peer, or an honest colleague can help you see it years sooner.
The part I find hopeful
Rebuilding the company was never required. The founder went on holiday, left the office at five, and let people see her do it. Culture starts on day zero, and any day you notice what you’re teaching can be a new one. Our work at The Core Questin, often involves both, holding up the mirror, and also helping you shape the next chapter. We would love to chat if you’re looking for some help.
