Your Best Engineer Just Quit
They didn’t leave because they were struggling. They were thriving: clean code, thoughtful reviews, deadlines met. But they didn’t feel like they belonged.
So what really happened?
They left because of what the culture tolerated, what it rewarded, and what it ignored. And that’s culture debt, invisible, compounding, and ultimately expensive.
What Happens to Culture During a Turnaround or Scale-Up?
As a VP of Engineering, CTO, or Director of Engineering, you’re trained to track backlog velocity, uptime, throughput, and roadmap delivery. You debug systems. You forecast resourcing. You balance technical debt against time-to-market.
But one form of debt doesn’t show up in dashboards. Until it blows a hole through your team: culture debt.
Culture debt builds up when you prioritize speed, output, or survival over the health of your team and the clarity of your values. You hire fast, make compromises, skip onboarding, avoid hard conversations, and assume you’ll “fix it later.” And like all debt, culture debt accrues interest.
But there’s something even more dangerous: shadow culture debt.
Shadow Culture: The Terrain Beneath Your Map
Every company runs two operating systems:
- The official culture: value statements, onboarding decks, all-hands slogans.
- The shadow culture: who really holds power, who actually gets heard, how work flows when the pressure’s on.
Shadow culture isn’t in your Confluence page. It’s in the side chats, the eye rolls, the post-meeting DMs. It’s the second handbook your team follows to survive, even when it contradicts what’s been declared.
Ignore shadow culture during a turnaround or a scale-up, and you’ll find yourself running two conflicting systems. And when those systems collide? Shadow wins. Every time.
In a Scale-Up: The Shadow Culture Gets Fragmented
As a tech leader scaling fast, you may assume that your official values are scaling with you. But as headcount grows, shadow cultures fragment across teams. Some aligned, some quietly diverging.
Ask yourself:
- Who are the information brokers in your org?
- Which decisions get made before the meeting?
- Who do people check in with to interpret what was just said?
These aren’t org-chart questions. They’re influence-map questions. And they’re the foundation of your cultural terrain.
As you scale, friction grows not just because your processes break, but because your unspoken rules start to contradict your spoken ones. That’s when morale slips, trust erodes, and velocity drags.
In a Turnaround: The Shadow Culture May Be Hostile to Change
If you’re stepping into a turnaround, you’re inheriting culture debt accrued under someone else’s watch. The team has a memory. They remember who got rewarded, who got burned, and which behaviors were truly safe.
The most trusted people in the old regime, the ones others orbit, are still shaping how the team responds to change. Some are cultural assets. Others are beloved cynics.
Their influence isn’t formal, but it’s real. If they’re aligned with your direction, they’ll accelerate it. If not, they’ll quietly stall it. You can’t reset culture by mandate. You have to engage these informal leaders and bring them along — or risk letting them define your transformation for you.
- Spot your flag bearers.
- Understand who people orbit.
- Listen to what gets rewarded informally, and what gets punished silently.
Because if you try to bulldoze a new culture on top of a hostile terrain, you’re not leading. You’re losing quietly.
The Real Cost of Culture Debt
Let me tell you another story.
We once had a PM who was fantastic with stakeholders but always skipped engineering standups. She was polite, friendly, but consistently committed dev time without confirming scope, tech constraints, or alignment. The first time, we let it go. “She’s under pressure, it’s a one-off.”
Six months later, the team was routinely delivering work that wasn’t validated. Frustration grew. Rework increased. Engineering started quietly excluding her from planning sessions just to protect velocity. Eventually, the tension boiled over in a company-wide misalignment that triggered finger-pointing between departments.
The actual problem? We absorbed the first compromise. Then another. No feedback, no correction. Just quiet tolerance.
That’s culture debt accruing interest. And eventually, someone pays it.
Here’s another kind of interest compounding, not through decisions, but through silence.
I was a manager working under a senior leader in an organization. We had a developer, good-hearted, a bit slow, sometimes unmotivated, but a wonderful culture contributor. He made new hires feel welcome, kept the team connected, and brought warmth to our Slack.
The leader above me hated it. Constantly complained about how much that dev “wasted time” chit-chatting.
I came back from a vacation once and was called into his office. He smiled and said, “I did it.”
I asked what he meant. He replied, “I told that developer he had to get the f — — off Slack and start doing work. Sometimes you need to swear at them so they know you’re serious.”
I told him, flatly, that it wasn’t leadership. That swearing at someone was never acceptable.
I later apologized to that dev for the way he was treated. That senior leader would be let go years later, after other similar patterns surfaced.
But the damage from that moment lingered.
What did it teach the team?
- That care was expendable.
- That kindness wasn’t productive.
- That the loudest voice could set the tone, even when it was wrong.
