🗺️ Your start-up is expanding globally. Your culture isn't ready

TL;DR

🗺️ Your start-up is expanding globally. Your culture isn't ready

🌏 How to build a high-performing culture - globally?

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Your start-up is expanding globally. Your culture isn't ready

When a founder announces, “We’re hiring in a new country,” and you’re a stand-alone HR leader, you’re probably thinking:

“Oh no😱.”

Employment contracts. Payroll. Benefits (pension, insurance, tax). Compliance across multiple jurisdictions. The list is immediate, practical, and genuinely important. Get any of it wrong, and you're looking at financial penalties or delayed hires. Both cost real money. Both are easy to calculate. Both are relatively easy to get a budget for,  because you can put a number on the risk.

Culture is harder to sell.

It's intangible. The risk is harder to quantify. So it gets deprioritised…until the breakdown happens.

And HR leaders who have helped start-ups scale without getting the cultural foundations right know exactly what that breakdown looks like: poor communication, conflict, misunderstanding...and my personal favourite (not), the us vs. them mentality.

One team in Paris. Another in New York. And slowly, almost invisibly, 2 different companies are forming inside the same one.

Make culture tangible and the risks visible

Culture is your way of working. The network of people communicating and collaborating to get things done. And what most founders don't appreciate: even if you only ever hire in ONE country, ONE culture, complexity doesn't grow in a straight line as your headcount increases.

Each new person adds relationships, communication channels, interpretations, and assumptions. Not ONE new connection — M.A.N.Y.

That is just communication complexity in one location, one culture, one time zone.

Now add country-specific cultural differences: how people give feedback, how they challenge a decision, what "urgent" means, and what "done" means. Add time zones. The complexity doesn't just increase. It compounds.

That is the environment you are preparing to build your organisational culture as part of global expansion. So before we talk about how (see Part 2 below), let's talk about whether you're ready to.

Strategy is a choice. So let's start there

When I asked this HR leader why they were expanding, she said: "We need sales and customer teams on the ground, closer to our clients."

That is a business reason. A typical one once you have product-market fit and want to grow market share. But not every expansion decision is😬. There are 2 types, which I call:

🎯 Business reasons:

🤷🏻‍♂️ 'Feel like it' reasons:

Strategy is a choice, and choices made because someone 'feels like it,’ rather than business rationale, will cost your start-up the speed, focus, and coherence needed to grow revenue. So, this is where I want HR leaders to push 👉 clearly, commercially, without apology.

Be intentional about which borders you're crossing and which you're not

If your business reason is getting sales and customer teams closer to clients, start there. Hire the roles that are necessary in the market. Keep everything else at your hub, for now.

If you're based in Paris and you need customer coverage in the US and Brazil, ask the hard questions:

Every role you add in a new geography adds to that connection count.

Keeping certain roles at your hub isn't a limitation 

It buys you the time to build the cultural foundations that make global expansion actually work.

So make a choice: Which roles truly need to be in the market and which ones are you holding back until you're ready?

Start from your strategy, and culture follows from that choice.

How to build a high-performing culture - globally?

When I built my team from 7 to 40 (and no, not the whole company… just the HR team😅), we met 3 times a week. HR leadership met twice more on top of that. Every quarter, the whole HR team came together in person. And every other week, I had lunch or dinner with one direct report or one skip level.

I can already hear you…“Too many meetings. Shouldn't they be focused on doing the work? This is death by meeting.”

I put the solution in front of you first deliberately. Because it's easy to react to a ‘solution’ — to agree if it matches your preference, to dismiss it if it doesn't.

So instead, let me give you the why because the why is what travels across borders. This solution is one of many possible ways to solve it.

Start with what builds a high-performing culture anywhere

To build a high-performing team, one that can have healthy conflict, commit to a collective goal, and deliver results that move the business, we need trust.

Yes, this is straight out of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Lencioni.

But trust is a vague concept. And the way most companies try to build it? A quarterly team day. An annual offsite. Some kind of activity that someone on the team secretly dreads🙄.

We know it doesn't work. But why? The trust equation can help us shed some light here.

Trust = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy) ÷ Self-interest

Let's look at what your organisation already has a structure for and what it doesn't.

Credibility and reliability are usually covered in your recruitment process. You hire people with the credentials to do the job, and your performance reviews evaluate whether they deliver. Structure exists for both.

Self-interest is (hopefully😅) covered through shared goals, team bonuses, or values that reinforce winning collectively rather than individually.

Intimacy, a.k.a. the touchpoints that build strong relationships, empathy, and understanding, is often missing. Except for the occasional offsite that happens once, maybe twice a year.

That is the gap. And across time zones and country cultures, that gap gets wider.

Build trust intentionally and systematically

When my team met 3 times a week, it wasn't about the volume. It was about what we built inside those meetings, very deliberately, consistently, over time.

Intimacy happens in repetition.

Small moments, accumulated across dozens of interactions, allow people to understand how each other thinks, what each other needs, and where each other's edges are. That understanding builds empathy. And empathy is what creates the psychological safety for someone to say "I disagree", "I don't understand", or "I need help,"  without fear of how it lands.

(We reduce the touchpoints once we have the intimacy and increase them again when a new team member joins.)

So the question isn't: Should we have more meetings?

The question is: Where are your current rituals and are you building relationships inside them, or just getting through the agenda?

2 moves, depending on where you are

If your team already has regular meeting rituals: Don't add more. Build relationships into what already exists. Open with a personal check-in — one genuine question that isn't about work. Rotate who runs the meeting. Create space for disagreement before decisions land. The structure is already there. Make it do double duty.

If your team doesn't meet that often: Think about what frequent touchpoints you can create that serve both work results and relationships. A weekly async update that invites one personal line. A fortnightly call that starts with 5 minutes of nothing business-related. Small, consistent, low-effort. The frequency matters more than the format.

And across borders specifically, be intentional about creating moments where time zones aren't a barrier to relationships. Async video updates. Rotating meeting times so the same people aren't always the ones dialling in at 7 am. Small signals that say: you are not an afterthought in this team.

Intention is the only thing that travels without a visa

You cannot build culture across borders without first understanding what builds culture in the first place. Trust isn't a team day. It's the accumulation of small, intentional moments. Repeated often enough that people develop the empathy to understand each other, the familiarity to challenge each other, and the safety to be honest with each other.

That works in Paris. It works in New York. It works in São Paulo. 

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