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The Home of Culture Research: The Business of Culture I 2026 I Download Now
What Workday's Growth Summit taught us about building a high-performance culture
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At Workday’s Go for Growth summit, leaders from BCG, Nayya, Abnormal AI and Workday explored what actually changes when companies treat people strategy as part of how they grow.
Growth creates an interesting problem for culture. The things that help a company move quickly in its earlier years can become harder to preserve once teams expand, leadership layers appear and the business starts operating across more markets. At the same time, the quality of the people inside the organisation becomes even more consequential.
That tension came up repeatedly at Workday’s Go for Growth summit at Nasdaq headquarters in New York City, where finance, HR and technology leaders came together to discuss what growing companies need to get right next.
We moderated a conversation on people and culture with Johann Harnoss, Partner and Chief People Officer at BCG Henderson Institute; Sarah Liebel, President and COO of Nayya; Maya Marcus, Chief People Officer at Abnormal AI; and Heather Gardner, VP of Business Technology at Workday.
The discussion moved beyond the usual question of how to attract great people. The more useful question was what kind of organisation allows those people to have an outsized effect once they arrive.
One theme kept resurfacing: high performance is not something companies can simply demand from employees. The organisation around those employees has to make it possible.
Diversity came up in the conversation through a performance lens. The panel discussed the advantage companies gain when teams contain people who approach the same problem from genuinely different experiences and perspectives. As businesses enter new markets or encounter unfamiliar problems, that breadth becomes particularly useful.
BCG has attempted to measure part of this through its work on corporate vitality its assessment of a company's potential for long-term growth. Within that research, people vitality accounts for 18% of the overall index and considers factors including the strength and diversity of a company's talent. According to BCG, companies in the top quartile for people vitality tend to grow revenue around 29% faster and produce five percentage points more shareholder value annually.
The interesting takeaway is not simply that companies should hire more diverse teams. It is that the composition of the organisation changes the range of answers available to it.
For companies growing internationally, hiring repeatedly from the same backgrounds and networks eventually becomes a constraint. New markets bring different customer behaviour and different ways of working. A company needs enough variety in the people solving those problems to see what it might otherwise miss.
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Stop using proxies for ability That naturally led the conversation towards hiring.
Many companies still rely heavily on signals such as university credentials, previous job titles or a certain number of years in a similar role. The panel discussed a different question: what can this person actually do?
Instead of assuming that somebody with a particular background will perform well, hiring becomes more closely connected to the work the person will actually be responsible for. That can help growing businesses move faster because they are selecting for capability rather than relying on proxies for it.
One idea from the panel was to bring a company's strongest performers into candidate assessment even when the role does not sit directly inside their team. These employees already understand what excellent performance looks like in that particular organisation.
Their involvement makes hiring part of protecting the standard of the company rather than something that belongs solely to recruiters and hiring managers. That matters because every person a growing company brings in changes the environment slightly.
The question is not only whether somebody can fill the role that exists today. It is whether they increase what the organisation will be capable of doing tomorrow.
Ownership starts with personal responsibility
Another discussion centred on something almost every scaling company says it wants to preserve: an ownership mindset. It is often described as getting employees to “think like founders.”
The panel took a more useful view. Most employees are not founders, and pretending otherwise can make ownership unnecessarily abstract. What matters is whether somebody feels personally responsible for the outcome of the work in front of them.
Do they follow a problem through when it becomes inconvenient? Do they notice something that needs fixing and assume somebody else will deal with it? Do they understand the difference between completing their part of a task and actually helping the company reach the result it needs?
That behaviour is difficult to install through a company value after somebody joins.
It starts with who gets hired. Equity can strengthen the connection between employees and the wider performance of the business, but it cannot create ownership on its own. Companies still need people who naturally take responsibility for what happens around them.
That becomes increasingly important as the organisation grows.
In a small founder-led team, accountability can be almost automatic because everyone is close to the problem. Once the company becomes larger, responsibility can become distributed enough that nobody feels completely responsible for the outcome.
A strong culture prevents that dilution. High performance needs an organisation designed around it The wider lesson from the conversation was that culture becomes more consequential as companies grow, not less.
It is easy to describe high performance in terms of ambition or work ethic. The harder questions sit underneath it.
Who gets through the hiring process? What evidence are you using to judge their ability? Who gets trusted with important work? What happens when somebody takes ownership beyond the boundaries of their role? Are different perspectives actually influencing decisions, or simply represented inside the organisation?
These decisions eventually become the culture employees experience. For leaders preparing a company for its next stage of growth, that makes people strategy much closer to business strategy than a supporting function around it. A company cannot guarantee long-term performance by hiring talented individuals.
It can, however, build an environment where strong people are easier to identify, responsibility sits close to the work and emp