John Meadows co-founded Bowery Valuation in 2015 after spending four years at one of the largest independent appraisal firms in New York City, where he valued more than $3 billion of commercial property. Frustrated with an antiquated process and convinced there was a better way, he left to build the company he wished existed. That founder origin shapes how he thinks about culture: build the system, then let people operate inside it.
This Reimagining Company Culture conversation centered on a tension every founder eventually faces. Top-down vision moves a company in the right direction; grassroots ownership keeps it honest. Run the company too top-down and you get a culture of compliance. Run it too grassroots and you get fragmentation. The question is how to set the conditions for both.
The synthesis below pulls together John’s practical view with patterns from People teams who have done this work in companies of similar size and stage.
Why the Top-Down vs Grassroots Debate Misses the Point
Founders often frame culture as a choice between two extremes: control or autonomy. The framing is wrong. The real work is figuring out which decisions belong at the top, which belong at the team, and how to make those boundaries visible. Companies that get this right look intentional from the outside; companies that do not look chaotic from the inside.
McKinsey research on high-performing cultures reports that companies in the top quartile of culture deliver returns to shareholders 60 percent higher than the median. The companies in that top quartile do not all run the same culture model. They share something else: their leaders are precise about which behaviors they expect and which decisions are pushed down to teams.
The architecture matters. Without it, every cultural decision becomes a debate, and the founder ends up acting as the arbiter of every disagreement. That does not scale past 100 people, and it burns out the people most invested in making the company work.
When Top-Down Culture Actually Works
What kinds of decisions should leadership own?
Vision, values, hiring bar, and the small set of non-negotiable behaviors. These are the things that have to be consistent across the organization or the culture fragments. Leaders who try to crowdsource these decisions usually end up with vague values statements that no one references.
How do you communicate top-down decisions without sounding like a bureaucrat?
Show the reasoning. People can disagree with a decision and still operate inside it as long as they understand why it exists. Leaders who skip the reasoning step get superficial buy-in that erodes the first time the decision is tested by reality.
What Actually Works in Grassroots Culture Building
Push ownership down to the team level
The best teams own their rituals, their working agreements, and the day-to-day operating norms. Founders should set the floor and the ceiling, then let teams design the middle. Grassroots ownership creates the kind of distributed care that scales beyond what any executive team can enforce on its own.
Make culture stories visible
Culture lives in the stories employees tell each other about how the company actually behaves. Making those stories visible (in onboarding, in all-hands meetings, in performance conversations) reinforces the desired behaviors. Transparent workplace cultures grow because their stories travel.
Build feedback channels that actually get used
Grassroots only works if leadership receives the signal. Anonymous reporting infrastructure sounds heavy, but it is what gives employees a credible way to surface friction without putting their job on the line. Without it, leaders only hear the polished version of what is happening.
Where Employee Relations Fits in Culture Architecture
The seam between top-down and grassroots is exactly where ER lives. ER cases reveal where the official culture stops matching the lived culture. Companies that read ER trends as a culture signal (not just a risk function) get an early warning system most leadership teams would pay for.
What ER signals tell founders about culture health
The mix of cases matters more than the volume. A spike in retaliation reports means your speak-up culture is breaking down. A spike in manager complaints means a layer of leadership needs coaching. An ER program built on modern employee relations infrastructure surfaces those patterns in time to act on them, instead of after a high performer has already left.
Frequently Asked Questions About Top-Down and Grassroots Culture
What is grassroots company culture?
Grassroots culture is the set of norms, rituals, and behaviors that emerge from the work itself, often outside official channels. It is the culture employees create with each other when no one is watching. Healthy companies treat grassroots culture as data, not noise.
How do founders avoid being too controlling about culture?
Set a small number of non-negotiables and put a stake in the ground. Then push everything else down. Founders who try to control more than that signal distrust, which kills the grassroots layer faster than almost anything else.
How does company size change the culture conversation?
At under 50 employees, founders can shape culture through proximity. From 50 to 500, you need explicit systems and rituals. Past 500, culture becomes an architecture problem: who decides what, who teaches what, and how the system corrects itself when it drifts.
What is the role of middle managers in culture?
Middle managers are where top-down meets grassroots. They translate vision into daily behavior and surface ground-truth back up. managers account for 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement, which is why companies serious about culture invest in management development before anything else.
How can small teams build a deliberate culture?
Pick three behaviors that, if practiced consistently, would define how the team works. Talk about them in onboarding, in retros, and in feedback. Small teams have the advantage of being close to the work; the discipline is making the implicit explicit before growth scrambles it.
One pattern that comes up often in founder-led companies: the gap between top-down and grassroots widens whenever the executive team gets distracted by a fundraise or a launch. The cultural drift is invisible at first and then suddenly obvious six months later when a wave of regrettable departures hits. Founders who set up consistent listening cadences (skip-level meetings, anonymous pulse signal, and ER trend reviews) catch the drift earlier and pay less to fix it. The cost of the discipline is small compared to the cost of rebuilding trust after the fact.
The other underrated piece of culture architecture is what happens to a hire in their first 90 days. Onboarding is where the official culture either gets reinforced or quietly contradicted. Building a deliberate onboarding experience is one of the highest-impact investments a founder can make, and it is often the first place to look when a culture audit reveals drift between intent and reality.
Founders sometimes resist this work because it feels procedural. The reality is that culture architecture is the most strategic work a founder can do, because it determines whether the company can grow without losing the qualities that made it work in the first place. The discipline of writing down what is currently implicit is also where most cultural drift gets caught early.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
The top-down versus grassroots debate is the wrong fight. The real work is engineering the boundary between the two: which decisions live at the top, which live at the team, and how the signal moves between them. Founders who do this well end up with cultures that scale; founders who avoid the architecture end up rebuilding culture every 18 months under a new banner.
For People teams supporting a founder going through this, the highest value move is to make the cultural architecture visible. Organizational culture frameworks help, but only if leadership treats them as living documents rather than wall art that gets ignored after the all-hands.
See how AllVoices helps People teams turn workplace signals into action.
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