Building and protecting a healthy company culture takes at least as much intentional action as sustaining physical fitness in a human body. By continually investing in cultural health, leaders not only defend their people against workplace toxicity, they also reinforce the organization’s foundation for profitability, innovation, and resilience. Culture-strengthening leaders make five purposeful moves to get the results they want: modeling desired behaviors, attending to regular employee feedback, addressing values violations promptly, communicating openly through change, and promoting only culture-building A-Players.

Business growth keeps your company from stagnating or losing ground to your competition. But “growth at all costs” can devastate a business and its people. That rapid-growth strategy, especially popular among startups aiming to scale quickly and profit later, simply cannot be maintained over the long term. Unfortunately, the biggest losers under that approach are very people who could have been foundational for lasting growth.