Why scaling organisations must build their cultural foundations before growth tests them
Growth does not simply make an organisation bigger. It changes the social system through which work gets done.
Recent work with a client in a growth phase reminded me how important it is to be intentional about shaping the right culture for the organization as early as possible. To the credit of the founders of the organization, they did not wait until the culture had become toxic before they recognized that they needed to work on the culture of the organization. They saw the signs of a growing company reshaping itself as new people entered, and immediately reached out for assistance. That was a refreshing experience for me. Normally I get called in when the organization is already in trouble, and when it is far more challenging to turn a dysfunctional or toxic culture around.
There is a stage in the life of many organisations when culture appears to be a low-maintenance issue, as it seems to take care of itself. People know one another, like in a small village, and shared history supplies the context that formal systems have not yet had to carry. Everyone has direct access to the founders, and information travels through conversation, observation, and proximity. When something is unclear, one could just walk into one of the leaders’ offices and simply ask.
This can quite easily create the impression that the organisation has a strong culture. In some cases, it indeed has a strong and healthy culture, but often what looks like cultural strength is actually only the temporary advantage of smallness. Once the organisation starts to scale up, rapid growth can quite easily expose the cracks. New people arriving in numbers often have an impact on the organisation through the accumulation of different assumptions, working styles, and interpretations of what matters. And that adds pressure to the system, especially when the new people start to outnumber those who were there from the start.
The internal experience shifts with that pressure. For example, communication lines multiply, decisions that once took minutes begin to travel through layers, access to founders becomes uneven, and roles start to overlap. In the process, it is reasonable to expect that the founders’ first followers may feel that something precious is being lost, while newer employees struggle to understand unwritten rules they were never present to learn. At that point, culture does not stop forming. It simply starts forming without sufficient guidance.
The culture that worked before may not carry what comes next
As I started working with my client, it was quite clear that we were at the bridge where the organization needs to transition from trying to preserve the intimacy of a start-up to operating at the complexity of a larger enterprise. That is often a tension point for founders, as leaders want to retain agility, loyalty, and the sense of family that helped the organisation succeed. But intimacy and informality are not the same as trust and agility.
Some of the key issues that can quite easily be missed when the organization is at that transformation threshold include:
- Not realizing that informality at scale can produce ambiguity. Leaders can easily miss this. Informality when you are just a handful makes absolute sense, as everyone knows exactly what needs to be done. However, as the number of people increases, the clarity can wane as people interpret information differently.
- Easy access to founders can turn them into decision-making bottlenecks. The line where delegating decision-making power becomes necessary is not always obvious, especially for founders too busy scaling up.
- The organizational structure can become distorted as reporting lines are built around personalities instead of the strategy. This can easily result in complex matrix systems that are difficult to maintain as new people arrive.
- Loyalty can make accountability feel like betrayal. A family metaphor can blur performance standards, inhibit difficult conversations and make necessary differentiation feel personal.
The challenge, therefore, is not to preserve every feature of the old culture. It is to identify the qualities that gave the organisation life, protect their essence, and translate them into forms that can travel.
If responsiveness mattered when the organisation was small, what decision rights and information flows will preserve responsiveness at scale? If people valued closeness, what leadership practices and rituals will sustain belonging when everyone can no longer know everyone? If entrepreneurial initiative drove success, how will the organisation introduce necessary controls without teaching people to wait for permission?
These are not questions about atmosphere. They are questions of organisational design.
The cost of waiting for a cultural crisis
Too many organisations turn their attention to culture only after the damage has become visible. In culture assessments, I have repeatedly seen high turnover, burnout, silos, blame shifting, inconsistent leadership, resistance to change, and an ‘old guard versus new people’ divide, among the signals that the culture had simply been neglected by the leadership. Sometimes it takes a serious ethical failure to create enough urgency at the top. By then, the organisation is not building on open ground. It is trying to repair trust while still delivering the strategy.
The visible incident may be sudden, but the cultural conditions that made it possible usually are not. They accumulate through tolerated behaviour, avoided conversations, unclear accountabilities, distorted incentives and small compromises that become normal.
This is why deliberate culture work is a form of organisational risk management. It allows leaders to identify weak signals before they harden into patterns and to strengthen the foundations before the weight placed on them becomes dangerous. The aim is not to engineer a culture in which nothing goes wrong. It is to create one that can detect, discuss and correct problems before they become catastrophes.
What intentional culture creation requires
Intentional culture creation is not a values workshop followed by posters and branded language. Nor is it a campaign delegated to human resources. Culture is shaped collectively, but leaders hold disproportionate influence. People watch what leaders model, reward, ignore and tolerate.
Being intentional naturally requires clarity on what the culture blueprint should look like. In other words, where is our strategy taking us, and what is the ideal culture that will support that strategy? Collective shaping around a co-designed blueprint is, of course, not a two-day sprint and carries complexity that requires leadership commitment and credibility. A credible culture journey normally requires leaders to work across several connected domains:
- Identity and purpose: Clarify who the organisation is becoming, what must never be lost, and what must change to serve its next chapter.
- Leadership conduct: Translate aspirations into observable leadership behaviour, especially under pressure.
- Decision-making and power: Make clear where authority sits, how judgement should be exercised and when escalation is necessary.
- Communication and voice: Create conditions in which people can surface uncertainty, disagreement, risk and bad news early.
- Accountability and reward: Align consequences, recognition and performance systems with the culture the organisation says it wants.
- Belonging and trust: Ensure that growth does not create insiders and outsiders or make psychological safety dependent on personal access to powerful people.
- Systems and rituals: Embed shared meaning in induction, meetings, stories, routines, talent decisions and the everyday experience of work.
These elements must reinforce one another. Asking employees to behave differently while leaving decision rights, incentives and leadership habits untouched merely transfers responsibility for culture to those with the least power to change it.
A culture journey is an act of collective authorship
Leaders cannot abdicate responsibility for culture, nor can they manufacture it in the executive suite and announce it to everyone else. The people who live the culture hold knowledge that leaders need. They know where stated values collide with operational reality. They can identify what should be preserved, what is no longer serving the organisation, and what new behaviours growth will require.
The strongest culture journeys therefore combine direction with participation. Leaders set the strategic and ethical boundaries. The organisation then engages in disciplined conversation about the culture required to achieve its purpose. Together, people translate broad aspirations into specific behavioural commitments and embed them in the systems through which work is governed.
This process also answers a deeper question: Who are we becoming? That question matters because significant change is never only structural. It asks people to renegotiate identity, belonging, authority and meaning. If leaders attend only to the organogram, technology or growth targets, these human shifts do not disappear. They unfold underground and often emerge later as resistance, conflict or withdrawal.
Build while the foundations are still accessible
There is a particular advantage in doing this work before dysfunction becomes entrenched. Leaders can approach culture from a position of aspiration rather than accusation. Employees can help design the future without first having to defend themselves against a diagnosis of failure. The organisation can preserve what is valuable while it still recognises it clearly—and change what will not scale before it becomes bound up with status, habit and identity.
I should mention that deliberate culture work will not remove every growing pain. Scaling inevitably creates tension. But it can prevent predictable tensions from becoming avoidable damage. It gives the organisation shared language, clearer expectations and stronger mechanisms for learning and course correction.
The most important question for a growing organisation is therefore not whether its culture will change. It will. The question is whether that change will be consciously guided by purpose and strategy, or left to be shaped by pressure, personalities and accident.
Culture is what scales. Wise leaders decide early what they are willing to multiply.
If you are considering how you could be assisted in your organisation’s culture journey, either as the Board or the Executive team, read more about my work here: Board Services and Executive Support
