Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, identifies Tom Alexander’s approach to culture as a direct challenge to how most CEOs think about scaling. Alexander, CEO and co-founder of Holistic and former COO of 1871, one of the world’s top tech incubators, argues that culture is not a perk problem — it is a communication problem. When CEOs treat internal communication as the highest-leverage culture tool — not perks or amenities — employee sentiment improves even when nothing else changes, as Alexander documented across hundreds of companies in 1871 and through Holistic’s client work. CEOs who fix communication first and stop chasing lagging indicators build companies where people stay, perform, and grow.
This episode is for CEOs who are scaling fast and watching culture slip — leaders who suspect the problem is bigger than ping pong tables and free snacks but aren’t sure what to fix first.
Key Takeaways
- Internal communication is the single highest-leverage tool a CEO has for culture — there is no upper limit to how much employees want, and most companies are dramatically under-delivering.
- Perks like snacks and office amenities give employees a vehicle to express dissatisfaction, but the underlying issue is almost always communication and transparency.
- CEOs who fixate on lagging indicators like turnover rates and NPS scores cannot change them overnight — but they can change the processes that drive those indicators starting today.
- Giving positive, specific feedback does not cause employees to ask for raises. Withholding feedback causes employees to assume they are about to be fired.
- CEOs who invite new hires to shape the culture — rather than just describing what it is — attract candidates who think about contribution over compensation, which is the profile that builds a company rather than just occupying a seat in one.
Internal Communication Is the Cheat Code CEOs Keep Missing
Ask most CEOs how their internal communication is going, and they will tell you they are making a strong effort. Ask their employees, and you will get a different answer.
Tom Alexander has seen this gap up close — first at 1871, where he watched hundreds of startups struggle to scale, and now at Holistic, where his team works directly with companies on employee experience data.
His conclusion: “Internal communication is the cheat code for business in my mind. There’s literally no amount of internal communication that’s too much. It is impossible to slake the thirst of the modern employee in terms of receiving communication.”
The snack story Alexander tells makes this concrete. A pre-COVID client was spending $200,000 a year on office snacks and getting hammered in employee surveys over the quality of those snacks. Then COVID sent everyone home. The snacks disappeared. Employee sentiment went through the roof.
“It wasn’t ever about the snacks,” Alexander says. “The snacks were this vehicle through which people could complain about their employee experience, but what they really cared about was communication.”
The same pattern played out in 1871. The space was colorful, energetic, and full of amenities. But when Alexander asked people what they loved about 1871, they always told a story about a connection — a conversation that led to an introduction, a workshop that sparked a partnership. The perks set the stage. The communication was an actual experience.
For CEOs, the practical implication is direct: if your employees are complaining about peripheral things — the coffee, the equipment, the office layout — do not fix the peripheral things. Investigate whether they are getting the communication they actually need.
CEOs Who Chase Outcomes Miss the Processes They Can Actually Control
Tom Alexander, CEO of Holistic, identifies a second blind spot just as common and just as damaging: CEOs become obsessed with trailing indicators — turnover rates, NPS scores, workforce quality — and get frustrated when those numbers do not move fast enough.
The problem is structural. You cannot change your turnover rate from the last two years no matter what you do today. What you can change is your hiring process, your feedback cadence, your accountability practices — the inputs that drive those outcomes over time.
Alexander frames it this way: “I can have a flawed hiring process today and I can take a series of concerted actions today and starting tomorrow it can be fixed. Now it’s going to take some time for that renewed, rejuvenated hiring process to result in a thriving workforce.”
The distinction matters because frustration with outcomes can cause CEOs to take the wrong actions — cutting programs, replacing people, or declaring culture initiatives failures before the process changes have had time to work. Process thinking asks a different question: what can I control right now, and what will that produce over the next six to twelve months?
For most culture challenges, the controllable inputs fall into the same categories Alexander identifies across his client work: communication frequency, feedback quality, hiring process integrity, and how accountable leaders hold themselves and their teams in daily interactions.
Positive Feedback and Accountability Are Not Risks — Avoiding Them Is
Tom Alexander, CEO of Holistic, is direct on both fears Glenn Gow raises — that giving specific positive feedback will make people ask for raises, and that accountability conversations will drive people to quit: “That’s bullshit. That doesn’t happen either. Those are conceptions that people have made up to justify behaviors.”
