02/19/2026
Rapid growth exposes leadership gaps faster than strategy gaps.
At smaller sizes, shared context carries the organization.
People know each other.
Decisions happen informally.
Culture spreads through proximity.
As scale increases, that glue weakens.
One company grew quickly from a tight founding group to nearly 150 employees.
Revenue initially held.
Performance metrics looked stable.
But cohesion eroded... and four of the six original leaders eventually left.
Cohesion breakdown rarely hurts this quarter.
It threatens the next three years.
As the organization expanded:
👉🏼 Informal alignment stopped working
👉🏼 Early employees felt disconnected.
👉🏼 New hires struggled to find their footing.
The practices that once created speed began creating friction.
The strategy wasn’t failing.
The leadership model hadn’t evolved with scale.
The larger the organization, the less you can rely on informal alignment.
In enterprise environments, this shows up as
👉🏼 slower ex*****on
👉🏼 duplicated work
👉🏼 friction between long-tenured leaders and new talent
👉🏼 and the quiet exit of the very leaders who once held the culture together
During scale, three shifts matter:
1️⃣ Create shared language so expectations are explicit across levels and functions.
2️⃣ Rebuild shared identity so people understand who the organization is now, not who it was.
3️⃣ Normalize disagreement so new perspectives strengthen decisions instead of fragmenting teams.
Growth does not destabilize organizations.
Leadership practices that fail to scale do.
If your organization is expanding, what part of your leadership approach has not evolved with it?
