How Culture Scales (or Doesn’t)
The Uneven Path of Growth
When a company grows significantly, be that from 2 to 20, 30 to 300, or 300 to 3,000, the question of what to build is quickly overtaken by how the people building it work together.
Growth isn't just a numbers game. It's a cultural stress test. The assumptions, behaviors, and rituals that held everything together at one size can fall apart at another. Communication that once happened organically now requires structure. Decisions that used to fit around a whiteboard now sprawl across layers. Team rituals that once felt magical become awkward, outdated, or outright ignored.
This article explores the uneven, nonlinear way culture scales, highlighting what tends to endure, what tends to break, and how leaders can evolve their culture without losing their soul.
"If you get the culture right, most of the other stuff will just take care of itself."
– Tony Hsieh, Former CEO of Zappos
Growth vs. Scale
In business, “growth” and “scale” are often tossed around like synonyms. They show up interchangeably in investor pitches, team offsites, and executive planning docs. But while the two may seem similar, the difference between them becomes stark the moment your organization starts getting bigger, and messier.
Growth is straightforward. You grow a company by adding more: more people, more resources, more locations, more revenue. It’s about expansion in size and scope, and in many cases, it works, at least for a while. You need more support tickets handled? Hire 10 more customer success reps. Want to accelerate a product roadmap? Add two more teams. Growth, in this sense, is additive. It gets you more output by increasing input.
Scale, by contrast, is about leverage. It’s about getting more without a linear increase in cost or complexity. When companies scale well, they build systems, tools, and cultural norms that allow the organization to deliver greater results without always reaching for the hiring spigot. Instead of adding more people to ship faster, you might automate deployment pipelines. Instead of adding manual QA testers, you invest in comprehensive test coverage. Scaling is about efficiency and repeatability, it’s the difference between hiring your way through a bottleneck and removing the bottleneck altogether.
Culture follows this same dynamic, only it’s often overlooked until it starts to break.
Most companies grow their culture in the early days by relying on proximity. At 10 or 20 people, everyone can absorb the culture just by being in the room. You see how the founders give feedback, how decisions are made, what gets celebrated, and what gets ignored. It’s intuitive and undocumented. It doesn’t need scaffolding, yet.
But as your team grows, whether from 20 to 100 or 300 to 3,000, that passive transmission of culture doesn’t scale. People join who never sat in the early all-hands meetings or heard the origin story firsthand. They read the values slide deck, but they didn’t live the values with the founding team. Misalignment starts to creep in, not because anyone is acting in bad faith, but because culture was never designed to operate at this size. It wasn’t scaled. It was simply grown, and then expected to hold.
This is where many organizations stumble. Instead of investing in systems that help culture scale, they try to fix the problems by adding more, more HR programs, more offsites, more policy documents. The instinct is to grow the culture in the same way they grew headcount. But that approach rarely works.
Scaling culture isn’t about volume; it’s about durability. It’s about deliberately designing rituals, feedback loops, decision-making frameworks, and shared language that reinforce your values consistently across time, teams, and geographies. As Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings puts it, “Do not tolerate brilliant jerks. The cost to teamwork is too high.” That kind of belief only works if it’s embedded, not just spoken aloud in a values meeting, but reinforced through hiring practices, performance reviews, and everyday behavior.
The difference between growth and scale shows up most clearly when things go sideways. In a company that has scaled its culture, teams know how to act even when leadership isn’t in the room. People share a common understanding of how decisions are made, what’s expected of them, and what the organization values. In companies that have only grown their culture, those same moments often spiral into confusion, misalignment, and politics.
Growth gets you bigger. Scaling gets you stronger. And when it comes to culture, strength matters more than size.
Three Inflection Points in Cultural Growth
Culture is often most vibrant in the earliest stages of a company, but also most fragile. As a company grows, the way culture operates shifts dramatically, passing through distinct phases. What works for a small team often begins to break in a medium-sized one, and what survives there can feel irrelevant or even obstructive once the organization becomes large.
Understanding these inflection points can help leaders anticipate the cultural challenges ahead, not just react to them when things start slipping.
🔹 Small Teams: Culture by Proximity
In a small team, culture is deeply personal. Everyone knows each other. Communication is direct, unfiltered, and constant. There’s little need for documentation because understanding flows through shared experience. You don’t need a slide deck about company values when you’re eating lunch together every day and solving problems side-by-side. The culture is mostly modeled by the founders or early leaders, and it’s reinforced informally, through stories, tone, habits, and intuition.
Decisions are made quickly because context is shared. Conflict is resolved in real time. Trust is high because everyone has visibility into what everyone else is doing. Culture feels like a natural extension of the relationships between individuals.
🔹 Medium Teams: Culture Under Pressure
As the team expands into a medium-sized organization, the cracks begin to show. New people join who weren’t part of the origin story. They haven’t seen how things were built. They don’t carry the institutional memory of past decisions, and they start interpreting things differently, sometimes in ways that feel surprisingly off-base to early team members.
This is where assumptions become dangerous. What used to be clear now requires explanation. Values that once felt self-evident need to be articulated, taught, and reinforced intentionally. Informal norms, like “how we give feedback” or “how we handle failure”, begin to diverge across teams or functions.