The data does not support either fear, and the cost of avoidance is high. When employees do not receive feedback — positive or corrective — they fill the silence with anxiety. Alexander describes it precisely: “You go into a meeting with somebody, you give them a compliment, and at the end of it they go, ‘I was afraid I was going to be fired.’ You go to their performance review and they get fours across the board and they’re an outstanding employee. And at the end, they say, ‘I didn’t sleep last night. I was afraid I was going to be fired.'”
This is not a reflection of the employee’s irrationality. It is a rational response to years of working in environments where silence preceded bad news. Alexander puts the obligation squarely on the CEO: “Your job as a modern leader is doubly challenging. One is you have to do all the things that you said. And the second is you have to compete against all this other stuff that has infected people’s worldview up to that point. You can be a great leader, a great communicator — and on some level you’re answering for their previous boss who wasn’t that great.”
The practical move is to make feedback a consistent, specific, and frequent practice — not an annual event. When people know what good looks like and hear it regularly, the performance review stops being a source of dread and starts being a confirmation.
CEOs Who Invite Employees Into Culture Build Stronger Teams Than Those Who Describe It
New employees do not arrive as blank slates. They arrive with the cultural assumptions, communication norms, and professional beliefs baked in from every job they have held before — including what Instagram tells them the employer-employee relationship is supposed to look like.
Alexander is clear-eyed about what that means for CEOs: “You are trying to teach the employees about our culture. But what you’re really trying to do is you’re trying to invite them to be a part of that culture. Bring their experiences and make them part of the quilt.”
The distinction between describing culture and inviting people into it is not semantic. A description asks someone to conform. An invitation asks someone to contribute.
Alexander makes this tangible in his own interview process. He tells candidates three things about culture: he will describe it, teammates will describe it, and then — most importantly — the candidate has a homework assignment. “You need to go home and you need to imagine the culture after you’ve been here, after you’ve been a part of it. That’s the challenge. It’s not what culture am I coming into. What is the culture going to look like after I’ve been there?”
That reframe signals to candidates that they are being hired as participants, not passengers. It also filters toward people who think about contribution rather than just compensation — which is exactly who you want building a company alongside you.
How AI Helps CEOs Act on What Employees Actually Tell Them
The gap between gathering employee feedback and acting on it is where most culture programs break down — and it has a measurable cost.
Alexander is specific about the mechanism: a manager conducts a stay interview, gets a clear picture of what an employee needs to stay engaged, and then does nothing. Not because the manager does not care, but because there are three other meetings, the notes never got typed up, and by the time they surface again the moment has passed. That inaction does not register as neutral. It registers as a broken promise.
“It’s worse than not having done the interview in the first place,” Alexander says. “Because you made a contract. I want to know how I can help you. And if I’m not in a capacity to act upon that, then that’s really pretty deleterious to your employee experience.”
At Holistic, the platform is built specifically to prevent that outcome. AI takes stay interview data, synthesizes it, and surfaces decision-ready output before the window closes. The result Alexander points to: managers who previously let insights stall in handwritten notes now move from interview to action in the same session. “AI offers you a capacity to be the best version of yourself that you could never accomplish on your own,” he says.
Holistic take this further on the measurement side. Rather than asking employees directly whether the company is living its stated values — a question that will generate polished, self-conscious answers — they measure survey responses against those values without the employees knowing that is what is being assessed. The result is an honest read on where the company is walking the talk and where it is not.
“If I ask you, Glenn, ‘Are you transparent, accountable, positive, and hardworking?’ you’re going to give yourself 10 out of 10 on all of them,” Alexander explains. “But you’ll tell me the answers to those questions without me asking through your answers to other questions.”
That approach treats AI as what it actually is: a dispassionate observer that can see patterns a CEO who is too close to the work will miss.
