Surviving the Scale-Up: Leadership & Culture Lessons from Vidya Murali
Scaling a business isn’t just about growth metrics — it’s about surviving the emotional, cultural, and leadership chaos that comes with it. In a recent episode of Scale Smart Grow Fast, host Harley Green sat down with Vidya Murali, executive coach, former Amazon leader, and author of How to Survive in a Scale-Up Business, to unpack the real skills needed to thrive in high-growth environments.
Preferred listening on the go? Catch the full podcast episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Why Most Scale-Ups Struggle
According to Vidya, many startups fail to survive their scale-up phase because:
- The business model isn’t truly proven, just funded.
- Leadership hires are made based on brand names, not fit.
- Founders resist adapting their own roles and team structures.
- Toxic loyalty prevents necessary transitions.
Her insight? “What got you here won’t get you there. Scale-ups need a different kind of leadership mindset.”
The Emotional Skills That Matter
Vidya emphasizes that logic and strategy alone don’t cut it in the chaos of scale-ups. Leaders need:
- Emotional resilience to stay grounded under pressure.
- Self-awareness to let go of micromanagement.
- Psychological safety to drive true performance and innovation.
- Cultural clarity to scale values alongside business goals.
Creating Resilient, High-Performance Teams
Vidya urges leaders to:
- Build teams with a healthy skills mix (not just fresh talent).
- Regularly reevaluate roles based on evolving strategy.
- Invest in mentoring and coaching, not just performance metrics.
- Recognize burnout indicators early and reset expectations before it’s too late.
A strong culture doesn’t happen by accident — it’s shaped by intentional behavior, communication, and trust at the top.
Practical Leadership Habits
If you’re scaling fast, Vidya recommends two weekly rituals:
- Set clear intentions on Monday. What kind of leader do you want to be this week?
- Reflect on Friday. What worked? What didn’t? How did you show up for your team?
And always pause before reacting: “The space between a trigger and your response is where leadership lives.”
💡 Final Thought
Scale-ups aren’t for the faint of heart. But with the right mindset, emotional tools, and cultural focus, you can grow without burning out.
📘 Get her book at 40% off using code HSSB40: Buy the Book
🌐 Learn more at vidyamurali.com
🚀 Feeling the pressure of fast growth?
At Workergenix, we help founders and execs streamline operations, empower leadership teams, and build sustainable, high-performance cultures — without the burnout.
👉 Book a free discovery call to see how our executive support solutions can help you scale smarter.
Like what you read? Get weekly insights on scaling, efficiency, and profitability—straight to your inbox. Click here to subscribe.Transcript
Harley Green: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Scale Smart Grow Fast podcast. What does it really take to thrive in a scale-up environment? In this episode, Vidya Murali, author of How to Survive in a Scale-Up Business and former senior leader at Amazon, Deliveroo and Skyscanner shares hard earned insights on the leadership mindset, cultural pitfalls and team dynamics that define high growth companies. With over two decades of experience scaling performance and resilience in tech, Vidya is going to offer practical advice for executives managing rapid change without losing their people or their sanity. Vidya, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?
Vidya Murali: Thanks Harley, thanks for the intro. I’m doing well.
Harley Green: Awesome Vidya. Can you share a little bit more about your background? You’ve got incredible professional background, these amazing businesses. You know, what has prompted you to write this book and share your experience?
Vidya Murali: Sure. So I grew up in India. I did my engineering and I joined the IT sector, which was very booming at that time. And then I took that as an opportunity to come to the UK as well. I did my MBA in Cambridge and my first job after MBA was Amazon. So Amazon, worked for more than six and a half years and I got really interested in the growing categories in Amazon. And at the end of six and a half years, I thought, okay, let me go join these scale-ups, these high growth young companies and the small fish, big pond, big fish, small pond type analogy. So I entered scale-ups almost blind. And when I entered the scale-ups and with my experience in Amazon, everything was new. No one prepared me for how chaotic it’s going to be. It was exciting. We had really big opportunities to lead the team, to grow, do something new. I enjoyed all of that.
However, it also came with some challenges because if you think about scale-ups, young founders, there’s a lot of tension around fundraising. There’s a need to prove value, the requirement for the role and teams change constantly. So I felt even with that Amazon experience and MBA and all that stuff, I was not prepared. No one prepared me for this. What I needed was emotional skills, like emotional superpower skills to navigate this environment because logic just didn’t cut it. It didn’t make a cut in the environment like Amazon, but not in the scale-ups. So I changed quite a few jobs. I learned a lot in this process. However, I was constantly questioning myself, what’s wrong with me? Why am I changing these jobs? What’s not working? And then during COVID, like everybody else, I had some time to reflect. And I realized like, okay, this is not a problem with me. It’s the nature of the environment.
