Every company talks about culture, but few are truly tested on it.

Founded in 2015, Lifen revolutionizes healthcare communication through innovative technology solutions. Like many startups, we mastered our product faster than we mastered scaling our team while preserving what made us “us”.

We grew from 25 Lifeners to 220 in two years, then economic pressures brought us back to 130. Most companies would have lost their identity in this whirlwind, but each phase taught us what truly mattered : through explosive growth and tough decisions, our culture became our compass.

For candidates considering their next move and HR professionals building resilient organizations, this is my honest account of what works, what doesn't, and why culture might be your most valuable strategic asset.

The Foundation: Define Culture with Intent

Back in 2018, when our CEO, Franck, outlined the ambitious growth objectives for the upcoming years, the strategic question that immediately followed was clear: How do we ensure we recruit the right talent, and how do we guarantee these individuals will collaborate effectively?

His response was straightforward

“They need to align with our values”

The challenge? We had not yet defined our organizational values.

Rather than rushing to create a set of aspirational principles, we made a deliberate strategic decision: we would refrain from defining our culture for the next two years. Instead, we would allow our existing team to organically demonstrate and shape it through their actions.

Lesson #1: Authentic Culture Cannot Be Mandated

At approximately 25 employees, questions about our organizational culture were emerging just as we prepared to scale rapidly, hiring between 100 and 150 new team members over the following months. Attempting to codify cultural values at that moment and subsequently requiring 100+ new employees to adopt behaviors defined by our initial 25-person team would have been fundamentally flawed.

While this approach is common in many organizations, it contradicted our philosophy of authentic culture development.

Our approach began with our clear definition of culture itself

This definition became our guiding principle. Rather than manufacturing culture in executive meetings, we committed to observing and documenting it in practice. We systematically analyzed and documented how our team naturally responded to pressure, recognized achievements, and navigated complex decisions. We identified the behaviors that drove our effectiveness and therefore we wanted to reinforce while also identifying behaviors we wanted to avoid.

Through this observation process, we identified three core elements that had organically developed within Lifen :

• radical transparency in communication

• user-first innovation in product development, and

• collaborative problem-solving that leverages diverse perspectives.

The key distinction was that these were not aspirational values we hoped to achieve—they were proven behaviors we had already demonstrated consistently. Radical transparency reflected our established practice of open communication regarding organizational challenges and strategic uncertainties. User-first innovation captured our systematic approach to evaluating every feature and decision through the lens of our users. Collaborative problem-solving described our proven methodology for addressing complex challenges through collective expertise.

By deferring the formal definition of our culture until we could observe and validate authentic behaviors, we avoided the common pitfall of creating compelling value statements that lack practical application. Instead, we documented the behaviors that were demonstrably driving our success, making them scalable, teachable, and—most importantly—genuine.

The next step was how to make it inspirational ?

Scaling Without Losing Soul

Our first major test arrived with rapid growth. Market demand for our healthcare solutions accelerated, requiring us to scale our team significantly in a compressed timeframe. Every company faces this critical juncture—the tension between recruiting quickly to capture market opportunities and maintaining cultural integrity.

We recognized that if we were going to rapidly scale, every single manager needed to be actively involved in recruitment. Therefore, they all needed to be aligned and thoroughly briefed on the specific behaviors they should evaluate in candidates to ensure new hires would thrive in our culture and work environment. The next strategic step was to transform the behaviors we had identified through observation into a practical framework that our managers could operationalize.

Lesson #2: Translate Culture into Actionable Frameworks

We needed to make our culture inspirational without compromising authenticity—no corporate rhetoric that would ring hollow to our team. In 2021, our two co-founders and I engaged in brainstorming sessions to distill our cultural essence into actionable but inspirational principles. This process yielded three core values:

Embrace Complexity, Real Impact, and Bienveillance (oui oui in French)

However, articulating values was only the beginning. We made a deliberate effort to define not only what each value meant in principle, but more importantly, we provided clear examples of behaviors that exemplified each value—and equally important, behaviors that contradicted them.

For instance, our ‘Embrace Complexity’ value was presented as follows:

We explained why this was a company value in the first place, it’s key !

Then, we made it tangible by clearly outlining which behaviors aligned with it and which didn’t.

We took it a step further by specifying how this value was expressed in different contexts

This approach made culture tangible across all organizational levels: for leadership, for managers conducting interviews, for current employees in their daily work, and for prospective recruits evaluating our organization.

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