At Mix, culture has always been more than a buzzword – it’s the foundation we started with.
Before we had a name, a website, a logo, or cardboard cutouts that we tote around to conferences with us, we were six people sitting around a table talking about the kind of company we wanted to build.
From day one, our culture was rooted in four key values, and while we’ve grown and evolved over the years, what hasn’t changed is our belief in the power of building something meaningful. Not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because a strong culture is essential to attracting top talent and bringing breakthroughs to life.
Of course, getting everyone on the same page about what “culture” really means is hard enough. But the real challenge comes with change: scaling teams, shifting priorities, and navigating uncertainty.
Handled well, growth can reinforce and elevate your culture. But it can also send things drifting in a direction you didn’t intend – leaving you wondering what changed, and what to do next.
What Is Culture Drift – and Why Does It Happen?
It usually starts small: a tight-knit team aligned around a mission, where culture feels organic. Collaboration is seamless, trust is high, and values are simply how things get done.
But as growth kicks in, the dynamics begin to shift. Decision-making slows. Friction shows up between functions. New hires struggle to connect while longtime employees disengage. The culture you built starts to feel… different.
That’s culture drift.
It rarely happens all at once. More often, it’s the slow change that comes with scale and shifting priorities. And in the high-pressure world of life sciences – where complexity, competition, and rapid change are the norm – it’s not just common, it’s expected.
Some of the biggest drivers of culture drift include:
Rapid Growth
When teams grow fast, culture tends to dilute. Harvard Business Review notes that companies growing at ~40% CAGR often struggle to maintain cultural cohesion without deliberate effort. As new layers form and middle managers take the reins, cultural ownership often gets lost in translation.
Misaligned Hiring and Onboarding
In a hiring sprint, speed can edge out fit. Candidates who look great on paper may lack alignment with your values or ways of working. And without strong onboarding, even great hires are left to guess what “good” looks like, eroding clarity and cohesion across the board.
Organizational Disruption
Layoffs, leadership changes, and restructures shake more than reporting lines. They impact trust. Without transparency and consistency, employees begin to question whether the values that drew them in still hold true.
Milestone Pressure and Burnout
Life sciences companies run on milestones: funding, trials, launches. But that pressure can deprioritize collaboration and transparency in favor of speed and survival. Over time, those tradeoffs become embedded in how people work.
And while it may feel efficient, the long-term costs are real. McKinsey research shows that organizations with healthy cultures outperform peers by up to 3× total shareholder return, even during times of crisis.
The bottom line: culture drift doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It means your organization is growing. What matters is what you do next.
Turning Insight Into Action: Rebuilding Cultural Alignment
Culture drift isn’t a reason to panic, but it is a reason to pause and reassess. Here are four practical ways to start bringing your culture back into alignment with your organization’s mission and values.
1. Step Back, Observe, and Listen
Resist the impulse to immediately try to solve the problem; instead, get curious. Where is your culture still strong? Where is it breaking down? Are there pockets of alignment within the organization? Did this shift happen slowly over time or was it triggered by a specific event?
Before making changes, it’s critical to understand what’s really going on across the broader system. Acting too quickly on assumptions can ultimately make matters worse.
Take time to listen to employees, managers, and teams. The goal is to gain a clear, shared view of how things have changed and why.
2. Equip Your People Leaders
As companies expand, culture is largely shaped on a daily basis by mid-level leaders.
These managers are often caught in the middle: responsible for team morale, communication, execution, and alignment, without always having the training, tools, or authority to lead through change.
Make sure they’re supported. Help them understand not just what the culture should look like, but how to recognize drift, how to escalate issues, and how to manage the emotional and practical challenges that come with change.
When leaders feel disconnected or frustrated, that frustration spreads fast. But when they feel confident, supported, and clear on how to lead, that’s when culture can take root again.
3. Assess and Support Your Existing Team
Not every culture issue calls for a radical reboot.
Sometimes, it’s about understanding who’s thriving, who’s struggling, and where there’s room to grow. Assessments and surveys can help identify not just performance gaps, but alignment gaps, too; that is, where people are disconnected from the mission or unclear on expectations.
From there, transparent and frequent communication, coaching, feedback, and targeted development can help individuals and teams re-engage. In some cases, it may become clear that certain roles or people are no longer the right fit. That’s not failure – it’s progress.
4. Reinforce Through Values-Based Hiring
Once you’ve taken stock of where you are and ensured your leaders are getting the support they need, you can start to refocus – and hiring is one of the most effective ways to do it. That doesn’t mean hiring people who look, think, or act the same. In fact, diversity of thought, background, and identity is essential for a strong culture and performance.
What is essential is alignment around values and ways of working. New hires should understand and be energized by your mission. They should bring new ideas while still operating in a way that supports the organization you’re trying to build.
That kind of values-based alignment often gets overlooked during high-growth phases, but it’s key to cultural stability over time.
How Mix Can Help
It’s easy to think of culture as something you “solve,” or something that gets handled by HR or a specially appointed task force.
But culture doesn’t live in one department, and it isn’t static. It lives in your processes, your expectations, your incentives, and your people leaders. It shows up in how you communicate, how you make decisions, and what gets reinforced – or ignored. And ultimately, it has to be owned at every level, starting with leadership.
So whether you’re just starting to feel the signs of culture drift or working through deeper organizational shifts, Mix can help in a few key areas:
Consulting & Organizational Development
Through consulting and organizational development work, we partner with life sciences companies to identify cultural misalignment, assess team dynamics, and optimize ways of working.
Assessments & Surveys
Our assessment tools and surveys help measure values alignment – for both existing teams and new hires – and inform smarter, more cohesive hiring strategies.
Coaching & Development
Our coaching and development programs give leaders and teams the support they need to re-engage and move forward together.
As we’ve said from the beginning: Culture is built by people. And runs on talent.
If you’re ready to get yours on track, we’d love to be a part of it. Get in touch with us today and let’s connect on how we can help.
