Janson's Journal | September 2026
The Habit That Becomes Your Culture
“Culture is more than ‘Ooh, is this a nice place to work?’” That’s how Stanford researcher Jennifer Chatman describes the biggest misconception business owners have about culture. Most of us picture it as the nice extras: the holiday party, the gift, the occasional team lunch. But culture isn’t the treat you hand out once a quarter. It’s the system running underneath everything else, whether you built it on purpose or not.
That system also runs whether anyone is paying attention to it or not. Researchers who study this call it a hard management tool rather than a soft one. It is how an organization gets everyone rowing in the same direction, and how people learn what will be rewarded and what will not. That distinction matters heading into year-end. The holiday party, the year-end gift, the new tradition you are considering, none of that builds culture on its own. It only works if it reinforces a system that is already running the other eleven months of the year.
Here is the part that catches most business owners off guard. Culture does not wait for you to design it. It exists in how decisions get made, in how the team talks about clients, in what happens the moment someone makes a mistake. A recent piece on small business culture put it plainly, culture forms whether you planned it or not. Our Dove founders, Beth Bender and Kenda Lister, understood that early. They did not write values on a wall when they built The Dove Agency. They built a habit, decision after decision, of how problems got solved and how people got treated. That habit became the firm we are today.
That same piece lays out what actually builds a healthy version of this from day one, and none of it requires a formal program:
Say what matters out loud, with real examples. A value nobody names is a value nobody shares.
Celebrate wins where the whole team can see them.
Treat mistakes as something to learn from, not hide. A team that hides errors is a team that stops solving them.
Do what you say you will do. A gap between stated values and daily behavior is the fastest way to lose people’s trust.
Take the first days of onboarding seriously. What someone experiences in that window becomes what they believe the company actually is.
At The Dove Agency, that habit shows up in specific places. Each month, our supervisory crew meets to raise what clients, the industry, and our own operations are signaling, while day-to-day collaboration runs continuously across the team in Slack. Wins get celebrated out loud, and corrections happen kindly, with an eye toward learning rather than blame. We strive for exceptionalism, but no one here is expected to be perfect. Hiring looks at fit as much as skill, and onboarding carries that forward from day one, covering our communication standards, our technology protocols, and the ten years of history behind this company. None of it rests on one gesture. It shows up in quarterly gatherings, a purposeful approach to the holidays, and time spent volunteering together as a team.
Size is not required to build culture. A firm of two or three people already has a culture; it is simply smaller and more personal. If you are a solo owner about to bring on your first hire, the moment to decide what you want that culture to be is now, before the role is filled. How will you handle the first mistake? What will you celebrate? What will the two of you say to each other on a hard day? Those early answers become the pattern on which everything else gets built.
If you have not built something like this yet, heading into year-end is a natural place to start. If you already have it, it is a natural place to reinforce it. Culture is rarely won in one big moment. It is built in small, repeated actions, said and shown so consistently that they eventually become automatic. Say what matters to your firm out loud now, then keep saying it.
Sources for Janson’s Journal
Carroll, Glenn & Chatman, Jennifer. “Great Company Culture Is More Than Creating a Nice Place to Work.” Stanford Graduate School of Business Insights, April 2026.
Nario, Manuela. “Company Culture in Small Businesses: How to Build It From Day One.” Bits Kingdom, July 2026.