Ashford Communities

After nearly 30 years in Human Resources, I have had the opportunity to work with organizations through growth, hypergrowth, transformation, contraction, leadership changes and everything in between. One thing I have learned is that growth is rarely as clean as it looks on an organizational chart.

We often measure growth through numbers: more employees, new locations, stronger revenue, expanded services or new technology. Those things matter, but behind every number are people trying to understand what that growth means for them. Will my role change? Will I still have access to leadership? Will the things that made this a great place to work disappear? Do our values still mean the same thing now that we are bigger? Those questions matter because organizations do not simply scale operationally. Their cultures have to scale, too. And scaling culture does not mean keeping it exactly the same.

Culture has to travel through other people.

I have never believed culture is what we put on a wall or write in an employee handbook. Culture is what employees experience: how supervisors respond to mistakes, whether leaders follow through, how decisions are communicated, whether accountability is consistent and whether employees feel comfortable raising concerns. When an organization is small, senior leaders can influence that experience.

That is why frontline and mid-level leaders become culture carriers as an organization grows. Employees may hear the vision from the CEO, but they experience culture through their immediate leader. HR sometimes makes the mistake of thinking we own the culture. We do not. Our responsibility is to define, reinforce and measure it, and give leaders tools to carry it forward. Ultimately, culture belongs to everyone.

Growth Requires More Clarity, Not More Complexity

I learned this firsthand while working for an organization that grew approximately 150% in a single year. It was exciting but incredibly challenging. Almost overnight, we had a much larger workforce, new leaders, changing responsibilities and questions that had never surfaced when the organization was smaller.

Like many HR leaders, my initial instinct was that growth required more structure: more policies, processes, meetings and approvals. But as I stepped back, I realized something important: we did not necessarily need more. We needed greater clarity around what we had already established.

“Culture is not something leaders preserve. It is something people carry forward.”

Some practices needed to be amended because the business had outgrown them. Others remained relevant but needed to be communicated more clearly and applied consistently. In many cases, employees and leaders did not need another policy. They needed to understand the policies, expectations and practices already in place and why they mattered. That experience changed how I think about scale. Before creating another process, policy or approval, I ask: Is something truly missing, or have we simply outgrown how we communicate and apply what we already have?

Growth requires structure, but structure without clarity eventually becomes bureaucracy.

Protect the Culture, But Let It Evolve

Earlier in my career, I thought preserving a strong culture meant protecting it from change. Experience taught me differently. As organizations grow, their cultures evolve.

The organization that takes you from 50 employees to 200 may not be the same organization that takes you from 200 to 500. Technology changes how work gets done, and AI is forcing us to rethink how work can be performed. The goal should not be to preserve every practice because it was successful. Our responsibility as leaders is to understand the difference between what is foundational and what is familiar. Protect the values and behaviors that define you and the trust built. But give yourself permission to shed practices that no longer serve the organization.

A process that worked may now slow people down. A communication practice that worked with 50 employees may be ineffective with 500. A leadership behavior that worked in a startup may not work. That is not abandoning your culture. That is allowing it to mature.

Healthy organizations ask: What should we keep? What should we improve? And what should we stop doing? Sometimes growth requires letting go.

Listen Differently as You Grow

As organizations grow, senior leaders naturally become more removed from the everyday employee experience. Information travels through more layers and may become summarized, softened or filtered before reaching executives.

That makes listening differently even more important. Engagement surveys are valuable, but some of the most useful insights I have received throughout my career have come from simply being present: walking the workplace, sitting with employees, listening to managers describe what is not working, reviewing exit feedback or asking: “What are we making harder than it needs to be?”

It is a simple question, but the answers can reveal a great deal about organizational health. The harder part is acting on what you hear. Employees do not expect leaders to fix everything. But they do expect us to listen, communicate honestly and follow through on what we say we will address.

The Human Side of Growth Still Matters

technology and AI than almost any workplace transformation during my career. These tools will change how HR operates, how leaders make decisions and how employees work. But the more technology enters the workplace, the more intentional we need to become about the human experience. Technology can identify trends, automate processes, analyze feedback, improve productivity and provide leaders with better information.

It cannot replace trust.

It cannot replace a manager having a difficult conversation with compassion. It cannot make an employee feel valued if their leader never recognizes their contribution. And it cannot create accountability if leaders are unwilling to hold themselves to the same expectations they set for others. Those things remain human.

Growth Should Change You

Ultimately, I no longer believe the goal of scaling culture is to make sure an organization feels exactly the same at 500 employees as it did at 50. Growth should change you. The challenge is making sure it changes you in the right ways.

Keep what works. Strengthen what matters. Question what has become outdated. Shed practices that no longer add value. Give people permission to think differently about what the organization can become. If employees understand what the organization stands for, see those values reflected in leadership behavior, feel heard, know what is expected of them and trust that leadership will follow through, the culture has not evolved.

After nearly 30 years in HR, I have come to believe that helping an organization evolve without losing sight of who it is may be one of the most important responsibilities we have as leaders.