And when I connected with other people who made this transition from mature corporates or well-organized businesses to scale-ups, I had similar stories. There’s a lot of war stories. There are people thriving, there are people struggling. So I thought how wonderful it would be to take all these experiences, very challenging experiences sometimes, and also like good experiences, and write a book that will help people to navigate this environment.
Whether they are grads looking for a dynamic space to work or working in corporate environment and are really tired of meeting after meetings and documents and stuff. They want to do something big, manage big teams. When they make this transition, I thought this will be an incredible resource, something that I wish I had before. So I wouldn’t be questioning myself rather working on developing the skills to navigate this environment. So yeah, that’s the background behind the book.
And I personally enjoy writing. I like the process of writing. It gets me into the state of flow. I love talking to individuals, hearing their stories. So all of this put together, I was able to reach out to a lot of veterans, experienced people, get their stories, convert them into practical insights, also use some frameworks. I am an experienced coach as well. So I brought coaching questions into the book. So it’s very much a practical toolkit that people can take and go, okay, now I’m the first 90 days or I’m interviewing, what should I be looking out for? What can I do? Or I’m facing this pattern. There is some toxic loyalty going on here. What can I do about it? So that’s kind of the idea.
Harley Green: Very nice. Now you’ve led some high growth teams when at these different companies you’ve been with. What would you say separates companies that survive scale-up from those that crumble?
Vidya Murali: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think obviously there’s a few things that come together, needs to come together. First of all, the business idea. When you move from a startup to a scale-up phase, the business idea shouldn’t just be an idea. It should be a model that’s worked out and that’s fully proven. Unfortunately, in many cases, it seemed to be an idea and somehow they convinced the funding, investors to invest into the business and that’s not quite it. So the proof of the business that it works, it can scale, needs to be established fully. And then it’s about the team really, leadership and team. The CEO and the founding teams are super useful and super important for the success of the business. Because of the small nature of the team, they are the culture. In big companies, yeah, you have all these cultures, you write these things and it is more organic. But in scale-ups, it is the CEO and founders that make the culture. So if they are able to create the environment of psychological safety, people can fail, people can move on, people can take risks and grow. And, you know, they are embedded within the business. There’s a good chance that the scale-ups will make it. On the other hand, you also have scale-ups that are kind of super hyped. The business model is not proved. They also hire people based on like brands and I come from Amazon myself, but just because I have an Amazon brand doesn’t make me the right fit for the roles and the scale-ups. Might be in some case, might not be in some case. So the founders and leadership need to be very honest about who are they looking for, at what level of maturity the org is, and they need to bring people that are right for that kind of stage. Also let go of people who are not serving them because somebody who’s done well in one to hundred might not be the right person from hundred to thousand or beyond, which is very hard. If you think about the founders, they have a lot of loyalty, which is a great thing because they had people who have been with them for quite a long time. However, including themselves, you need to question, does the business need my skills or it could be better off with somebody else who has the experience of scaling. So yeah, these are very tough conversations to be had, reflections to be had, something that I covered in my book as well, but it’s important when a business has its own identity, it’s becoming a bigger part of the employers and it’s actually making an impact to do justice to it and not be blockers for the business, even though you’re like, be the founder and CEO.
Harley Green: What are some tips you have or strategies that maybe you share in the book to help founders in these leadership teams when they might be at that point where it might be time to reevaluate the roles of some of those long-time loyal employees or even themselves? Is there opportunities to change the role or are there some cases where they just need to completely exit the company and find a new home?
Vidya Murali: Yeah, it’s a mix of both. I think the main thing is you have a strategy, a vision, and then you develop your org structure and skills working backwards from it. And that includes the founder and CEO and the top leadership till the junior most level as well. Every, ever so often every year, if it’s a scale-up or you’re doing it more frequently, the needs keep changing. So you need to think about, okay, this year, this is my goal. For example, your goal could be, I’m going to expand in new markets and I need some scalable systems to do that. And then you think about, okay, do I have the leadership in place in all these areas to drive this? Have these people got the experience and then work downwards, like top down from it. In terms of the question of, could we coach people and upskill them? Or should some people have to exit, I think it’s again a combination of both. At some level, some scenarios, people are coachable, especially if they’re early, like, they’re junior employees and in the mid-level employees, still possible to coach them, as long as they have role models in their team. So I have worked in businesses where everybody is like pretty new and then they don’t have these leadership and role models to coach them and grow them. But in some cases, people are just suited for that stage of the business. So again, I have the suitability test as well in my book, and I’m going to share that in some form. We need to understand what drives people, where do they thrive? So somebody who has a very high risk appetite and has alleged reaction to processes, they’re not going to thrive in bigger companies or even the scaling companies. Or somebody who has very low risk appetite and they like to analyze and think about things before they do, they’re not going to thrive in the early stage. We got to kind of be real about where people thrive in the environment and have that conversation with them. And rather than seeing this as a negative, it’s probably a good thing for this person because they’re no longer in the environment, they’re able to thrive. So give them an opportunity to also move on to somewhere they can do well.
