Is Growth a Miracle Drug?

What if the real medicine is something quieter: a sense of belonging?

By Claude Monet - Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC BY-SA 2.5

There’s a popular saying: “Growth is the miracle drug. It fixes everything.”

I’ve heard it in boardrooms and town halls, sometimes whispered as a coping mechanism, other times shouted as strategy. And sure, growth helps. It buys time. It boosts morale. It creates options.

But after years of building teams, I’ve come to believe:

Growth doesn’t fix all the problems. A sense of belonging does.

When we engineer a sense of belonging — when people feel seen, trusted, and part of something that matters — that’s when the real work begins to thrive.

Belonging isn’t about comfort. It’s about commitment. It creates the kind of invisible glue that holds people together during the uncertainty, the pivots, the late nights. It’s what makes people say, “This is hard, but I’m staying in it.”

Without that foundation, growth can become a kind of morphine: a painkiller that numbs the organization to deeper problems. It can create the illusion of progress while structural issues fester underneath. You’ll see this in companies that are hitting their numbers, but quietly bleeding trust. Where teams deliver, but no longer collaborate.

It’s not that these problems are invisible, most leaders see the cracks. But growth offers the comfort of motion. The safety of charts that go up and to the right. It feels easier to chase the next quarter than to pause and fix the culture.

So we put off the hard conversations. We tell ourselves the system is working — after all, look at the numbers.

But growth built on avoidance is fragile.

One market shift, one missed forecast, and the whole thing starts to wobble. Because what was missing wasn’t strategy. It was cohesion. Trust. Belonging.

Some of the best leaders I’ve known do something that seems counterintuitive:
They pause.
They listen.
They trade a few points of short-term growth for long-term resilience.
They understand that fixing what's inside the company is not a distraction from growth, it’s the most leveraged path to it.

Belonging is not soft.

Belonging is the core operating system for durable, human-centered companies.

And it’s the thing that allows growth to not just happen, but stick. If you’re leading a team, a company, a product, ask yourself: are we chasing growth as a band-aid, or building a culture that can carry it?

Because growth impresses.
But belonging?
Belonging endures.

This doesn’t mean you trade performance for belonging. You need to design for both and that too consciously, and relentlessly. Because in the long run, the most resilient growth comes not from teams that are just productive…But from teams that believe in each other.

And here’s one simple way to visualize that tension:

As you can see the interplay between performance and belonging doesn’t just shape how teams feel, it shapes how they perform over time.

Belonging gives performance its depth. Performance gives belonging its direction. When they’re in balance, teams don’t just deliver, they endure.

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