When I joined TikTok, the company was just crossing 1,000 employees globally. Three years later, that number had skyrocketed to over 50,000.
It was one of the most intense scale-ups I’ve ever experienced. And it taught me, in the most real and human way, what it actually means to scale culture.
Not the version on the values deck.
Not the slogans painted on office walls.
But the invisible threads that run beneath every decision, every Slack message, every moment of pressure.
I shared some of the most pivotal lessons I’ve carried forward from TikTok, and from two decades in people space. This reflection goes a layer deeper, especially for those building in high growth environments or rethinking culture from the inside out.
1. Culture Isn’t What You Say. It’s What You Tolerate.
A lot of leaders say culture is a priority.
But when you ask how they’re actually scaling it, the answers get vague.
Culture is what people whisper about in Slack.
It’s what gets rewarded behind closed doors.
It’s a living system built through behaviors.
In fast-growing companies, the first 10–30 people inherit the operating system directly from the founders: how they talk, how they make decisions, how they handle stress.
But the moment you start to scale, culture becomes too important to leave to chance. Because by the time you feel it drifting, it’s already embedded in your systems.
Tactical Insight: Build a living onboarding guide on how your company makes decisions under pressure. What you stand for. How you move. What recovery looks like when things break. That living doc becomes an anchor for new hires.
2. Pressure Reveals the Truth of Your Culture
One of the most defining moments of my time at TikTok came when we were suddenly banned in India, one of our largest markets.
There was no playbook. No PR script. Just people, thousands of them whose jobs and futures were hanging in the balance.
Every night that week, I sat down with the CEO. Our conversations weren’t about cost-cutting, they were deeply human. We found a way to redeploy half the team and kept the team on payroll for 8 months, offering 3x severance when we had to cease operations.
It was one of the most human leadership decisions I’ve ever been part of.
Moments like that reveal the soul of a company.
Reflection Prompt: When crisis hits, what do your people experience first? clarity or confusion? Care or control? That’s your real culture.
3. Leadership Habits > Culture Decks
We had beautifully written values at TikTok. But what people actually paid attention to? Leadership behaviors.
Who got promoted.
Who got airtime.
Who was interrupted, or never invited to speak.
We built our own internal engagement survey and paired it with behavior mapping: How were leaders showing up? What did their teams absorb and replicate?
Because in the end, culture is behavior.
Tactical Insight: Run quarterly behavioral check-ins with your functional heads. Go beyond performance. Ask: What are we modeling? What are we tolerating? What needs to shift?
4. Systems Shape Energy. And Energy Fuels Performance.
When you’re scaling at hyperspeed, complexity is your biggest threat. At TikTok, it often felt like building ten planes at ten altitudes simultaneously.
We learned to simplify what we could and design systems around trust, not control.
Hiring was focused on builders, people who knew how to create in ambiguity. And compensation reflected that. For senior leaders, performance bonuses reached 8x, with fully vested equity or cash. It wasn’t sustainable forever (and eventually got capped), but it reflected a clear stance: pay for top talent, and trust them to build.
We didn’t get it all right, but what worked was clarity. Simple, scalable, flexible clarity.
Tactical Insight: Design monthly “leadership huddles” by region. Use them as decision forums: What’s blocked? What’s shifting? Who needs context? These create a heartbeat for scaling trust and alignment.
5. If You Don’t Design Culture, It Will Default
Not all our bets paid off.
There were cultural pivots and mistakes.
We once hired a high-profile CEO from Disney. Brilliant, experienced, and widely respected. But we missed a step: aligning expectations across geographies and leadership norms. Within 90 days, miscommunication and cultural disconnect led to a loss of trust. That leader decided to move on, and we gave the top role to a leader who had grown with the company from the start.
They knew how to navigate the founders in Beijing. They had the trust of the teams. That decision helped stabilize the ship.
Lesson: Leadership alignment is not a one-off. It’s a constant calibration especially across borders.
6. What I’d Do Differently Now
If I could go back and do it all again, I’d invest earlier in:
- Reimagine how we listen to employees
- Codifying behavioral expectations across leadership
- Enable and empower managers to take action on employee feedback
- Creating lightweight rituals that reinforce clarity
- Designing for regional nuance with a coherent global spine
We talk a lot about values. But values are useless if they’re not practiced.
Rituals > rules.
Leaders set the ceiling.
And at the end of the day, culture is always co-created.
Reflection Prompt: Where in your company is culture drifting toward default? What small behavior shift could bring it back into alignment?
Making Work More Human
After TikTok, I took a long breath, literally and metaphorically.
That journey shaped the foundation of what I’m building now at Hoogly AI.
We’re on a mission to help teams build culture in real-time through behavioral shifts.
Instead of once-a-year surveys, we use conversational AI to create safe, anonymous space for employees to share what they’re really experiencing. And we guide leaders to take action, not just read dashboards.
Because insight is nothing without follow-through.
And culture is nothing without care.
If this sparked something in you, and you want to co-create a culture that feels human and high-performing, let’s connect. We’d love to offer a pilot of Hoogly for your team.
We’ve been where you are.
And we’re here to help you build what comes next.
💛
Anitta
