What shame taught me about building team culture

We didn’t use the word “shame.” That would have felt dramatic. Or too heavy. Or not “startup” enough. But it was there—alive in the pauses after missed deadlines, the side glances during a bad demo, the silence when someone skipped prep and hoped no one would call it out.

We were a five-person team building our first product together. Back then, we said we were flat. Friendly. High trust. The kind of culture where “anyone could speak up.” In reality, shame did the heavy lifting. Not policy. Not process. Shame kept us in line. Until it didn’t.

When a team is tiny, everything feels personal. Every action gets noticed. Every mistake feels amplified. You can’t hide behind departments or layers. Your work—and how seriously you take it—is right there in front of everyone else. We didn’t have a performance review system or OKRs. We had vibes. But the vibes had rules. If you were prepared, sharp, on time—you earned quiet respect. If you weren’t, you didn’t get called out. You just felt it.

A teammate once showed up late to a user call and tried to wing it. No one said anything afterward. No feedback, no Slack follow-up. Just cold politeness for the rest of the week. He never did it again. We never used words like accountability. We didn’t have to. Shame did the job. It was a kind of social currency—subtle, ambient, but powerful. And honestly, it worked. For a while.

Here’s the thing: shame is efficient. In early-stage teams without time for HR policies or performance frameworks, it acts like a silent operating system. It enforces standards without bureaucracy. It communicates: “This isn’t okay here”—without a meeting. But shame is also uneven. It hits some harder than others. It depends on cultural cues, emotional awareness, and often, prior trauma. It assumes that everyone interprets silence the same way. That’s not true.

One of our interns froze up after a minor mistake in a sprint review. She apologized profusely in a group message the next morning, then went quiet for days. We thought she was just introverted. She was actually spiraling—and ended up quitting with no explanation. That’s when I started questioning it. What had we really built?

Every founder wants to build a great culture. But in the early days, culture isn’t something you design. It’s something you absorb and reflect. I had grown up in a family where success was acknowledged in silence, and failure was met with a look. Not words. Just that look. I carried that into the company without realizing it.

So when someone fumbled, I didn’t give them feedback. I gave them the look. It felt natural to me—but corrosive to others. Eventually, one teammate told me: “It’s hard to grow when you don’t know where you stand. I can’t tell if you’re disappointed or just thinking.” That landed hard. Because she was right. We weren’t using shame with clarity. We were using it instead of clarity.

There’s a version of startup advice that says: “Make your culture psychologically safe. People should never feel fear.” But the truth is, fear and shame exist in every workplace. You can’t remove them. You can only design around them. I’ve learned that psychological safety doesn’t mean avoiding discomfort. It means pairing discomfort with direction. It means people know what the standards are—and what happens when they’re missed.

When shame lives in a vacuum, it becomes toxic. When it’s paired with honest, compassionate feedback—it becomes discipline. Not punishment. Not humiliation. Just: “This matters.” In other words: shame can be a teacher. But only if the syllabus is clear.

We didn’t run a DEI workshop. We didn’t hire a culture consultant. We just started saying what we meant. We made a team agreement that any critical feedback would be said directly, with care—and never withheld as punishment. We changed our standups to include one moment of accountability each. Just one person saying: “This didn’t go as planned, here’s what I learned.”

We added a “feedback receipt” ritual: whenever someone received tough feedback, they had to acknowledge it publicly—not defend it, just acknowledge. It normalized the idea that shame wasn’t an endpoint. It was a checkpoint. And we stopped calling our culture “nice.” We started calling it “clear.”

Here’s what I believe now: shame is a signal. A data point. It says, “Something meaningful was compromised.” But it’s up to the team to decide whether that signal gets ignored, weaponized, or translated. If you’re a founder, you’re not just building a product. You’re building an emotional economy. Shame is part of that economy—whether you like it or not.

The question is: do your team members know the conversion rate? Do they know what earns trust back? Do they know how long the “quiet freeze” lasts after a mistake? Do they know what counts as repair? Because if they don’t, they’re not learning. They’re guessing. And guessing, under shame, breeds paralysis—not growth.

I’ve worked with teams in Malaysia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and the UK. Shame operates differently in each place. In Southeast Asia, indirectness is often read as politeness—but also used to mask tension. In Gulf teams, shame and honor dynamics run deep, often colliding with Western-style feedback norms. In British companies, shame is often coded into dry humor or passive-aggression.

Founders building cross-cultural teams need to understand this: shame doesn’t travel well. If your team spans time zones and cultures, you cannot rely on shame as an unspoken force. You have to translate it. Structure it. Or replace it with something clearer.

1. Name the Norms Early
   I’d start every team not with values, but with real examples of how we behave when someone screws up. Role-play it. Test it. Make it explicit. Culture isn’t just what you celebrate—it’s how you handle the hard stuff.
2. Create a Feedback Loop for Emotional Signals
   We had retrospectives for product. We needed them for feelings too. Just 10 minutes every month: “What emotions are shaping how we work together?” Not therapy. Just inventory.
3. Design for Repair
   Not just conflict resolution. Actual repair. What does rebuilding trust look like in your team? Is it a conversation? A written follow-up? A new ownership opportunity? Make that visible.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “Oh no. We’ve built this too,”—good. It means you can fix it. You don’t have to remove shame. You just have to make sure it’s not the only teacher in the room. Give your team the tools to process it. Give them language. Give them pathways.

And give yourself grace, too. Founders carry shame invisibly—when things don’t grow fast enough, when hires fail, when investors ghost. If you don’t metabolize your own shame with clarity, it will leak into your team. I say this from experience. You can’t scale a culture where no one feels bad. But you can scale a culture where people know what to do when they do.

Culture doesn’t live in Notion documents or onboarding decks. It lives in the micro-moments where something breaks, and we choose: freeze, deflect, or repair. Shame isn’t the villain. It’s the invitation. But only if we build the path to walk out of it.

In truth, shame is part of every workplace—whether acknowledged or not. It creeps in when someone lets the team down, when expectations aren't met, or when silence fills the room after a mistake. Ignoring it doesn’t remove it. Overusing it corrodes trust. The real leadership challenge is in creating clarity around what matters, what the standards are, and how we course-correct together.

As a founder, your job isn’t to eliminate emotional friction. Your job is to design how it gets processed. Build systems where emotions like shame are integrated—not avoided or abused. Because the way your team metabolizes failure will define whether it grows resilient—or just grows quiet.