How Leaders Build Scalable Culture By Engineering Systems for Healthy Debate

Scaling a startup is hard, but scaling its culture is a different challenge entirely. It means making that culture measurable, maintainable, and scalable from day one. A common first sign of cultural strain isn’t loud conflict, but quiet withdrawal. Too often, this disengagement is misdiagnosed as an individual issue, not a systemic breakdown. Culture doesn’t scale by accident. It has to be built.

Michael Franco has over 12 years of experience advising startups and enterprise teams. As the Founder and Chief People Strategist of Quokka Hub, he uses people analytics to inform HR strategy, helping clients lift retention and engagement. His work is built on a core belief: to scale a business, you must first systematize its culture.

“Every people problem is a systems problem. Your people systems are there to catch when someone is having a bad day, and if those systems aren’t in place from day one, you won’t see the warning signs until it’s too late,” says Franco. A well-designed system does more than just manage workflow. It helps leaders spot the signs of cultural strain. One of the biggest is a lack of feedback. Quiet compliance often stems from the human cost of high-pressure growth, as employees stop disagreeing with leadership, no longer volunteer ideas, and retreat into bare-minimum effort.

• The sound of silence: When a culture erodes, it often takes productive disagreement with it. “Disengagement isn’t just that people aren’t doing things, it’s that they’re doing the bare minimum. They’re no longer volunteering for additional work or bringing ideas. And what’s most important is they stop disagreeing with you,” says Franco. “When you are a small team, people will openly challenge a bad marketing decision. But when you scale and lose that culture, you stop getting disagreement. When the team stops advising on the business, you know you have a problem.”

This cultural breakdown is a predictable outcome of the transition from startup to scale-up. The multi-hat, all-in mentality of the early days gives way to needed specialization, which can lead to silos. Maintaining company culture during this hypergrowth phase becomes a common challenge for any young company.

• From hats to hurdles: As teams specialize, they risk losing sight of the big picture, which can cause the informal culture to fracture. “In a startup, everybody on the team wears multiple hats and enjoys having a view of the overall business. As you scale, people have to specialize, which gives them less time to break into other silos. That causes culture breaks. You’re no longer seeing the big picture, you’re just seeing your business, and your business feels like the most important one,” says Franco. “That’s the siloed effect. For example, the sales team thinks they’re the most important team, and they forget to talk to the product team to learn about new things they can sell.”

• An antidote to silos: To counter this, Franco explains that systems should be designed to engineer serendipity and break down departmental walls. He recommends creating opportunities for informal connection that move beyond rigid, mandatory, all-hands meetings. Some modern leaders are also leaning into this kind of unstructured time to foster the cross-functional relationships that silos can weaken. “The system is about creating touchpoints that break down silos. This means creating opportunities for coffee chats or open hours with no agenda, where a team like sales can just hang out and be available for anyone who wants to chat about what’s going on,” says Franco.

• Rethinking the ritual: The same systems-thinking applies to formal communication. Franco recommends reinventing large meetings to keep the startup energy alive and prevent them from becoming stale corporate rituals. This elevates meetings from predictable data dumps to engaging, focused conversations designed to keep people on their toes. “Instead of the typical, once-a-quarter all-hands meeting that covers everything, make them more impromptu and focused. One month, you can chat about accomplishments. The next month, you can talk about future goals. This keeps the conversations fresh and engaging, avoiding the stale, corporate feeling of simply reporting quarterly numbers,” advises Franco.

Beyond informal chats and fresh meetings, Franco recommends a specific, counter-intuitive rule to address the silence of disengagement. By engineering psychological safety into formal touchpoints, leaders can reverse the tendency for team members to withhold opinions. It’s a simple change that challenges traditional, top-down communication and redefine leadership norms.

• Flip the script: “When a company is small, everybody talks about everything. As it grows, that becomes harder. One rule to fix this should be that the less-senior person always speaks first,” says Franco. “This ensures they’re not worried about contradicting anything that anybody else has already said. They get to speak their mind, and over time, they will get more comfortable doing so because they know they’ll be backed by leadership.”

But a framework is only as good as the people who execute it. Franco emphasizes that this model of empowerment needs to be paired with clear accountability to be effective and prevent decision-making deadlock. These systems require investing in people long before scaling, making sure everyone understands the vision, values, and culture behind decisions.

• Everyone’s a leader: Universal leadership training creates a shared understanding that makes every framework more effective, but it doesn’t eliminate the need for clear ownership, according to Franco. “Leadership development should be for everybody, whether you want to be a manager or not. When the whole team is trained, even non-leaders learn to recognize what good leadership is. This makes any framework you choose more effective because people understand the reasoning behind the decisions being made,” says Franco. “That said, you do need somebody who has direct ownership at the end of the day. Otherwise, you can have a deadlock with no one to make the final decision.”

Combining smart frameworks with universal training creates a resilient cultural foundation, Franco argues. Investing in systems that empower productive disagreement fosters a shared understanding and a common language across the organization. That common language helps transform culture from a statement on the wall into a lived, daily reality, where the silence of disengagement is replaced by healthy, rational dialogue.

“When even the most junior person understands the company’s leadership philosophy because they’ve been given the training, their feedback transforms. They can approach a leader, acknowledge the reasoning behind a decision, and then productively explain why they disagree. That disagreement is now rational and productive because it connects with the leader on a strategic level,” Franco concludes. “This is what gives everybody a common language. You get a common language, and you’re practicing the culture in real time.”