UpTrajectory Review
Marcel Schwantes argues that company culture lives in the stories and rituals your people repeat. The piece frames culture not as a mission statement on a wall but as the narratives employees tell about what happened here and the ceremonies they keep. For a small-business operator, this reframing matters because it moves culture from an abstraction to a practice you can shape daily. You do not need a chief people officer or a budget for offsites. You need attention to what gets told, what gets celebrated, and what gets repeated when you are not in the room.
Why this matters to you: small teams amplify every story. A founder who closes on Friday to share a customer win, or who starts each Monday with a two-minute ritual of thanks, sets the tone faster than any policy manual. Your people watch what you repeat, not what you announce. In a five-person shop, one story about a founder skipping a promised bonus can undo a year of values talk. In a fifty-person shop, the same story becomes folklore. You are always broadcasting culture, even when you think you are just running the business.
What is new here is the emphasis on repetition as the mechanism. Many leaders treat culture as a launch event; Schwantes treats it as a habit. We agree. The under-reported point is that rituals need not be grand. A consistent question at standup, a story told at onboarding, or a closing tradition can carry more weight than a values poster. The skeptical read is that rituals can harden into empty theater if the underlying behavior does not match. A Friday win-share rings hollow when the week included a layoff handled coldly. Rituals work only when they reflect reality.
Second-order effects: stories and rituals scale unevenly. As you grow, the founder's voice fades and middle managers become the keepers of meaning. If they do not carry the rituals forward, culture fragments into departmental dialects. The cost of neglect shows up in turnover, disengagement, and a brand that feels hollow to customers who sense the gap between promise and practice. Hiring gets harder too, because candidates now interview you by asking current employees what it is really like. Your stories precede you.
What to watch next: track which stories new hires tell after ninety days. If they repeat the ones you want, your rituals work. If they tell stories about confusion or broken promises, your culture is drifting. Act by choosing one ritual to protect this quarter and one story to retire. Write down the three stories you want repeated about your company, then design one small ritual that reinforces each. Keep it simple, keep it weekly, and keep it honest. Culture follows what you repeat.
“Why culture lives in the stories and rituals your people repeat.” — Inc. Magazine
Takeaway: Write down the three stories you want repeated about your company, then design one small weekly ritual that reinforces each.
Excerpt from the original — Inc. Magazine
Why culture lives in the stories and rituals your people repeat.