Harley Green: You mentioned that it’s the responsibility of the leadership team to set the culture in these businesses. What would you say are some of the most common cultural setting challenges that leaders face as they shift from startup to that scale-up mode?
Vidya Murali: Yeah, there’s quite a few. With the scale-up comes a lot of pressure. So startup, if you think about it, this idea, they’re approving, they’re like a small team. They don’t really have to have meetings. They can talk to each other. When you go to a scale-up stage, it becomes like an organization. It’s like the Dunbar number, like 150 people. You don’t have to organize anything. You just can’t get to know. But beyond that, then you need to have some internal communication set up. You need to communicate in a way that motivates people and challenges them, but also balances the reality of the situation. So many founders and leaders are not ready for this because when they started the company, many of them started it because they didn’t want to be an employee. They didn’t want to follow all these rules. And then they go into the scale-up stage and now they have to create them. And that’s quite challenging.
It can be done with a great team in place. So I think one of the things that founders can do is not to think about it as their own sole ownership. They can also bring in people who can help them and complement them in this area. They can still be the visionary, but you have a good CEO who’s able to kind of communicate, for instance, and bring the people, the team together. That is probably the most important thing and challenge that founders face in terms of engaging the employees and the team and bring them together. But yeah, apart from that, obviously, as it scales, they need to make profit, the pressures and the rigor, execution rigor also becomes more important than in a startup stage.
The leaders might not have experience or skills. Again, this is where the hiring comes in place and bringing in people who have done that. And also creating them space when you bring in new people, you got to give them the liberty and freedom to operate. If they are operating under a restricted environment, as in they need to kind of listen to what the CEO says and not able to challenge CEO, and they have to maintain the team that’s been there for ages and don’t have the skills, you bring a fantastic person, put them in the middle, they can’t deliver. So those kinds of things are very common with all good intentions, you know, bring in new people, but make sure that’s set up for success and change.
Harley Green: Yeah, let’s talk a little bit more about getting them set up for success and how can these leaders build these resilient cultures while still supporting the performance and not sacrificing their people? We’re in that stressful stage where you want to start getting profits. You want everyone at their peak performance, but you still want to have that resilient culture and it’s a fine balance. What are some tips and strategies that you might offer people to consider?
Vidya Murali: Yeah. So there is a very common myth that when you push people to drive performance, it kind of affects the culture in a negative way. You can only do it in a negative way, but it’s not the case. In many of the scale-ups I’ve worked, I saw a lot of busy work where people are constantly on Slack messages. People are constantly changing their decisions. Kind of like, you know, being micromanaged by C-level people.
And all of this is actually counter effective on performance. So really thinking about how to build a sustainable team and how to drive them for performance. Some of the common ways you can do that is ensure there’s a good mix of people. When you have a team, if you’re kind of bringing all of these people like, you know, very fresh and you don’t have experience there, there’s going to be a problem. These people are going to be waiting for instructions and that creates this micromanagement environment.
So every year, every six months, make sure your teams have a good mix of skills so they can learn from each other rather than having to have this kind of, for the leadership team and the rest of the company, that kind of having those layers is a good way for driving performance. Another kind of misunderstood thing is the psychological safety. It’s seen as something very soft, that’s not driving performance, seen as a cushion, but actually it drives performance. So Amy Edmondson, she’s done a lot of research on that in Google. And the one thing that differentiated the teams that drive performance versus others is the psychological safety. It simply means when things are going wrong, the team is open and safe to raise it as soon as possible without feeling that they’ll have some repercussions. That’s going to save a lot of time. So if that culture is encouraged where the failures are celebrated and somebody saying something that’s negative is encouraged rather than something pushed down, then that’s going to save a lot of time.