CEO Culture Framework: Five Principles for Scaling People-First Companies
| Principle | What it means in practice | Named evidence from this interview |
| Internal communication has no upper limit | Employees always want more communication than they are getting — the goal is to over-deliver, not find the minimum | A client spending $200,000 per year on snacks saw employee sentiment rise sharply after COVID eliminated the perks and forced a shift to direct communication |
| Fix processes, not outcomes | Turnover, NPS, and workforce quality are trailing indicators — the hiring, feedback, and accountability processes that drive them are changeable today | Alexander’s framework at Holistic is built on this distinction: a flawed hiring process can be overhauled in a day; its effects on workforce quality take months to show, which is why CEO patience with process change determines whether culture improves or stays stuck |
| Positive feedback and accountability are safe | Neither giving compliments nor holding people accountable causes employees to demand raises or quit — avoiding both fills the silence with anxiety, producing employees who cannot sleep before a review even when they are rated outstanding | Alexander’s direct observation across hundreds of companies at 1871 and through Holistic’s client work: employees who receive no feedback consistently assume they are about to be fired, regardless of actual performance |
| Invite, don’t describe | Asking new hires to imagine the culture after they have shaped it — rather than presenting a fixed culture to adopt — filters toward candidates who think about contribution rather than compensation | Alexander applies this as a standard homework assignment in Holistic’s own hiring process; candidates who engage with the prompt self-select as builders; those who disengage self-select out |
| Let AI close the action gap | AI turns stay interview insights into decision-ready output before the window closes, preventing the broken-contract dynamic that destroys trust after a manager asks what an employee needs and then does nothing | Holistic’s platform moves managers from interview to action in the same session — the specific outcome the product was built to produce, replacing the stalled-notes dynamic Alexander identified as worse than skipping the interview entirely |
Quotes from This Episode
- “I can have a flawed hiring process today and I can take a series of concerted actions today and starting tomorrow it can be fixed. Now it’s going to take some time for that renewed, rejuvenated hiring process to result in a thriving workforce.” — Tom Alexander, CEO, Holistic
- “You go into a meeting with somebody, you give them a compliment, and at the end of it they go, ‘I was afraid I was going to be fired.’ You go to their performance review and they get fours across the board and they’re an outstanding employee. And at the end, they say, ‘I didn’t sleep last night. I was afraid I was going to be fired.'” — Tom Alexander, CEO, Holistic
- “You are trying to teach the employees about our culture. But what you’re really trying to do is you’re trying to invite them to be a part of that culture. Bring their experiences and make their part of the quilt.” — Tom Alexander, CEO, Holistic
- “It’s not what culture am I coming into. What is the culture going to look like after I’ve been there?” — Tom Alexander, CEO, Holistic
- “AI offers you a capacity to be the best version of yourself that you could never accomplish on your own.” — Tom Alexander, CEO, Holistic
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the biggest culture mistake CEOs make as their company scales?
Most CEOs underestimate how much internal communication their employees need, and they fixate on lagging indicators like turnover rates and NPS scores rather than fixing the processes that drive those outcomes. According to Tom Alexander, CEO of Holistic, there is no upper limit to how much communication employees want — and the feeling that communication is missing often shows up as complaints about unrelated things like office perks. CEOs who shift focus to what they can control today, starting with communication frequency and feedback quality, build cultures that improve over time rather than ones that drift.
Does giving employees positive feedback cause them to ask for raises?
No. Tom Alexander, whose firm Holistic works directly with companies on employee experience data, states clearly that this is a misconception CEOs use to justify withholding feedback — and it has no basis in evidence. What actually happens when feedback is withheld is that employees assume bad news is coming. Alexander describes employees who receive fours across the board in a performance review and still admit they could not sleep the night before because they were afraid they were about to be fired. Consistent, specific, positive feedback reduces anxiety and increases performance rather than triggering salary demands.
How can a CEO use AI to improve company culture without losing the human element?
The highest-value AI use case in culture-building is closing the gap between gathering employee feedback and acting on it. Tom Alexander, CEO of Holistic, explains that the value of a stay interview collapses if the insights never move to action — and the inaction registers not as neutral but as a broken contract with the employee. Holistic’s platform uses AI to move stay interview insights to decision-ready output within the same session, preventing that breakdown. Holistic also uses AI to measure whether employee survey responses reflect a company’s stated values without asking directly, producing a read that human self-assessment would distort. The role of AI is to enable leaders to act on what they already know — not to replace the human relationships that make culture real.
CEOs Work with Glenn Gow to Scale Their Companies by Scaling Their Culture First
Glenn Gow is The Scaling Executive Coach — he coaches ambitious executives into the CEO seat and CEOs into successful exits. With 25 years as a CEO and 5 years in venture capital, Glenn helps leaders scale their companies by scaling themselves first. If this conversation was useful, you can apply for executive coaching with Glenn Gow or apply to be a guest on The Scaling Executive Podcast.
