Episode 32: Your culture alarm: growth slows every time you hit snooze
Published on 13 May 2025 • Hosted by Dr Lisa Colledge
Your product is strong. Your customers are happy. Revenue looks good. You’re facing an exciting opportunity to grow.
So why are you worried by something that you sense is… off in your team?
You’re almost certainly not imagining it. You’re hearing a culture alarm.
In this episode, I encourage you not to keep hitting snooze, but to listen to your internal alarm. It is there for a reason: because quiet signals—such as low energy, missed ownership, and unproductive meetings—tell you your team isn’t set up to scale at the same pace as your opportunity.
Too often, leaders dismiss these instincts, thinking that it’s probably normal when you’re growing. But I’ve seen it play out: exceptional teams faltering not from lack of skill, but from a culture that wasn't intentionally shaped. Ignoring culture alarms will quietly erode performance—until the impact becomes clear in burn out, stalled progress, and reduced profit margins.
The good news? It’s never too late to reset. In fact, these alarms are your first chance to shift things—fast. The sooner you move, the easier and quicker the solution is.
With small, focused, evidence-based steps, you can reignite energy, rebuild motivation, and recover your growth curve. One team I worked with saw a 20-point jump in engagement within two weeks of simply sharing honest, objective, blame-free observations about the state of the team’s culture.
Culture change doesn’t have to be slow—but it does have to be intentional.
This episode is a reminder to trust your instincts. They’ve brought you this far. Keep trusting them —and your culture will become the strongest enabler of the growth ahead.
If you sense the culture alarm, listening to this podcast is a great first step towards investing in your growth. The podcast episodes I recommended in the episode, if you’d like to learn a bit more, were:
Episode 29: Culture is the game — IBM vs Polaroid.
Episode 12: Avoiding the Polaroid pitfall: a culture of healthy dissent.
Episode 27: Empathy, innovation, and the future of work: a discussion with Robert Annis.
I’m Dr Lisa Colledge, and I help ambitious leaders build future-ready teams they trust to deliver now and adapt to whatever’s next — driving engagement, performance, and enduring resilience.
Learn more about building Neuro-Inspired Teams that outpace, outperform, and outlast your competition.
