Uber’s rise and fall is a masterclass in what happens when a company’s culture can’t keep up with its growth.
They were disrupting industries and growing faster than anyone could keep up with. But behind the shiny brand? Unchecked egos, toxic leadership, and cultural warning signs were left ignored. Lawsuits, government investigations, and a viral #DeleteUber campaign followed, costing them both trust and talent.
Let’s not sugarcoat it. Uber’s leadership built a culture where results mattered more than respect and where profit was put over people.
Here’s the real lesson:
You can’t scale a business and leave your culture behind.
And yet, I see it happen all the time, especially during times of fast growth or leadership change. Culture gets treated like a “nice to have” instead of the foundation that holds the whole operation together. Eventually, the cracks start showing.
If your team feels disconnected, confused, or burnt out and you can’t quite put your finger on why, it might be time to hit pause and ask: Is our culture still working? Or has it fallen behind our growth?
Let’s break down the signs it might be time for a reset.
What Organizational Culture Really Is
Culture isn’t just your mission statement or what’s printed on your recruiting brochure.
It’s what your people feel when they show up. It’s how decisions get made when no one’s watching. It’s the unspoken norms that shape behavior, expectations, and performance.
Most importantly?
Culture isn’t static.
It evolves. And if you don’t evolve it on purpose, it will evolve on accident—often in ways that create friction instead of alignment.
Not Sure If It’s Time for a Culture Reset? Start Here.
I’m pretty hopeless when it comes to fixing my computer. But I’ve learned one trick that rarely fails: the reset. When it crashes, I just turn it off and back on. In most cases, that easy trick gets my computer running smoothly again.
Sometimes, organizations need to do the same thing: a hard reset.
A culture reset requires taking a hard look at your culture and the behaviors that show up in it, what’s working, what’s not working, and making intentional choices about the culture you want to build.
Here are seven signals your culture isn’t keeping up with your business:
- Leadership is out of sync: If your leaders aren’t aligned (and worse, if your team can feel it), you’ve got a trust gap that can take your entire business offline. Take Sears. A new leadership team pitted divisions against each other, turning internal teams into competitors. That culture of competition (instead of collaboration) helped drive them straight into bankruptcy
- Employee feedback goes nowhere: A recent study discovered that 63% of employees felt their managers were ignoring them. Please don’t make your employees feel that way. Go spend a few hours and really get to know them.
- Burnout is obvious: Look around: Are your people showing up late, calling in sick, or checked out during meetings? Burnout doesn’t always come from overwork. Sometimes it comes from misalignment, when your people care but feel like things will never change, so they just quit contributing. .
- Communication is breaking down: Yahoo went through two massive data breaches in the early 2010s and never said a word to the public OR their employees. It wasn’t until they were selling a chunk of their company to Verizon that it was discovered. The result? A $350M loss in their sale price and total collapse of internal trust.
- Your values feel…vague: New employees don’t know which values their company stands for, and seasoned employees have long forgotten what they are. Here’s a rule of thumb: If you have to remind people what your company stands for by pointing to a poster in the hallway, your values aren’t embedded in how you operate the company.
- Recognition and growth opportunities are missing: The Majority of American companies have some sort of recognition program. But if recognition only gets handed out when quarterly goals get hit, your culture could be quietly starving.
- Policies take priority over people: Kodak and Blockbuster scaled before their culture could catch up. Their policies became rigid, and their processes were outdated. They put profit over people and lost both as a result.
What To Do Next
You don’t need to burn it all down and start over. But you do need to take a hard look at what’s working and what’s not.
Here’s how I help teams hit reset:
- Envision: Clarify the culture you want to build.
- It’s more than updating the mission statement. It’s about naming the values you want to live by, and by making sure they point your team in the right direction.
- Embed: Align your people and processes.
- Culture isn’t built in the boardroom. It’s shaped by how decisions get made, how feedback is given, and how teams operate day to day. It’s the systems and structures that actually support your vision and values.
- Experience: Make your culture real at every level.
- From onboarding to everyday meetings to the customer journey, your people should feel the culture, and not just hear about it. It’s how you create a remarkable brand experience.
Start With a Gut Check
Not sure where to begin?
Download The Culture Health Check, a free assessment I created to help leaders spot the friction before it becomes a failure.
It’s a quick, score-based checkup to help you see if your communication, leadership, and systems are keeping pace with your growth or quietly holding you back.