Middle managers start to play a larger role, and with them comes a shift in how information flows and how decisions get made. Without clear scaffolding, culture becomes fragmented. One team might be operating in an agile, experimental way, while another is slow and risk-averse. People in different departments might interpret the same value, say, “ownership” or “transparency”, in entirely different ways, sometimes to the point of contradiction.
At this stage, companies often start trying to formalize culture: writing down values, launching onboarding programs, holding all-hands meetings. But unless these are done with intention and clarity, they can feel like hollow gestures. The risk is that culture becomes performative, a slogan on a wall instead of a set of living, breathing practices.
🔹 Large Teams: Culture by Design
Once an organization reaches the scale of a large team or enterprise, culture must be systematized, or it will dissolve. With multiple layers of management, cross-functional dependencies, geographic distribution, and a steady stream of new hires, it’s no longer enough to “just hire great people” and hope for the best.
Culture at this level requires real infrastructure. It has to be embedded in hiring, onboarding, performance management, and leadership development. It has to be taught, through stories, yes, but also through decision-making frameworks, repeatable rituals, and operating principles that are understood across the company.
At the large-team stage, leadership can no longer rely on charisma or visibility to shape behavior. The CEO doesn’t have a direct relationship with every employee. Culture becomes less about individual leaders and more about institutional habits. It’s not just what leaders say, it’s what gets rewarded, what gets tolerated, and what gets repeated.
Organizations that scale well at this stage often treat culture as a product. They revisit it regularly. They test its assumptions. They look for friction and refine the experience. And they ensure the foundational values remain intact, even as the expressions of those values evolve to fit new contexts.
What Rituals Actually Scale
Not all rituals break under pressure. Some are designed with just enough structure and meaning to scale effectively across team sizes and time zones.
✅ Blameless Postmortems - Popularized in engineering, these aren’t just for infrastructure teams. They model a learning culture and psychological safety. Scaled well, with templates, facilitation training, and cross-functional adoption, they make failure a place for insight, not blame.
✅ Decision-Making Frameworks - Ritualized decision logic, like Amazon’s one-way vs. two-way door model or conviction/consequence matrices, help teams make better calls without waiting on executives. They’re repeatable, teachable, and scale across complexity.
✅ Onboarding Storytelling - Values printed on posters rarely change behavior. But real stories, why certain norms exist, who modeled them, what mistakes shaped them, travel farther. Great onboarding programs don’t just teach what we do. They teach why it matters.
✅ Feedback Loops - Whether via retrospectives, peer reviews, or skip-levels, well-designed feedback loops let culture be a conversation, not a monologue. They also scale trust when managed with care.
What Rituals Break (and Why)
Some rituals work beautifully, until they don’t. Often, their failure isn’t obvious until the damage is done.
❌ Founder Osmosis - Early-stage teams rely on proximity. Watch the founder. Mimic how they handle conflict or celebrate wins. But once you cross even modest headcount, this no longer scales. Culture needs to be explicit, not just observed.
❌ Organic Bonding - Ad hoc lunches, happy hours, or hallway serendipity become less frequent. Remote work exacerbates the problem. Culture needs intentional connection points, or you drift into cliques and silos.
❌ Unspoken Norms - “We all just know how we do things here” is a red flag. Unwritten rules eventually get misinterpreted or gatekept. What once felt natural starts to feel exclusive.
Sometimes it’s not that rituals break, it’s that they ossify.
Many teams fall into the trap of failing to revisit old decisions. Whether it’s an internal tool you built at 50 people or a meeting format from the Series A days, failing to evolve can introduce friction and resentment.
Cultural rituals need to be audited, not just maintained. What made sense at 100 people may now be redundant, or even counterproductive. Like product features, some rituals need deprecation plans.
How to Scale Culture Deliberately
Here are some principles to guide the transition:
1. Codify Early, Revisit Often - Don’t wait until 500 people to write down your values. But also don’t laminate them. Culture should be a living document.
2. Use Stories, Not Slogans - Values should feel like choices, not clichés. “Default to transparency” is fine, but a story of when someone did it well (or didn’t) makes it real.
3. Design for Scale, Not Nostalgia - Just because something used to work doesn’t mean it still does. Rituals should match your team’s shape, not its history.
4. Invest in Cross-Functional Glue - Culture frays most at the edges, across departments, levels, and locations. Build bridges, not silos. Encourage cross-pollination.
5. Model It Every Day - Culture is what leaders do, not what they say. If you want a feedback culture, you better be asking for feedback. If you want trust, you need to trust first.
Final Thoughts
Culture doesn’t scale by accident. As companies grow, whether from a handful of people to dozens, or from hundreds to thousands, the way they work, communicate, and make decisions inevitably changes. The challenge isn’t to preserve culture in amber, but to carry its essence forward with intention. That means recognizing which rituals still serve you, which need to evolve, and which have quietly expired. The strongest cultures aren’t static, they adapt without losing their identity. Getting there requires more than values on a slide; it demands leadership, systems, and a willingness to revisit assumptions. Culture isn’t what you once were, it’s what you choose to be, every time your team gets a little bigger.