In an era of distributed work, organizational culture has become your competitive advantage—if your managers can successfully translate it across contexts.
Recently, I sat across from a fintech founder pitching for funding. With only five employees, his CTO must manage contract developers across seven countries to meet demands. “It’s the only way we can afford to build what we need,” he explained, “but sometimes I wonder if we’re trading our soul for runway.”
This concern highlights a critical challenge. Are we undermining our most valuable strategic asset—organizational culture—in our rush to balance costs and access to talent?
Culture as Your Competitive Moat
Research confirms what I’ve observed working with CEOs: culture is not a soft HR concern but a hard-edged competitive advantage. McKinsey’s research shows companies with strong cultures outperform industry peers by significant margins in shareholder returns.
Culture is the only sustainable competitive advantage within the entrepreneur’s control and the most powerful way to protect intellectual property in a world where technical innovations are quickly replicated.
The challenge? Culture doesn’t naturally scale across distributed environments. It requires intentional translation.
Middle Managers: The Cultural Translators
This is where middle managers enter the picture. Once primarily responsible for workflow and productivity, they now serve as the critical nodes in your cultural network.
In my work with growth-stage companies, I’ve seen middle managers create company culture anew every day. They decide which values to emphasize, which behaviors to reinforce, and how abstract principles manifest in concrete decisions.
A product leader I coached with a team across Chicago, Eastern Europe, and Singapore spends 30% of her day on what I call ‘cultural contextualization’—explaining the why behind decisions and translating values into different contexts.
According to Gartner’s research, managers in distributed environments spend significantly more time on cultural reinforcement compared to pre-pandemic norms.
The Cost of Cultural Fragmentation
When managers lack the capacity to perform this translation effectively, culture fragments, with devastating consequences.
For startups, the cost is existential. When your competitive advantage is speed and innovation, cultural disconnects create deadly friction. I’ve seen promising startups implode not from market factors but from internal cultural pressures.
For established organizations, the risks include:
- Innovation drought: Microsoft’s research shows teams with weak cultural cohesion generate fewer viable innovation concepts.
- Performance decline: Gallup’s data reveals that culturally fragmented teams show productivity decreases up to 23%.
- Talent exodus: LinkedIn’s report found that employees reporting weak cultural connections are 3.7 times more likely to search for new positions.
Building a Culture Translation Engine
Forward-thinking organizations recognize culture translation as a strategic capability. For example, consider these four companies and their approaches:
1. Formalize the cultural translation role
GitLab, a fully remote company, has formalized culture-building into their management structure. Their Remote Work Playbook explicitly outlines how managers translate company values across distributed teams.
CEO Sid Sijbrandij explains: “We’ve codified our culture into a handbook that serves as the single source of truth for how we operate.”
2. Create cultural translation infrastructure
Zapier has built infrastructure to make their culture visible and accessible. CEO Wade Foster notes: “We create explicit systems that let information flow throughout the company. We document everything from meetings.”
3. Develop cultural capabilities and support resilience
Microsoft provides data-backed insights on distributed work and specific manager training for hybrid environments, while Buffer maintains its culture during uncertainty through radical transparency.
During their 2020 layoffs, Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne shared how their values guided difficult decisions: “We want to approach this layoff in line with our values, guided by our commitment to Buffer’s long-term mission.”
Culture as Crisis Prevention
In my experience, strong cultural translation serves as an organizational immune system during crises.
Companies that maintain performance through disruptions understand that the best crisis plans include informed managers who can rapidly translate organizational values into new contexts.
The Future-Proof Culture Strategy
Leaders seeking to build a genuine cultural advantage, should consider these tips.
- Recognize your middle managers as the primary architects of your lived culture. As one CEO told me, “I can craft all the value statements I want, but my managers determine whether they’re wallpaper or operating system. It’s about having a strong dialog and the ability to banter and fully understand changes that need to be made, the impact and perception.” Equip these cultural translators with the skills, time and resources to perform this function effectively through formal training and technological support.
- Measure and reward successful culture translation. Companies like Microsoft have cultural cohesion metrics that track alignment across distributed teams.
As distributed work becomes permanent, organizations must decide whether to allow culture to fragment, or invest in the middle managers who translate their values into lived experience.
When managed effectively, culture isn’t a casualty of distribution—it’s your most resilient competitive advantage.
In a world where talent, technology, and strategy can all be replicated, your culture—and the managers who translate it into action—remains your most defensible asset.