Hiring and Culture

Who enters the system and what behavior propagates once they do

Organizations are shaped less by who enters the system and what behaviors get reinforced once they do.

Hiring and culture are often treated as separate conversations. In practice, they are deeply intertwined. Hiring determines what capabilities, instincts, and values enter an organization. Culture determines which of those behaviors compound over time, which get suppressed, and which become normalized.

Together, they shape the organization’s trajectory.

Over the course of my career, I’ve spent a lot of time building and working within teams across science, engineering, operations, policy, and climate. Some of the strongest teams I’ve been part of operated with an unusual level of alignment. People trusted one another. Priorities were clear. Disagreement sharpened thinking rather than fragmenting the group.

And importantly, those environments were intentional. The strongest organizations and teams are systems that intentionally reinforce the kinds of behaviors, relationships, and decision-making structures that allow good work to compound under pressure.

Hiring for Technical Excellence and Cultural Add

A lot of organizations reduce hiring down to credentials, resumes, or narrow definitions of expertise. And to be clear, technical excellence matters a lot.

However, over time, I’ve become less convinced that technical skill alone predicts whether someone will strengthen an organization.

Startups, climate organizations, research teams, and emerging technology spaces operate in environments where priorities, constraints, and information change rapidly. Teams need people who can reason clearly when conditions are ambiguous, timelines compress and change, and information is incomplete.

The best hires I’ve worked with were people who combined deep technical expertise with adaptability, judgment, and intellectual flexibility.

In particular, people who could reason from fundamentals (‘first principles’) rather than relying entirely on precedent, could navigate incomplete information and make informed enough decisions, could update their thinking as new evidence emerged, and could collaborate effectively without needing perfect clarity at every moment.

One phrase I’ve come back to repeatedly is “strong opinions, loosely held.”

Because uncertainty requires people who can advocate clearly while remaining adaptable enough to change their minds.

Why “Culture Fit” Often Fails

I’ve also become increasingly skeptical of the phrase “culture fit.” It often becomes shorthand for familiarity: people who communicate similarly, think similarly, share similar backgrounds, or make the existing team feel comfortable.

While interpersonal cohesion matters, teams built entirely around similarity tend to become fragile quickly. They lose perspective diversity, blind spots compound, and groupthink becomes harder to interrupt.

The strongest teams I’ve worked with brought together people who thought differently, challenged embedded assumptions, and approached problems uniquely.

What mattered was the shared commitment to how the organization operated.

This is why I think “cultural add” is usually a healthier framing than “culture fit.” Instead of “does this person resemble the existing organization?” the framing becomes “what does this person strengthen inside the organization?”

Do they bring intellectual curiosity?

Adaptability?

Emotional steadiness?

Collaborative instincts?

Ownership mentality?

The ability to navigate disagreement productively?

Teams become stronger when people expand the system’s capability.

Culture Is Reinforced Behavior

One of the biggest mistakes organizations make is assuming culture is primarily defined by value statements, branding exercises, or internal messaging.

Culture is the set of behaviors organizations consistently reward, tolerate, reinforce, and punish.

If collaboration is praised publicly but promotions reward individual visibility, people learn very quickly that collaboration is reputational and competition is operational. If accountability exists inconsistently, resentment accumulates unevenly across teams. If leaders preach sustainability while rewarding constant overwork, urgency becomes normalized regardless of official values.

And founders and leadership teams often underestimate how much influence they have over this process.

Early organizational culture is frequently a mix of two things: the values founders already embody, and the values they aspire to embody. That distinction matters because aspirational values only become real when leadership consistently practices them operationally.

You can’t embed what you don’t have.

I’ve seen this in myself too. There were periods where my instinct toward rigor and keeping optionality open unintentionally created ambiguity. What felt to me like thoughtful iteration felt to others like shifting priorities. Over time, I’ve realized organizations inherit not just a leader’s strengths, but also their unresolved tendencies. Things like indecision, conflict avoidance, urgency, perfectionism, emotional reactivity, micromanagement. Those patterns propagate operationally far faster than most leaders realize.

If leadership avoids difficult conversations, the organization learns avoidance. If leadership reacts emotionally to disagreement, people stop surfacing problems early. If leadership says feedback matters but becomes defensive when receiving it, feedback culture quietly collapses beneath the surface.

Teams inherit unresolved founder and leadership dynamics surprisingly quickly. And once behavioral norms stabilize, they become difficult to unwind.

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Over time, organizations become behavioral amplifiers. The traits they reward compound. The tensions they avoid spread quietly through the system. And culture becomes the thing people experience every day in meetings, decisions, conflict, accountability, and trust.

Hiring determines what enters the organization. Culture determines what survives long enough to propagate.

Next time, we’ll explore how organizations maintain focus as teams grow and priorities compete: the relationship between clarity, accountability, care, and progress.