At DMK Tribe, people leave all the time.
Not because something went wrong. Because that’s what expats do. Someone gets a job offer in another city. A contract ends. A family decides it’s time to go home. And every few months, a new wave arrives: people who just landed and don’t know anyone yet.
In September 2023, I took over the full leadership of a community called Marketing Digital Lisboa. We were 600 members. From it, I founded DMK Tribe: Digital Marketing, plus Tribe, because that’s what we were, a tribe that met to talk about what was happening in our industry. Today we are more than 9,000, in 5 cities, with people from more than 50 countries. We grow because more people arrive than leave. But at every event there are new faces, and others are missing because they have already moved on.
So how do you build a culture when the people who carry it keep leaving?
My answer was to stop depending on them. Because we could never count on people staying, we built a culture that works even when they leave.
Where culture usually lives
In most companies, culture lives in the people who have been there the longest. They know how things are done. They know the rules nobody wrote down. New people learn by watching them.
That works until those people leave. Or until the company hires so fast that the new people outnumber the old ones. The culture doesn’t disappear in one day. It fades slowly, and nobody notices until it’s gone.
If your culture depends on people staying, you don’t really have a culture. You have seniority.
What we did instead
When I took over, the first thing I changed was the energy. I made the rituals personal, so every new person would feel at home from the first minute. Three things kept us together while the people kept changing.
1. Small rituals people can count on. At every event, we ask people to write their name on a name tag. When I see the name, I call the person by it and welcome them to the community. It takes ten seconds. But someone who just arrived in a new country, where nobody knows their name yet, remembers that moment. A ritual is valuable because it’s repeated, not because it’s big.
2. Welcoming every new member on purpose. When I know someone is new and doesn’t know anyone, I introduce them to a member who has been with us longer. That person becomes their first connection. Over time, many members become nodes: people who support the newcomers, the same way someone once supported them. That network is what really holds the community together.
3. Turning the founder’s energy into a system. This is the hardest part, and it isn’t perfect. In Lisbon, the community works without me. When I travel, long-time members cover for me. They have watched how I do it, and they do it really well. I’m proud of that. In the other cities it’s more complex. Local leaders need time, and life changes: they get new jobs, take on more responsibilities, or, being expats, they move away too. But the greeting and the rituals stay the same, whoever is leading. I support new leaders from a distance until they feel confident.
Your company is more like an expat community than you think
People leave for better offers. Teams double in a year. New hires work remotely and never meet the people who built the culture. Every wave of hiring changes your culture. The only question is whether you decide how.
The lessons translate directly: greet new people by name, connect each one with someone who has been there longer, and make sure your rituals don’t depend on one person being in the room.
Here is a simple test: if your three longest-serving people left tomorrow, would a new hire still learn how things work here?
If the answer is no, your culture is a memory, not a system.
What is one ritual in your team that would survive if you left tomorrow?
Thanks for reading me,
Jhamile Abuabara