What’s the Culture Cost of Growth?
Growth is intoxicating.
New customers. New markets. New investors. New talent.
There’s an energy to it, a velocity that feels both inevitable and earned.
But there’s a truth we don’t talk about enough: growth tends to come at a cost.
And if you’re not paying attention, the first thing it costs is culture.
Not the brand version of culture.
Not the swag or slogans.
But the lived experience of being part of a company where people feel connected, clear, and committed.
We often treat culture like the soft side of the business. The thing that just happens when you hire the right people or get lucky with chemistry.
But here’s what we’ve come to see again and again:
Culture is not the generator of alignment, coherence, or trust.
Culture is the expression of them.
When alignment is strong, culture feels magnetic.
When coherence is intact, culture feels purposeful.
When trust flows, culture feels alive.
And when those things falter, even subtly, culture is the first place you feel it.
It shows up in the tone of meetings.
In how decisions get made.
In who speaks up and who goes quiet.
In whether people feel energized or exhausted, included or invisible.
And here’s the pattern we see inside nearly every scaling company: As the business grows outward, people drift inward.
94% of executives and 88% of employees believe a distinct workplace culture is crucial to business success. Yet, only 19% say their culture is consistently upheld during periods of growth and change.¹
The Micro–Meso–Macro Truth
Culture begins at the micro level, the individual.
The moments where people feel aligned, seen, grounded in their own truth, connected to a shared purpose.
As a company scales, this gets tested.
⟶ Individuals (micro) feel less connected to the original clarity.
⟶ Teams (meso) lose the rhythm they once took for granted.
⟶ The organization (macro) replaces human understanding with speed, efficiency, and bandwidth.
This is where the culture cost begins to compound.
It’s not because leaders don’t care.
It’s because scaling magnifies misalignment, fast.
And misalignment is expensive.
The Real Cost of Incongruency
When what’s happening inside the company no longer aligns with the story told outside, people feel the disconnect.
And when people feel the disconnect, they stop believing.
Not immediately.
But slowly.
Quietly.
In the dozens of moments that no engagement survey can actually measure.
⟶ They care less.
⟶ They trust less.
⟶ They contribute less.
⟶ They stop going above and beyond.
⟶ They disconnect—from each other, from the mission, and from themselves.
That’s the culture cost.
And it always shows up before the financial one.
The Risk of Losing the Plot
Early-stage culture works because it's intimate.
People know each other.
They know why the work matters.
They can feel alignment, not just hear about it.
But as the company grows, something shifts.
The focus moves from who we are to what we produce.
From shared meaning to operational efficiency.
From coherence to speed.
From belonging to bandwidth.
This is how culture starts to slip, not through malice, but through momentum.
The Opportunity
Scaling doesn’t have to dilute culture.
In fact, growth can strengthen it if leaders are willing to protect the very things that made the company magnetic in the first place.
Companies that prioritize culture during moments of transformation are 2.5x more likely to see sustained performance improvement.²
Ask yourself:
⟶ Where in the organization are people working harder because the system isn’t working for them?
⟶ Where are teams struggling to connect, coordinate, or make decisions quickly?
⟶ Where are you seeing more confusion, rework, or noise than clarity?
⟶ What are your people telling you indirectly through turnover, burnout, hesitation, or silence?
⟶ What is at risk if the way you’re operating today simply scales as-is?
These answers don’t arrive by accident.
Culture isn’t simply the outcome of good work. It’s what makes good work possible.
When companies scale with coherence, culture becomes a reinforcing engine, not a casualty.
Here’s the good news:
You can build.
You can grow.
You can scale.
And you can protect what matters.
Yet only 23% of employees strongly agree they can apply their organization’s values to their everyday work. Translation: culture isn’t scaling.³
If you’re scaling a business, culture isn’t the side dish. It’s the system.
Build it like it matters, because it does.
Let’s build from there.
Sources: (1) Deloitte, Global Human Capital Trends (2016), (2) McKinsey & Company, Organizing for the Future (2021), (3) Gallup, State of the Global Workplace (2023)
THOUGHT PARTNER CHALLENGE | Count the Cost Before You Grow
Before your next big hire, expansion, or strategic leap, ask:
⟶ What made our culture magnetic in the first place?
Which trust signals do we need to protect at all costs?
⟶ Where is alignment slipping — at the micro, meso, or macro level?
What feels off, diluted, or unclear?
⟶ If culture is the expression of our trust system, what is it revealing right now?
What is it trying to tell us — before metrics catch up?
⟶ If we scale as-is, what might we lose?
And what will it take to preserve the coherence we value?
The companies that thrive aren’t the ones that scale the fastest.
They’re the ones that scale without losing themselves.
