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Let me paint you a picture.
You’re at your company’s all-hands.
“We’re pivoting,” they say. The product you’ve spent months, maybe years, working on is being deprecated. You still have a job, but the work is going to look different now. Different product. Different pace. Different priorities.
Nothing is technically wrong. No one’s in trouble. But something has shifted.
This is one of the most common ways culture changes, and it’s rarely named as such.
We tend to talk about culture fit like it’s something you evaluate once during interviews and then never revisit. In reality, culture is constantly shifting. Every new hire changes it a little. Every product or strategy pivot changes what’s rewarded. Every reorg quietly reshapes the job people think they’re doing.
The environment you joined is rarely the environment you’re actually working in a few years later.
At the same time, you are not the same person you were when you accepted the role.
What motivates you evolves. The kind of problems you want to solve shifts. The type of leadership you need around you becomes clearer. Fit isn’t a one-time decision. It’s something that gets renegotiated over time, whether you acknowledge it or not.
Sometimes that renegotiation happens naturally. Other times, it doesn’t happen at all, and that’s when things start to feel off.
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Outgrowing isn’t failure
Sometimes you outgrow a company. Sometimes a company outgrows you. Neither means you failed, and neither means the company did something wrong.
Where people get stuck is treating that misalignment as a personal flaw. They assume something is wrong with them instead of recognizing what’s actually happening. I’ve watched capable, high-performing people slowly lose confidence because the fit changed and no one ever named it.
They work harder. They second-guess themselves. They try to push through something that used to feel energizing but now just feels heavy.
For leaders, this matters more than we like to admit.
When leaders treat misalignment as a performance issue instead of a systems signal, people get coached or managed for what is really a change in context. Ownership blurs. Engagement drops. Burnout creeps in, not because someone can’t do the job, but because the job quietly became something else.
If you pretend culture doesn’t shift, you miss the moment when your team starts to drift. And you especially miss the high performer who isn’t disengaged, just misaligned.
Why this matters right now
Many companies are heading into performance review season. Reviews already make people introspective, and the end of the year does too. People are asking themselves whether they’re growing, whether their work still matters, and whether they can see themselves here next year.
Good leaders don’t use that moment to push harder on alignment. They use it to create space for honest reflection. Not every question needs an immediate answer, but avoiding the question altogether is how misalignment turns into burnout.
I teach in my course a module on the 3 Ps: Progress, Problems, and Plans. We talk about problems because we shouldn’t just be reflecting on how an employee is doing tactically in their day-to-day. We spend time talking through the more philosophical questions: is the project I’m working on in alignment with my goals? Is the company still on a trajectory that I’m aligned with? Do I see a future here, or am I making things out of fear of change?
Pausing to ask whether this is still a place where you can do your best work isn’t disloyalty. It’s self-awareness. And for leaders, it’s a responsibility.
That doesn’t mean encouraging people to leave. It means acknowledging that growth isn’t always linear and fit isn’t permanent. Sometimes leadership looks like helping someone make sense of a shift instead of forcing a conclusion.
Growth doesn’t always mean staying. It also doesn’t always mean leaving.
Sometimes it just means noticing that something has changed, and giving yourself and your team permission to reflect before resentment fills the gap.