How do you get to 95% employee satisfaction while growing like a rocket?
Can you push people hard AND have them be happy and kind to each other?
I ran management workshops for a cybersecurity company that's the fastest-growing in its space - data security, valued at over $6 billion. In two years they went from 50 to 1,000 people and multiplied their revenue 26 times.
And honestly? I couldn't believe what I saw.
The paradox that shouldn't exist
A group of people growing a company like a meteor, and simultaneously being the nicest, most patient, most supportive team I've encountered.
That's just not how it usually works.
Usually it's one or the other: a company with lovely people where growth is mediocre, or explosive growth where people can barely stand each other.
And yet here they were - doing both.
Their engagement survey? 95% satisfaction.
How does that happen when rapid growth usually brings frustration, first-generation attrition, and chaos that's hard to untangle?
What they figured out
I spent time with the people leader there - someone who's a force of energy herself - and asked her to explain their secret.
It comes down to a few things that sound simple but are incredibly hard to execute at scale:
They hire for kindness, not just competence. Technical skills can be taught. Being a decent human being to work with? That's harder to train. They filter for it early and aggressively.
They invest in managers before they need to. Most fast-growing companies promote people into management and then train them (maybe). This company trains them first. They know that every bad manager creates a blast radius of unhappy people.
They treat culture as infrastructure, not decoration. Culture isn't the posters on the wall or the values on the website. It's the system that determines how people actually behave when nobody's watching. They built that system deliberately.
The lesson for every manager
You don't have to choose between performance and humanity. That's a false choice that lazy management philosophy has been selling for decades.
The best teams I've seen - and I've seen hundreds at this point - are the ones where people work hard because they want to, not because they're afraid. Where the standard is high and the support is real.
So next time someone tells you "you can't have it both ways" - you can. It just requires being intentional about it from day one, not trying to retrofit culture after you've already broken it.
Nobody should tell me again that "you can't fly on two wings at once." You absolutely can.