Culture
Culture is the shared values, beliefs, norms, practices, and meanings that shape behavior and interpretation within a social group or organization.
Tech Startup Toolkit
Organizational culture is the shared values, norms, beliefs, and behavioral expectations that shape how an organization operates.
- How it is used
- Guides startup founders in creating a workplace that supports hiring, retention, collaboration, and sustained performance.
- How deep it goes
- Defines culture, explains its formation and maintenance, and gives practical leadership, principles, and acquisition checks without operational metrics.
- Examples
- Uses Re:Build’s posted principles, Amazon interviewing, founder departures, and acquirer-culture investigation as concrete cases.
- What you can do after
- Apply it by defining early expectations, modeling them through leadership, reinforcing principles, and evaluating cultural fit in an acquisition.
Collaborative Software Design: How to facilitate domain modeling decisions
Culture is the shared norms, practices, assumptions, and ways of working that characterize a social group.
- How it is used
- Guides facilitators to observe group behavior and identify cultural patterns affecting collaborative modeling.
- How deep it goes
- Defines fractal cultural patterns and provides an observation exercise, but does not develop broader cultural theory.
- Examples
- Uses cross-department blame, repeated organizational accusations, meeting interruptions, and a fractal triangle as examples.
- What you can do after
- Practice observing behavior factually and testing whether patterns recur across people, teams, and organizational levels.
Think Like a Software Engineering Manager
Organizational culture is the shared values, beliefs, norms, and practices that shape behavior within an organization.
- How it is used
- Frames how engineering managers integrate hires, support employees, and address conditions that may contribute to attrition.
- How deep it goes
- Gives practical measures and reflection questions for shaping culture, without a formal assessment method.
- Examples
- Uses collaborative planning, inclusion activities, and a manager’s late-night email to show how behavior shapes expectations.
- What you can do after
- Practice/perform culture-shaping habits through clear expectations, inclusive behavior, supportive working practices, and attention to leadership signals.
Read how Think Like a Software Engineering Manager explains culture →
Interview Speak
The shared values, norms, behaviors, and working practices that characterize an organization.
- How it is used
- Uses culture to prepare candidates for questions about organizational fit, values, collaboration, leadership, conflict, and team support.
- How deep it goes
- Explains how to research, translate, and evidence culture, stopping short of defining culture through organizational theory.
- Examples
- Uses job-description phrases, organization research, change initiatives, process improvements, conflict situations, and team-development examples.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate/understand organizational fit and answer culture questions with researched, behavior-based examples.
Lead Developer Career Guide
A shared system of values, beliefs, norms, and practices that shapes how members of a group interpret and respond to behavior.
- How it is used
- Guides lead developers in interpreting behavior, adapting feedback, building trust, and creating collaborative work environments.
- How deep it goes
- Explains culture through workplace behavior and leadership tactics, but stops short of formal cultural theory or systematic organizational analysis.
- Examples
- Uses global-team jokes, differing feedback reactions, mentoring goals, radical candor, delegation, and resistance to toxic culture.
- What you can do after
- Practice/perform culturally aware feedback, clearer communication, trust-building, delegation, and support for team growth.
Related concepts
- style guidecontrasts with · A style guide is a documented set of conventions for consistently formatting, naming, organizing, or presenting source code.
- principleconfigured by · A principle is a general rule, guideline, or value that guides decisions, behavior, or judgments.
- CEOconfigured by · A chief executive officer is the senior executive responsible for directing an organization’s overall operations and strategic direction.
These guides are generated from the text of Manning books by Manning's knowledge graph and link to the sections they draw on. The full books are available on liveBook and at manning.com.