Transcript:
00:10
You scaled, you hired, you grew. And somewhere along the way you looked around and thought, this does not feel like the company I built anymore. The energy is different, the team may feel disconnected, and the values you talked about in year one of your business are not just words on a wall that nobody references. Sounds familiar. Welcome back to the COO Solution Podcast. I’m your host Derek Fredrickson, and this is the missing piece to scaling your business with ease.
01:13
Derek Fredrickson
And today we are talking about one of the most common and most painful things I see happen to growing companies all the time, and one of the least talked about until the damage is unfortunately already done. It’s culture erosion. Not the dramatic kind where something blows up publicly and ends up in a headline or online. It’s the quiet kind, the slow drift that happens when a business grows faster than its identity can hold. And today I’m going to break down what exactly causes culture to break during growth and scale and what strong operational leadership does to prevent it. And how you, as a founder or CEO can stay intentional about culture even when everything around you is moving fast. So let’s get into it.
02:06
Derek Fredrickson
Let me start with something I hear constantly from founders and CEOs who are scaling. They tell me the culture used to be the thing that set them apart. The tight knit team, the shared mission, the way people showed up for each other each day. And then they hit a growth phase. New hires, new markets, new complexity. And slowly, almost unintentionally, that thing that they were so proud of started to disappear. Here’s the hard truth. Culture does not break because founders stop caring about it. It breaks because founders stop tending to it. And when you are in a high growth scale season, tending to culture feels like a luxury when actually it’s a necessity.
03:11
Derek Fredrickson
And the companies that scale successfully, that double their team and keep their identity, that enter new markets and still feel like the same organization, are the ones that treat culture as an operational discipline, not just a feeling. They build systems around it. They hire for it. They hold leadership accountable to it. And most importantly, they put someone in place who. Who owns it alongside the CEO. That is exactly where a COO or chief operating officer, or a really strong second in command becomes one of the most important culture assets a company has. Because the founder cannot be everywhere. But the right operator can make sure that the culture travels even when the founder does not. So today I want to give you the framework for how that actually works. Not theory, the practice.
04:16
Derek Fredrickson
Now, before we talk about how to protect culture, we need to understand why it breaks down in the first place. Because if you do not know what is causing the drift, you cannot stop it.Reason number one, you hire for speed instead of fit. When growth accelerates, hiring pressure accelerates with it. You need bodies in seats. You need coverage. And in that urgency, the hiring bar quietly drops. Not by intent, not by design. Nobody decides to stop hiring for culture fit. But suddenly you have people on the team who do not share the same values, do not understand the mission, and are not aligned with how you operate as an organization.
05:09
Derek Fredrickson
And those people, even just one or two of them, can change the feeling of a team faster than you think. And the fix is not slowing down hiring. That’s not an option. It is building culture into your hiring process as a non-negotiable filter, not an afterthought. Reason number two, your leadership layer does not reflect your values. Here is one of the most important things we tell our CEOs that we work with. Your culture is not what you say it is. It is what your managers and team do when you are not in the room.
05:53
Derek Fredrickson
If your middle layer of leadership is not deeply aligned with your values, your culture will break at that layer and the people below them will feel it immediately. This is one of the most critical roles a COO plays. The operator who sits between the CEO and the team is responsible for making sure the values cascade. That they do not stop at the executive level, but actually live in. How decisions get made, how people get developed, and how accountability gets applied at every level of the organization. Reason 3. You stop talking about culture because you assume everybody already knows it. In the early days, culture is explicit. You talk about it constantly because you are building it in real time. But as the company grows and scales, CEOs often stop talking about it, assuming that it’s understood, assuming it is embedded in the organization.
06:52
Derek Fredrickson
And what about those new people that are joining? They never got the full story. They never heard the why behind the values. And so they’re piecing things together from a culture perspective, from what they observe, which may not be the culture that you intended. So culture has to be communicated continuously, not just established once. It is not a founding document. It is a living and breathing conversation and reason number four, the systems and processes do not reflect the culture. This one is subtle but devastating. You can say your culture is built on trust and autonomy, but if your processes will require approval at every level and micromanagement is baked in to how the work gets done, the system contradicts the culture that can hurt. People will always believe what they experience over what they are told.
07:52
Derek Fredrickson
So if you want a culture of accountability, your operating model needs to build accountability in it. If you want a culture of ownership, your structure needs to give people something to actually own. Culture and operations are not separate. They have to be aligned or one will undermine the other.
Okay, so now let’s talk about what the solution actually looks like. How do you protect culture through a growth or scale phase? How does a COO or second in command leader keep the identity of the company intact even as the headcount doubles and the complexity multiplies? Number one, make culture part of the operating rhythm. Culture cannot live only in the off site retreat or the all hands meeting. It has to be part of how the company operates week in and week out.