That’s the cost of culture debt. Not just attrition, but erosion. Not just burnout, but betrayal. The moments people remember are often the ones we let slide.
When shadow and official culture diverge too far, the costs show up fast:
- Quiet firings: High-output, values-aligned people pushed out because they don’t play the unspoken game.
- Dual-culture burnout: People living one way for leadership, another for survival.
- Passive resistance: Initiatives that die not in meetings, but in silent execution.
Teams with high culture debt report significantly higher rework cycles up to 40% more according to research from McKinsey and DORA, and lowered psychological safety as outlined in Google’s Project Aristotle. Gallup also reports that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement, and leaders in high-debt environments often report spending over 50% more time resolving interpersonal friction, clarifying misaligned priorities, or fixing miscommunications.
Culture debt silently wrecks velocity, erodes accountability, and makes high-trust collaboration impossible, precisely when you need it most.
When Culture Becomes a Force Multiplier
Not every shadow culture is toxic. When the lived behaviors match the stated values. When your shadow and official culture align, magic happens.
I once joined a team where one of the stated values was “assume good intent.” That could’ve been hollow. But in practice, it wasn’t. Code reviews came with thoughtful questions, not gotchas. Demos surfaced mistakes without shame. Even when things went sideways, engineers didn’t blame, they debugged, together. It was the kind of place where a junior engineer could disagree with the CTO and be heard. That’s rare. That’s cultural alignment.
And the best part? That alignment didn’t require massive playbooks. Just consistency, clarity, and a few well-supported flag bearers modeling the right behavior.
What Leaders Can Actually Do
If you’re serious about paying down culture debt, here’s a tactical framework that balances observation, action, and reinforcement:
Diagnose your culture debt. Anonymous surveys are a start, but skip-levels, focus groups, and “walk-the-floor” listening are where the truth lives. Ask people what unspoken rules they follow to succeed here. If they hesitate to answer, you’re already in trouble.
Map your real influencers. Who do people go to for clarity, not permission? Who shapes opinion, sets tone, defuses tension? Those are your shadow operators. They’re defining the real rules.
Support or reshape your flag bearers. When they amplify the right values, back them visibly and protect their energy. When they reinforce cynicism, coach, then escalate. Influence, not title, defines culture.
Shift one norm at a time. If real decisions happen in DMs, replace them with async decision docs in Slack. Set a 24-hour window, tag relevant people, and require visible input. Document the choice in a shared channel so the decision outlives the discussion. If retros are performative, pilot anonymous input and publish results. Don’t replatform your culture. Refactor it.
Institutionalize what works. When alignment happens, when someone acts in a way that embodies both the values and the outcomes, make it a pattern. Document it. Teach it. Scale it. Culture spreads best through consistent, shared wins.
Lead from the terrain, not the map. Culture work isn’t a memo. It’s a pattern of attention. The unspoken rules are running your team, until you start rewriting them.
If you’re leading during scale or recovery, you must name the gap.
- Say the quiet part out loud: “We say X, but I know we do Y. Let’s fix that.”
- Protect your flag bearers. They’re the emotional infrastructure. Don’t let them burn out.
- Reinforce the shadow norms you want. One small shift ripples fast: move decision-making into public channels. Celebrate quiet wins. Model vulnerability.
- Stop managing from the map. Lead from the terrain.
Managing engineers involves far more than managing tasks and timelines, it means shaping the conditions under which they can thrive or burn out. they can thrive, or burn out. Culture is a system. And like any system, it needs debugging.
Final Thought: Name It or Be Managed By It
Culture debt builds not from incompetence, but from the speed, pressure, and tradeoffs that leadership demands during high-growth phases. And I know what you’re thinking: “We’re barely shipping features and you want me to focus on culture?” But culture debt is exactly why shipping is getting harder.
The best engineering leaders I’ve seen treat culture like infrastructure: they monitor it, maintain it, and debug it when needed.
Because the cost of inaction isn’t just attrition or burnout. It’s execution drift. It’s slow decisions. It’s missed signals.
When you start paying it down, you’ll feel it. People start surfacing concerns earlier. Meetings get more honest. Feedback becomes a shared tool, not a weapon. You’ll notice:
- Engineers pushing back constructively without fear.
- Quiet contributors stepping into visibility.
- Decisions that stick, because they’re understood, not just announced.
- Slack channels that signal alignment instead of anxiety.
That’s what it looks like when culture turns from a drag into a driver.
Start small. Shift one norm. Then another. Culture doesn’t change all at once, it changes through repetition, reinforcement, and leaders who choose not to look away.
And if you don’t shape your shadow culture, it becomes the ceiling on your team’s potential tomorrow.