Growth That Eats Itself

There's a statistic that should make any leader evaluating an artificial intelligence initiative uncomfortable.

Recently, an executive at a company in the middle of an expansion told me something I hear more and more in executive committees: "I'm unfocused. I can't concentrate, everything is urgent and nothing is a priority." They weren't talking about their workload. They were talking about a company that's billing more than ever, attracting investment, and landing talent, but internally operates in permanent improvisation mode. Decisions made twice because nobody remembers who made them the first time; priorities that change from meeting to meeting, day after day, person to person; and an entire leadership team holding up, by sheer effort, the gaps the structure should be covering.

The usual mistake is treating this as a well-being or workplace-climate problem. It isn't, or not only. It's a business problem, with direct impact on three lines that matter in any organization and that aren't solely an HR issue: talent drain, culture as a competitive advantage, and employee experience as an early risk indicator. All three are connected, and all three are getting costlier to ignore.

Talent drain: the bill that doesn't show up on the P&L

Spain closed 2025 as the only European Union country with double-digit labor turnover, with roughly 2.4 million people changing jobs every quarter, according to Eurostat data cited in a recent analysis of the Spanish labor market. National average turnover now sits around 17%–18%, one of the highest figures in the European Union.

The cost isn't marginal. Replacing an employee can run between 30% and 50% of their salary when you count hiring, training, and lost productivity; for critical profiles that figure can reach double the annual salary, according to estimates from firms like Michael Page and Wellhub. In companies with several hundred employees and above-average turnover, that translates into several million euros a year in replacement costs, not counting the knowledge that walks out with each departure or the leadership time spent managing vacancies and safeguarding knowledge instead of building the business.

An uncomfortable truth for any executive: in fast-growing companies, the first ones to leave aren't the worst performers; they're the ones with the most options. The talent the company needs most to scale is, systematically, the easiest to lose when the organization doesn't give clear signals about where it's going or who decides what.

Culture: the technical debt nobody puts on the balance sheet

Every organization that grows fast accumulates "cultural debt," just as a product accumulates technical debt: shortcuts get taken because the work has to keep moving, and those shortcuts (habits, informal hierarchies, processes that "everybody understands" but nobody has written down) work while the company is small. Tending to the basics early on is fine, but when headcount multiplies, that debt starts charging interest in the form of friction, rework, and distrust between teams.

Three signs any leadership team can recognize in their own meetings:

Ghost decisions: they happen in informal conversations, never reach the people who execute them, and get reopened weeks later, multiplying the cost of every decision.

Dependence on heroes: entire processes held up unofficially by two or three people; the company's real operational risk lives in their calendars, not in the org chart.

Diffuse authority: teams and reporting lines multiply faster than clarity about who has the final say, which slows down every important decision.

Maintaining culture in small teams is easy. We're not saying that growth means we should redesign our culture; we're putting on the table, and questioning, how these organizations will scale that culture when responsibility can no longer depend on a few people and the system itself has to sustain it.

Redesigning culture at the pace of the business isn't a matter of corporate values or workplace climate. It's as structural as redesigning systems or the org chart when the company changes scale, and it should be on the same agenda as growth strategy, not tacked on as an HR appendix.

Employee experience: the key indicator

Employee experience is usually treated as a "soft metric," when in reality it works as a key business-risk indicator: it moves before turnover, before productivity, and well before the bottom line. Improvised onboardings, objectives that change without explanation, leaders with no time to lead because they're managing day-to-day operations... All of that is felt internally months before it shows up in a report.

Absenteeism in Spain now sits around 7%, the highest in the European Union, and a good portion of it is being covered with overtime and unused vacation, which further reduces the efficiency of the team that is present, whether from work overload or organizational exhaustion, according to a recent Michael Page analysis of the Spanish labor market. It's the full chain: an organization neglects its people's experience, that disconnection shows up first as absenteeism and lack of focus, then as turnover, and finally as a bill that does reach the executive committee, though by then it's a repair bill, not a prevention bill.

The decision isn't whether to invest in this, but when

No fast-growing company can afford to treat culture, decision structure, and the experience of its people as secondary to growth. They're precisely what determines whether that growth is sustained or turns into a continuous cycle of hiring, talent drain, and permanent restarts, with the resulting cost in results and execution speed.

Going back to the executive I opened this reflection with: what my client needed wasn't personal productivity advice. They needed their organization to resolve what was theirs to resolve from the leadership seat: priorities that hold for more than a week, decisions that don't have to be made again, and a structure that doesn't depend on every person improvising their role every day. That is, today, an executive committee agenda item just as much as any investment or market-expansion decision.

Read the original op-ed in El Confidencial here.

By Mariana Socorrós, Partner at Olivia Spain.