08:59
Derek Fredrickson
That means weaving in the values into your meeting structures, your one ones, your performance reviews and your hiring conversations. It means creating regular moments, not just annual or semi annual ones where the team reconnects with the mission and the standards that define how you work. Listen, a great COO builds this into operating cadence so it happens consistently and frequently, not just when the founder remembers to bring it up. Number two, hire a leadership team that carries the culture, not just the skills. Every leadership hire is a culture hire. Every time you bring someone into a management role, you are amplifying whatever that person values and models. If they are high skill and low alignment, the skill will not save you alone. That misalignment will spread.
10:01
Derek Fredrickson
So the COO’s job in this area is to partner with the CEO, you on leadership, hiring with culture at the center and to develop the existing leadership layer so they become active carriers of the culture rather than passive participants in it. Number three, create accountability for culture, not just performance. Most companies measure performance. Very few companies build meaningful accountability for how people show up culturally and when there are no consequences for culture violations. When somebody consistently undermines trust, they dismiss the values or create a toxic dynamic and nothing happens. That message is sent to the rest of the team that the culture here is optional. Strong operational leaders make culture accountability real. They name it when something is off. They address it directly and early. They make clear that how you operate matters just as much as what you produce.
11:14
Derek Fredrickson
And lastly, number four, let the culture evolve without letting it drift. Here is something CEOs sometimes get wrong. They try to preserve the culture of year one forever. Even as the business grows into something that genuinely needs to mature and evolve. Holding too tightly to how things used to feel can be just as damaging as not holding on at all. The goal is not to freeze the culture. It is to protect the core while allowing the expression of it to evolve. The values do not change. The way they show up in a 25 person company may look very different than in the beginning with a 5 person company. And that’s okay. A strong COO helps the CEO navigate that distinction. Holding the line on what is non negotiable while creating the space for the organization to grow into its next version.
12:16
Derek Fredrickson
All right, now let’s make this practical. Whether you are in a growth phase right now or you are planning for one, here are three things you can do today.
Step 1. Do a culture audit. Sit down and ask yourself, honestly, if someone joined my company tomorrow and spent three weeks watching how things actually work, the meetings, the decisions, the conversations, the way people treat each other. What culture would they say they observe? Is it the one that you intended? Where’s the gap? That gap is where the work is.
Step 2. Look at your leadership layer. Identify the two or three people in your organization who have the most daily influence on your team. Are they actively carrying your culture? Are they modeling the values? Are they the kind of leaders you want your team to emulate?
13:20
Derek Fredrickson
If not, that is your most urgent culture problem. And it is not solved by a values poster. It is solved by development, accountability, or sometimes a hard conversation.
And lastly, step three, build one culture moment into your operating rhythm this week. It does not have to be big and elaborate. It could be starting your next team meeting by recognizing someone who demonstrated a core value of the organization. It could be asking your leadership team how the culture is showing up in their departments. It could be revisiting your core values in a one one with a key hire. Just one intentional moment this week and then again next week. Culture is built in repetition, not in one time events.
14:11
Derek Fredrickson
So these three steps will not fix everything overnight, obviously, but they will start moving the needle in the right direction and they will signal to your team that culture is not something that lives in a deck or on a poster. It lives in how you lead every single day.
Culture is not soft. It is one of the hardest and most important things to build and protect as your company grows. And the founders and CEOs who get it right are the ones who treat it with the same rigor and intentionality they give to revenue, sales and operations and team structure. So if you’re in a scaling season and you are starting to feel the drift, if the culture that made your company special is starting to feel like it is slipping away, do not wait.
15:10
Derek Fredrickson
That gap will compound and the longer it goes unaddressed, the more expensive it becomes to close.
Listen if today’s episode gave you something useful, go ahead and hit subscribe where you’re listening or watching to this podcast so you never miss a future episode.
And listen. If you know a founder or CEO who is in a growth phase and starting to worry about their culture, share this with them. It might be exactly the lesson and conversation they needed to hear. You can also take our free quiz if you are wondering whether your business has the operational foundation it needs to scale without losing what makes it great. Take my free quiz at thecoosolution.com. Just five minutes and you will have a clearer picture of where to focus.
16:02
Derek Fredrickson
And I would love to hear what is coming up for you after today’s episode. Are you in the middle of a scaling phase? Are you feeling the culture drift? Send me a message on LinkedIn or reach out at the coosolution.com and let’s talk about it. That’s a wrap on today’s episode. Thank you for listening. I’ll see you next time at the COO Solution podcast.
