3 Ways Workplace Culture Can Hinder Growth—and What to Do About It

Workplace Culture Can Hinder Growth: What to Know about Culture and Growth
Research on organizational alignment consistently shows that workplace culture — essentially, how work gets done — drives 40% of the difference between high- and low-performing companies. Deloitte’s recent findings reinforce this: 94% of executives and 88% of employees agree that a clear company culture is critical to business success. In short, culture can either accelerate growth or create significant barriers.

We couldn’t agree more. Once dismissed as “soft,” culture now has a hard, measurable impact on the bottom line. How people think, behave, and collaborate isn’t just an HR concern — it’s a business imperative.

3 Ways Your Culture Can Hinder Growth

1. Your Culture Isn’t Healthy Enough to Support High Growth
   Organizational health — rooted in leadership, trust, capability, and climate — is the foundation for sustainable growth. Just as personal health allows individuals to perform at their best, a healthy culture empowers teams to excel. When culture is unhealthy, toxicity creeps in, undermining engagement, retention, and performance.
   
   Ask yourself: Does your organization foster enough psychological safety for teams to thrive under the pressures of high growth?
   
   
2. Your Culture Tolerates Substandard Performance
   High-performing cultures set clear expectations and consistently hold people accountable. They define, measure, and reinforce performance in ways that balance immediate results with long-term success.
   
   Low-performing cultures, by contrast, allow underperformance to persist, which drags down those striving to excel. If expectations aren’t met, there must be consequences; if they’re exceeded, recognition should be unequivocal.
   
   Ask yourself: Is your performance management approach designed to cultivate the mindset and capabilities required to scale rapidly?
   
   
3. Your Culture Isn’t Aligned with Your Growth Strategy
   A strategy only succeeds when it flows through people and culture. The more closely culture aligns with growth objectives, the more likely your initiatives will succeed. Misalignment — when “how things get done” clashes with “what needs to get done” — creates friction, undermines collaboration, and slows strategy execution.
   
   For instance, if your growth plan emphasizes cross-selling complex solutions through deeper client relationships, but your culture rewards transactional, short-term behavior, your strategy will falter.
   
   Ask yourself: Are the ways your teams think, act, and collaborate fully aligned with your growth ambitions?

The Bottom Line
Creating a clear, believable, and implementable plan for growth is the first step.  Your second step is to assess your organizational culture so that you can shape and align it to purposefully help, not hinder, your strategic priorities.  Have you identified and addressed the ways your workplace culture can hinder growth?

To learn more about how to align your culture with your strategy, download How to Build a Purposeful and Aligned Corporate Culture that Gets You Where You Want to Go.

Tristam Brown

Tristam Brown is a seasoned business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.