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Hiring Complexity Series #4

Has the organisation quietly become something different?

When we're a team of twenty people, it's surprisingly easy to stay aligned: we know what everyone is working on, conversations happen naturally, decisions are made quickly because the people involved are often sitting in the same room or speaking every day, if priorities change, we can usually explain them directly.

As the organisation grows, we often expect more of the same, just with more people. But somewhere along the journey, something changes: the founder is no longer involved in every decision, new managers emerge, teams begin specialising, information starts flowing through people instead of directly between them, two employees can have completely different experiences of the same organisation. Growth hasn't simply added more people, it has changed how the organisation works.

The question becomes: How do we recognise when the organisation has outgrown the way we've always led it?

What happens when our people practices don't grow with the organisation?

Many of the approaches that helped us reach twenty employees begin to show their limits as the organisation grows. Hiring becomes less consistent because more people are involved in making decisions, managers interpret expectations differently because they haven't always shared the same context, communication becomes uneven, not because people aren't committed, but because information can no longer spread organically.

None of these changes means the organisation is failing, they're often signs that the business has reached a new stage of growth. The challenge is that we sometimes respond by trying to work harder, communicate more or hire faster, when the organisation is actually asking for something different: greater clarity, stronger systems and more intentional ways of making people decisions.

What does the organisation need from us now?

One of the most important transitions founders make isn't learning how to lead more people, it's learning how to lead a different kind of organisation. The practices that worked when everyone shared the same context won't always work when teams become larger, more specialised and more distributed. That doesn't mean replacing agility with bureaucracy, it means becoming more intentional about how decisions are made, how managers are supported and how capability is developed as the organisation grows.

Here's the shift: instead of asking "How do we keep doing what worked before?", ask "What does this stage of growth require from the organisation that wasn't necessary before?"

Growth doesn't simply increase the number of people we lead, it changes the kind of organisation we're leading.