Detoxing

Changing roles is a great time to detox from the culture you just left. While the experience you gained at your previous company is likely a big part of what gets you hired into your next role, it's worth taking time to be intentional about what you want to bring with you. The cultural practices/norms you picked up from your previous organization will likely not carry over directly to your new company, and the transition between jobs is a great time to get some perspective.

I'm not talking about leaving behind a toxic culture. People who've worked in toxic environments are acutely aware of the behaviors, especially from leadership, that they're eager to leave behind.

What I'm talking about is being self-aware of the behaviors you developed in your previous role: language patterns, expectations, engagement style, how you're showing up, how you're seeing others, the assumptions, biases, and triggered responses you've accumulated. While you're looking for your next role, do the work to separate what is authentically you from the habits and assumptions you've picked up along the way.

Working with a team, we all develop norms: expectations and assumptions about motivations and behaviors given job types, roles, and organizational politics. Who will do it, how they'll make it happen, the collective understanding of quality, what success looks like. These are well-intentioned ways to manage the day to day. The same is true at the organizational level: being able to spot the difference between changes to policies and priorities that are just words and those that come with real consequences is critical to succeeding inside a company. The more immersed you are in your job, a combination of intensity, responsibility, tenure, and speed, the more reliant you become on those assumptions.

The more successful you are in your career, the harder it can be to let go of one company's culture for another's. After all, it was your mastery of that culture that led to your success. However as valuable as these practices have been for your, they rarely transfer directly between organizations. Which is exactly why it's critical to objectively evaluate which cultural norms you want to leave behind and which ones you want to carry forward.

Where to start

Start by taking a step back and examining what you're bringing to the role. Your experience, knowledge, and engagement style are obvious attributes you'll want to retain. But it's also important to examine your assumptions about roles, processes, and shared practices: who makes decisions and how, what goes into setting priorities, and how success gets measured, not just for investors but for your colleagues.

Even for practices you helped roll out or evolve in your previous organization, it's important to separate the outcomes from the implementation. The outcomes are likely just as valuable to your new company as they were to your previous one, in fact they could be a key reason you were hired. But the successful delivery of those outcomes rested on the culture, and on your ability to navigate that culture as a native member. From my own experience, going into a new role, even with the support of the founder, CEO, and executive team, your colleagues and the broader organization will reserve judgment until they see that you've adopted the language of their culture and understand it well enough to know what to change and how.

Where does this carryover actually show up? In practice, it's rarely one big moment. It's a string of small ones, the kind you don't notice until someone reacts differently than you expected—unfortunately these reactions seldom occur directly and tend to come to your attention only after they have circulated through back channels. A few of the places I see it most:

Meeting etiquette
Meetings are so common people take them for granted, but they're some of the strongest and most telling cultural practices in an organization. How meetings are scheduled, whether there's an agenda, who schedules them, who's included and who isn't, whether they start and stop on time, who's allowed to be late. How a meeting runs, who speaks, what's said versus what's meant, what's left unsaid, and how decisions actually get implemented afterward, these are some of the clearest cultural signals a company sends.

Accountability
The idea of accountability often exceeds the reality. Some organizations enforce it in explicit, consistent, punitive terms. Many others treat it as a sliding scale based on the individual and their place in the social fabric, tenure, past accomplishments, seniority.

Role scope and responsibilities
It's common for someone joining a team to assume the scope of their accountability is well understood, after all, it was in the job description. But chances are the people you'll be working with never read that description, and their expectations are unlikely to be as concrete as your own.

Communication tone, frequency, and inclusion
Sending a message or email is the most common action any employee takes. Yet every organization has unwritten rules for where, when, and to whom messages are sent, along with tone, key phrases, and what's implied versus stated. As the new person, what matters most is whether what you're saying, and how you're saying it, reflects well or poorly on others, on yourself, or lands cold with no read at all.

Processes, rituals, and conventions
Everyone says they use Agile, but no two companies run it the same way. Sprint planning, stand-ups, retros, RCAs, the real definition of these has to be experienced to be understood. And that experience needs to stay objective, so you can tell whether a difference is just a difference, or an opportunity to share learnings and improve together.

This list isn't exhaustive, it's a starting point. I've built a full framework for identifying the different behaviors norms and working through this detox by design, rather than by trial and error. Take the next step below…