Scaling Your Culture: Maintaining Core Values as an Organisation Grows
How do you keep the connection and principles alive as teams expand? Develop tactics to integrate fundamental principles into expanding frameworks.
Scale your organisational culture effectively. Explore leadership strategies to embed core values and connections as your organisation or team successfully expands.
I remember the exact moment I realised we were losing it.
Our company was just 12 people. We shared a cramped office that always smelled faintly of burnt coffee and ambition. We knew each other’s families. We argued passionately about product features. We celebrated every tiny win like we’d just won the NRL Premiership. Our values were not etched on a surface; they permeated every breath we took.
Then, we got funding. Big funding.
Suddenly, we were hiring. Fast. The team doubled, then tripled. New faces appeared every week. The office got bigger and shinier, but the air felt different. Thinner. The internal jokes began to fade away. I was unaware that decisions were taking place in meetings I had not been invited to.
One afternoon, I saw a new hire sitting alone, looking completely lost. I realised I didn’t even know her name.
That was the moment. The magic, the essence of our creation, was evaporating like sand. We encountered one of the most common organisational growth challenges. Our culture was breaking under the strain of our success.
This article describes how we resolved the issue. It’s a collection of crucial lessons. They are hard-won for any leader watching their team expand and pondering how to keep the original spark.
Key Takeaways
Before we get into the nuts and bolts, here’s the big picture:
Your culture is what people do when no one is looking. Scaling it is an active, not passive, process.
Leadership’s job is to be the chief reminder of “who we are and why we’re here.”
Values on a poster are useless. Values must be verbs—actions you hire, reward, and part ways for.
Rituals and stories are the glue that holds growing teams together across different floors and time zones.
The Tipping Point of Anonymity
The problem with growth isn’t the new people. It’s the anonymity that creeps in.
When you’re small, accountability is natural. You can’t hide. Your actions, good or bad, are visible to everyone. This creates a powerful self-regulating system. But when you grow to 50, or 150, people can become numbers on a spreadsheet. Departments become silos. The “us” feeling shrinks to just the people at your lunch table.
This is the breeding ground for cultural decay. The unwritten rules that once governed behaviour get forgotten because the new majority never learned them in the first place.
I saw it happening at our company. Little things started to change.
People stopped tidying the kitchen.
Emails became more formal and less collaborative.
Our once steadfast assumption of noble intent gave way to a quiet suspicion.
We were succeeding on paper but failing as a community.
Instead of a top-down mandate, the solution began with a thorough introspection.
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