And also the micromanagement. So when you are a small company, the CEOs, the founders, CEOs, they’re all involved in all kinds of decisions. But as you scale, you need to step back and question, is my time well spent in this particular decision or is it well spent being involved in all the tactical things that I’m doing? And this is also actually creating a lot of pressure for the team. If the leaders are involved in every single decision, then they are probably going to be more prepared. They’re both going to be under the stress. So actually empowering the team to say, okay, you know, within the remits of your role, you can decide. And there are some things that need to come to my attention and like stop micromanaging and letting go. All of these can really help build more scalable culture rather than a culture that is based on control and busy work, which actually could be quite counter-effective.
Harley Green: You really nailed it when talking about executives being kind of micromanaging or being involved in decisions, they need to start questioning. And, you know, they oftentimes get to a point where they are drowning in these details when they start scaling up. And when does it make sense to start handing off some tasks from an executive’s plate to someone like an executive assistant, you know, coordinating reporting, admin work, calendar management, research, things like that, so they can really be freed up to be in that strategic mindset zone?
Vidya Murali: Yeah, as soon as possible, really. An executive’s time is not well spent doing admin. And there are various solutions — executive assistants, one of the solutions. We also have several AI tools now. Some roles like Chief of Staff would be quite useful as well if you’re looking at a little bit more higher driving strategic projects and connecting the dots, all of which can help.
The only caveat I would say is, again, creating the space for these people to do their job. And that requires the executives to let go and trust.
Harley Green: Right. A little bit earlier, we talked about how sometimes communication can actually slow things down. Like everyone’s responding to Slack messages all day. You know, as these companies are scaling, that communication can sometimes be something that breaks down, not just like in terms of not having communication, but maybe having too much communication or too much ease of communication. What are some practical methods to help maintain clarity and trust during that change regarding communication with the team?
Vidya Murali: Yeah. So, if one extreme is not communicating, people are going to assume things and people are going to have the feeling of uncertainty as well. It’s not good. On the other extreme, if everything needs to be communicated, that’s going to be really overwhelming. I worked in a company where everybody was constantly on Slack to the point that people had to do Slack work the whole day. And at the end of the day, they start doing their individual work.
That is an example of really, really extreme over-communication. I think it’s not the intent to communicate that overwhelms the team, it’s more the intent to control. So when the leadership team is very nervous about the team, they feel they have to be part of every single thing. They want to know everything. They want to be part of the decision-making. And that creates a cycle — they want to know, they ask questions. The team then goes, “I need to answer because my leader is asking this,” and they spend time on that. Then the team also prepares thinking, “I don’t have to think beyond what the leaders ask me for.”
So it goes into this whole busy work, micromanagement cycle. If you reverse it and go like, “I’m hiring this team that I can trust and I’m going to let them bring issues to me,” and have some controls in place — weekly business reviews, monthly reviews, KPIs — these give me both leading and lagging indicators, what Amazon calls inputs and outputs. I have those in place, but I’m going to trust my team to come up with these decisions and problems, and create the psychological safety and trust.
That requires a cultural change. That requires change management. If you’re stuck in that busyness wheel, it requires leaders to step back and really be honest about how their behavior is impacting the team and the performance and how that can be changed to become something more scalable.
Harley Green: Yeah. Well, speaking of maintaining the performance, when these businesses are scaling quickly, teams can often hit performance stress. What are some indicators that signal it’s time to reset the norms or reorient values?
Vidya Murali: Yeah, so I talk about burnout, for instance. It’s seen as unfortunately a badge of honor, but actually burnout is a very difficult experience. If you think about clinically someone affected by burnout, it takes a long time to reverse that. Anything to do with the brain takes a long time to reverse. So you really don’t want teams to go through that. You want to prevent those situations as soon as possible.
The indicators would be fatigue. If you think about having a team day or something, and the reaction is not excitement but “Ugh, another thing,” that’s a good indicator. It shows that they are not well. There’s no appetite for doing anything new, exciting, or change. So those reactions — which is why checking in is very important.
The practice of starting a meeting with a check-in, once a week asking your team how they’re feeling, how was their weekend — all these things which might sound trivial actually give a sense of how they are doing emotionally as well as in terms of well-being. There are various ways to check in. One method is “Rose, Bud, Thorn” — Rose is something positive, Bud is something they’re hoping for, and Thorn is something they are worried about. Ask them to share that. It brings all sorts of things they probably wouldn’t open up normally.
Creating those avenues is a great way to catch these early indicators. So once you sense that, what do you do about it? That’s where leaders need to step in and think about prioritization. Do you need the team to do everything, and do you need them to do it right now?
