The Culture Drift is Real, Here’s How to Lead Through It
Here’s a moment most founders don’t expect:
Your company is growing.
Revenue is up. You’re hiring fast. The roadmap is expanding.
And still… something feels off.
Meetings are heavier. Slack feels noisier. Decisions take longer. You can’t put your finger on it, but the vibe’s changed.
What you’re feeling is culture drift.
It’s not a meltdown. It’s not a crisis.
It’s something slower, subtler, and way more dangerous.
Because if you don’t catch it early, culture doesn’t just drift.
It erodes.
Here’s how to catch it, fix it, and lead through it.
1. Culture isn’t what’s written. It’s what’s felt.
You can have values on the wall. You can talk about “ownership” and “transparency” in onboarding decks.
But if your team feels anxious, siloed, or unsure of how decisions are made?
That’s your actual culture.
Start by asking:
- What do people joke about here?
- What do we praise, and what do we quietly tolerate?
- What happens when someone makes a mistake?
These are the cultural truths, not your Figma file.
2. More people = more entropy.
Every person you add increases complexity.
And every layer added without clarity creates friction.
That’s not a failure. That’s physics.
But you need to lead with structure:
- Are your team leads aligned on how to run 1:1s?
- Do new hires know what good communication looks like here?
- Does everyone understand how decisions actually get made?
The faster you grow, the more intentional you have to be about how people work together, not just what they work on.
3. Your early team still sets the tone, even if they’re quiet.
Founders often forget: legacy employees carry the blueprint of the culture.
If you scale fast and leave them behind, two things happen:
- They get frustrated and pull back
- New hires sense the tension and adapt downward
Loop your early team in. Give them new lanes to lead. Let them teach. Let them shape.
They’re not just “early employees.”
They’re cultural carriers.
4. Rituals are your secret weapon.
Culture scales best through rituals, the consistent behaviors that make your values real.
Some of my favorite founder-led rituals:
- “We own our misses” roundups at all-hands
- 15-minute wins-and-worries Slack thread every Friday
- Shoutouts that reflect actual values (“thanks for pushing back on the feature scope” > “thanks for working late”)
You don’t need more posters. You need more patterns.
5. You can’t protect culture from the sidelines.
Founders sometimes pull back from culture work as they grow.
It feels “people-y,” or like something HR should handle.
But here’s the truth: you’re still the signal.
How you speak. How you show up. How you make time.
If culture matters to you, people will act like it matters.
And if you go quiet? They will too.
Final thought: Culture doesn’t scale itself, but it can scale with you.
Culture isn’t fixed. It’s dynamic.
And if you’re intentional, it becomes one of your most defensible assets.
The best teams I’ve coached through scale didn’t preserve culture by holding on tight.
They did it by evolving the spirit of the early company into something bigger, clearer, and more inclusive.
If you’re feeling the culture drift, or just want to future-proof what makes your company special, let’s work through it.
