Protect Culture During Rapid Growth: The Top 4 Steps

How to Protect Culture During Rapid Growth
Rapidly growing companies — those expanding at 20% or more annually — can be exhilarating and highly rewarding workplaces. Yet, with rapid growth comes intense pressure on both organizational culture and business strategy. We define workplace culture as the everyday behaviors, attitudes, and norms that shape how work gets done. To preserve a strong culture amid fast expansion, leaders must consciously safeguard the core values, beliefs, and assumptions that have fueled the company’s success.

This means reinforcing meaningful behaviors, modeling the attitudes that matter, and embedding the principles that make the organization unique into every new business practice, role, and hire.

Six Times When Culture Becomes a Crisis
Corporate culture is most vulnerable during periods of significant change. In these moments, operational practices, decision-making boundaries, social norms, risk tolerance, go-to-market strategies, and beliefs about customer and employee focus can shift or fall out of alignment. Once these foundational cultural norms are compromised, restoring them can be extremely difficult.

Based on nearly three decades of assessing organizational cultures, we’ve identified six situations where culture is particularly at risk of becoming a crisis:

1. Shifts in Business Strategy
   When the company pivots or redefines its strategic direction, the behaviors and values that once guided success may no longer align with new goals.
2. Leadership Changes
   New leaders often bring different styles and expectations, which can unsettle established cultural norms.
3. Mergers or Acquisitions
   Integrating distinct organizations often challenges shared values and can create friction between legacy cultures.
4. Sudden or Unexpected Downturns
   Financial stress or market disruptions can force decisions that undermine the behaviors and trust that define the culture.
5. Rising Attrition of Top Talent
   When high performers leave, the implicit knowledge and cultural anchors they carry can erode, weakening the organization from within.
6. Rapid Growth
   Expansion at high speed can dilute shared practices and norms, making it harder for employees to connect with the values that made the company successful.

By recognizing these high-risk moments, leaders can proactively protect and reinforce the cultural elements that sustain long-term performance.

Corporate Culture Matters
Unfortunately, many still mistakenly believe that culture is “soft people stuff” that can be deprioritized because it does not have a quantifiable impact on business performance. Successful leaders know better. They understand and leverage their culture to outperform their competition.

• A recent Harvard Business School research report described how an effective culture can account for up to half of the differential in performance between organizations in the same industry.
• Our own organizational alignment research found that cultural factors account for 40% of the difference between high and low performing companies in terms of revenue growth, profitability, customer retention, leadership effectiveness, and employee engagement.

High Growth Creates High Pressure
Strategy only succeeds when it flows through people and culture. Savvy leaders understand that during periods of rapid growth, protecting and aligning culture is essential. They recognize that success depends on how effectively teams collaborate to execute the strategy, and that culture can determine whether scaling is smooth or chaotic. Without a strong cultural foundation, even the best structures, processes, and systems can falter under the weight of expansion.

How to Maintain a Healthy, High-Performing, and Aligned Culture
Maintaining a strong, vibrant culture during hyper-growth is one of the greatest challenges leaders face. Even the most committed CEOs can struggle to influence culture when:

• Hiring surges dramatically, introducing new employees faster than norms can be reinforced
• Resources are stretched to their limits, leaving little bandwidth for intentional cultural leadership
• Customer and stakeholder demands are relentless, creating constant operational pressure
• There’s barely time for a lunch break, let alone to champion culture initiatives

The key lies in creating scalable cultural practices — embedding core values into every process, decision, and interaction — so culture doesn’t just survive growth but actively drives it.

Some Wise Advice
Too often, companies in high-growth phases let the pressures of rapid expansion erode the very culture that made them successful — only to regret it later. To safeguard culture while scaling, leaders should focus on intentional practices that preserve values, reinforce behaviors, and keep teams aligned. Here are key tips for protecting culture during periods of rapid growth:

1. Make Hiring the Top Priority
   Poor cultural fit is expensive. The Society for Human Resource Management estimates that turnover due to misalignment with culture can cost an organization 50–60% of an employee’s annual salary. New hires who do not align with existing or aspirational cultural norms often underperform and can negatively impact team engagement.

   Conversely, our own project postmortem engagement data shows that employees who are strong culture fits consistently report higher levels of:

   • Advocacy for the organization
   • Willingness to go above and beyond (discretionary effort)
   • Intent to stay long-term

   Recruiting and interviewing may be time-consuming, but delegating this responsibility is a mistake. Because each new hire has a profound impact on your culture, leaders must stay closely involved in the selection process. Hiring for cultural alignment ensures not just immediate performance, but also the long-term health and resilience of your team.

2. Reward High Performers and Address Underperformance Promptly
   Top companies recognize that talent contributes unevenly to organizational success. High performers — especially those aligned with the company’s culture and growth trajectory — deserve deliberate attention. Ensure you have a structured plan to identify, develop, engage, reward, and retain these individuals who drive performance and model the behaviors you want to see scaled across the organization.

   At the other end of the spectrum, underperformers or employees whose behaviors conflict with the culture can erode motivation, engagement, and commitment among top talent. Ignoring misalignment or underperformance risks losing your high performers and cultural champions.

   During periods of rapid growth, leaders must invest time and discipline to:

   • Set and communicate clear performance and behavior standards
   • Define meaningful rewards and consequences
   • Identify both high and low performers early
   • Recognize and reward top contributors consistently
   • Support underperformers with improvement plans — or help them exit gracefully if alignment cannot be achieved

   By actively managing both ends of the performance spectrum, you protect culture while ensuring the organization can scale effectively without losing its core strengths.

3. Monitor and Sustain Organizational Health
   We define organizational health as the degree to which corporate values and behaviors are consistently lived throughout the organization. Simply put: Healthy organizations perform better and adapt more effectively, and people want to work in environments where health is evident in daily behaviors and interactions.

   Organizational health is especially critical to protecting culture during periods of rapid growth. Much like employee engagement, it can be measured on a continuum — from poor to excellent — across key dimensions such as leadership effectiveness, trust, capabilities, and workplace climate.

   While health alone rarely differentiates one company’s performance from another, there are absolute minimum levels that must be maintained during times of growth and change. Failing to meet these thresholds can undermine strategy execution, disrupt culture, and impede talent retention.

   During periods of expansion or change, leaders should actively monitor and strengthen organizational health. Treat it as a foundational element of your talent management strategy, ensuring the company can attract, develop, engage, and retain top performers while scaling successfully.

4. Align Your Culture (the How) With Your Growth Strategy (the What)
   Periods of rapid growth and transformation often reveal gaps between how work gets done and the strategic goals of the business. Because strategy flows through people and culture, leaders must reassess cultural norms and priorities just as regularly as they evaluate go-to-market plans.

   To protect culture during rapid growth — and ensure it scales effectively alongside your business:

   • Assess your current organizational culture across ten proven cultural dimensions.
   • Identify where shifts are needed to align your culture (the “how”) with your growth strategy (the “what”).

The Bottom Line
Organizational culture can either accelerate growth or undermine it. To leverage and protect culture during rapid growth, leaders must actively prioritize, reinforce, and realign the behaviors and values that matter most. Investing in culture ensures your growth is sustainable — and that your organization thrives long-term.

To learn more about how to protect culture during rapid growth, download The 3 Levels of a High Performance Culture