That’s one of the patterns — it’s a strength of founders and leaders to have a bias for action and want to do everything right away. That probably got them that far, but in a scaling business, everything cannot be done right now. That’s why you have to have priorities and accept that things take time to build properly. People have to schedule their work, and you need systems in place for milestones and delivery planning.
Harley Green: That’s so important. We are working with people, not machines. So there are those other aspects you have to be aware of to get the most out of them and make sure they’re happy. Speaking of that, we’ve kind of touched on this previously a little bit about bringing in people who maybe are going to help with coaching or mentoring at certain points in scaling. What role would you say the coaching and mentoring plays in helping scale-up leaders guide their teams through these difficult times?
Vidya Murali: I think it’s very important. I personally feel coaching is a gift, so is mentoring. Because when someone is stressed, as human beings, our logical part of the brain just switches off. We all go into this flight or fight mode. And that is not a good thinking machine. This is where using someone else to reflect really is powerful. So they’re able to bring this third-party perspective or even create the space for you and then you come up with your own answer. So coaching can be a powerful gift for everyone, including the leaders and the early employees.
Mentoring in particular, especially for the new joiners and people who want to move up but they haven’t done it before and then somebody else has done it before — that could be again a very powerful tool as well. And mentors not only help them with the skills, but they can also create opportunities for them because they are in the leadership team, they can be the sponsors as well. So I don’t think there’s any point in which you bring all these people. You just inherently hire people who have the opportunity and the willingness to coach and grow people and mentor people. So if you have a leadership team that’s willingly giving and bringing people up, that’s a gift. I think this Adam Grant’s new book, Give and Take, talks a lot about givers and bringing people into your team as well. So yeah, that is a great way to build scalable teams.
Harley Green: That’s great. Some people listening might have feared, “Okay, she’s going to say bring in the consultants,” right? But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can have your organic hires have these traits that foster that environment, it sounds like.
Vidya Murali: Yeah, you can bring the coaches as well. You obviously can use professional coaches, but you do need people embedded, understanding the context, to really help your employees.
Harley Green: Yeah, that’s perfect. Well, as we wrap up, for people who are feeling a little bit overwhelmed by growth in their business, what’s one actionable step they can take this week to strengthen their culture and regain control?
Vidya Murali: Yeah, so I would say the growth begins from inside. And if you’re a leader who’s overwhelmed and you’re like, “Oh my God, what’s going on in my business? Am I taking the right steps? What should I change?” I would suggest having an intention setting at the start of the week — saying, “This week, this is what I’m going to do — three things.”
And on a Friday afternoon, block your calendar and reflect, either with yourself or with a coach or with a mentor. How have you done? Not just from a performance point of view — what could you have done better from a behavioral point of view? What are the things that went well? What are the things you’re grateful for? And what are the things that you want to change?
So having that reflection practice really creates that clarity. And then you are a better person when you show up for your team, and the team sees that. And then it kind of creates this great culture. That would be my one tip. If I had to sneak in another tip, one extra tip would be —
Harley Green: Let’s do it. Yep.
Vidya Murali: Control your reactions, right? As leaders, you’re under pressure. There are lots of things — the board’s going to be putting pressure on you, your team, performance issues. But take that small pause between the trigger and your response and really intentionally communicate or respond. I’m not saying just always smile and be nice. Even if you’re going to communicate a bad message, if you’re going to communicate a challenging message, make sure you take some time to plan and communicate in a way that’s going to be productive. Because a lot of things when leaders react can actually have like 10x, 100x negative impact than anybody in a team reacting. So I would suggest these two things for the leaders.
Harley Green: That’s perfect. Thank you for sharing those tips with us. Now if people want to continue the conversation with you, Vidya, what’s the best way for them to connect?
Vidya Murali: So they can reach me. I do post a lot on LinkedIn, so they can follow me on LinkedIn and DM me or through my website — it’s vidyamurali.com. I have opportunities for scale-ups, networks, also for even grad universities to organize a career talk or a scale-up, thriving in scale-ups type of talk. They can reach me as well.
Harley Green: So as you’re listening, if you got value from this episode, do one quick thing. Hit like and subscribe so you don’t miss future strategies to help you scale smarter. And maybe you know a business owner or a colleague who could use this information. Share this episode with them. It could be exactly what they need right now. And if you’re listening on a podcast platform, leave us a quick star rating. It helps us reach more leaders just like you. And again, thanks for tuning in everybody. We will see you on the next one.