Fuzzy to Fuel: Make Culture Your Growth Engine 🚀

Sarah McLellan

Nov 3

4 min read

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Emma’s start to the week follows a similar pattern.

Every Monday morning, she opens her laptop determined to “do something about culture.” As the CPO of a fast-scaling tech company, she can feel the invisible drag setting in. The organisation is growing fast — but something beneath the surface is starting to fray.

The team is talented. The product is strong. But conversations feel heavier. Decisions take longer. That early buzz of energy and momentum has faded.

Misalignment creeps in between teams. Frustrations bubble up. Engagement surveys highlight the same themes quarter after quarter: a lack of clarity, inconsistent leadership signals, and patchy communication.

Emma knows culture matters. She can feel it in every leadership conversation. But she doesn’t know where to start — or how to make it stick.

So she does what many leaders do.

She talks about culture at all-hands meetings. She declares it “a priority.” She runs another engagement survey… but nothing really changes.

Not because she doesn’t care. But because it feels too big, too messy, too risky to tackle.

And every day it goes unaddressed, the cracks widen.

When culture is fuzzy, growth slows down

Emma’s story isn’t unique. It’s the quiet reality inside many organisations.

We’ve normalised treating culture as something fuzzy — something that sounds good in leadership decks but is hard to define, tricky to measure, and easy to park when other priorities shout louder.

But this comes at a cost.

Research makes it painfully clear:

Gallup shows disengaged employees cost organisations around 18% of their annual salary in lost productivity
McKinsey found that strong cultures correlate with three times higher shareholder returns
MIT Sloan Management reports that toxic cultures are over 10x more likely to lead to turnover than pay

We’ve all seen public examples of this: companies with brilliant products but weak cultural foundations. They scale fast… until the cracks start to show. Trust erodes, energy drains, and performance stalls.

Hoping culture will sort itself out isn’t a strategy. It’s a slow-burn risk.

There is another path…

Turn culture into your growth engine

What if culture didn’t have to be fuzzy?

What if, instead of being a “soft topic,” it became one of your sharpest strategic levers?

The world’s best and most resilient organisations have figured this out. They treat culture with the same seriousness they give to product, finance or customer strategy.

They make it tangible, trackable, and tied to growth. They move from vague good intentions to laser-focused action. They transform culture from a drag into a fuel source.

At Make It Human, we help leaders do just that.

The first shift? Making culture visible.

We use the Culture Triangle, which breaks culture down into three observable layers:

The environment people work in — the spaces, signals, and systems
The behaviours that are rewarded, tolerated, or left unaddressed
The everyday habits that shape how work really gets done

When leaders can see culture in these tangible ways, they stop guessing — and start leading with clarity.

Then it’s about rewiring ‘how things work around here’ for growth. That’s where our proven models and HABIT approach make culture-shaping feel clear and focused:

Hear how people feel — because culture isn’t what’s written on the wall, it’s what’s experienced every day
Align on the future — clarity creates shared energy
Build the behaviours — small, repeatable actions shape real change
Integrate it daily — culture lives in rhythms, not slogans
Trust & evolve — keep nudging, adjusting, learning.

Small nudges, powerful shifts

In today’s complex and evolving landscape, the organisations that thrive don’t treat culture as a big-bang transformation project. They build it steadily, intentionally, through everyday habits, to keep fuelling growth for what lies around the corner.

They weave culture into their daily rhythms, not their annual strategy decks. They make it part of team conversations, not a side project. They spot “culture cracks” early and address them before they become fault lines.

They use moments of change — new hires, product launches, leadership transitions — to realign and reinforce what matters most.

This is what companies like AirBnB, Atlassian, Zapier and Octopus Energy understand. Culture isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s their engine. (Read more on how some of these organisations achieve this in our Culture Stories series)

And you can too.

With a proven formula for success, a language that makes it tangible, and skills to bring it to life you can turn fuzzy intentions into focused action.