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Leadership Decisions Series #1

Growth is usually associated with progress: more customers, more revenue, more people, new markets and greater opportunities. So naturally, much of our attention goes towards what will help us grow. But growth also changes the organisation carrying it.

The question is: what could put us at risk as we grow?

Some of the most difficult risks do not come from making bad decisions, they emerge from decisions the business needs to make to enter its next phase.

Take talent: The people who helped build the organisation may expect to grow with it. Yet the next phase may require managerial, technical or strategic capabilities that do not currently exist internally. Recruiting those capabilities from the market may be the right decision for the business, while still creating frustration among loyal employees who feel they have earned the opportunity. We are no longer making a recruitment decision alone; we are managing expectations, progression, recognition and the relationship between contribution and readiness.

Culture faces a similar tension: in the early stages, culture often develops organically through the founders and the first employees. It may be strong without ever having been clearly defined. Then growth brings many new people, experiences and ways of working into the organisation at once. Something begins to change. By the time we feel that the culture has been diluted, we may struggle to explain exactly what has been lost because we never identified what needed protecting in the first place.

Reward also becomes more complex: Early compensation decisions are often shaped by available funding, urgency and the need to attract particular individuals, sometimes requiring the company to outbid the market. As the workforce grows, those individual decisions become an internal structure. Differences in pay become visible, progression needs to make sense. At the same time, compensation must remain aligned enough with the external market to attract the talent required for the next stage without creating a cost base the business cannot sustain.

Then there is management capability: Promoting a strong individual contributor into their first supervisory role can create progression and retain valuable organisational knowledge. But knowing the business is not the same as knowing how to lead people. Without the time, support or investment to develop new managers, we can unintentionally give someone greater accountability without giving them the capability to carry it. The risk then extends beyond that manager to the experience and performance of the team they lead.

And underneath all of this are the systems and processes that once served a smaller organisation. Recruitment, decision-making, communication, performance, approvals and information flows eventually need greater consistency. What once worked through proximity and individual judgement increasingly needs to work through organisational capability.

Here’s the shift: growth is not simply about adding more, it is about managing the transitions created by more.

New talent may be necessary without diminishing the contribution of those who came before. Culture can evolve without losing the identity that made the organisation successful. Reward can become structured without losing competitiveness. Employees can progress without being promoted beyond their current capability. And systems can become more robust without creating unnecessary bureaucracy.

None of these transitions happens automatically, they require choices about what we preserve, what we change, what we build and what we are prepared to leave behind. Perhaps one of the greatest risks in a growth journey, is assuming that because the organisation was capable of reaching this stage, it is already designed for the next one.

Growth changes what the organisation needs from its people, its leaders and its systems. Our leadership decisions determine how well we navigate that change.