By Todd Johnson | Principal at Strategic Talent Partners
As companies add people, functions, and locations, alignment becomes harder to maintain.
What happens in one part of the business increasingly affects another. Decisions that may once have been contained within a single function or team begin to have broader implications, requiring leaders to work together in ways that may not have been necessary at an earlier stage of growth.
The question is no longer simply whether each function is performing well. It’s whether leaders across the organization can stay connected around shared priorities, make decisions with the broader business in mind, and maintain consistency as the company becomes more complex.
That is the challenge at the center of the third and final scenario in our Talent Scenarios for Growing Businesses blog series.
The Enterprise-Stage Challenge
This scenario focuses on a privately held, professionally managed commercial construction company in the Enterprise stage of our Growth Leadership Model™.
The business has reached $250 million in revenue with 550 employees and plans to grow to $350–400 million over the next five years through larger project opportunities and geographic expansion.
There is significant experience throughout the organization. The CEO has been in the role for 10 years, the COO was promoted internally three years ago, regional leaders average more than 18 years of tenure, and most talent has historically been developed from within.
That experience is an asset, but it does not eliminate the pressure growth is creating.
Middle management is stretched thin. Project managers are managing larger teams than ever before. Recruiting skilled labor and project leadership has been difficult. Communication is fragmented across locations, and culture is becoming harder to maintain as headcount increases.
For a company planning another $100–150 million in growth, these are more than isolated people challenges. They are signs that the way leadership works across the organization needs to evolve.
Moving From Leading Functions to Leading Enterprise
At the Enterprise stage, one of the biggest shifts is moving from Leading Functions to Leading Enterprise.
Strong functional leadership is still essential. But leaders can no longer focus primarily on the success of their own department, region, or area of responsibility. They must understand how decisions in one part of the company affect another and work together around priorities that span the business.
They also need to look further ahead. What roles and leadership layers will the future organization require? Where will greater depth be needed? How will the company prepare people for critical positions? What needs to remain consistent as the organization expands into new markets?
Those questions shift the focus from managing what exists today to building what the business will need next.
Build Leadership Capacity Below the Executive Team
As growth continues, adding more responsibility to the same roles will become difficult to sustain.
That’s why for this company, building greater leadership capacity starts with taking a more intentional approach to succession and development.
The organization has a strong history of developing talent from within. But at the Enterprise stage, that approach needs to extend more systematically across critical roles, with a clearer understanding of who could take on greater responsibility, where readiness gaps exist, and how development can help prepare people for what comes next.
However, not every future talent need is able to be met from within. Leaders also need to recognize where outside experience could add capabilities the organization does not currently have.
Building depth in both ways gives the company more options as leadership needs continue to change.
Create Alignment Across Functions and Locations
Geographic expansion creates another challenge: communication that once happened naturally becomes harder to maintain.
As teams spread across locations, information can move differently from one part of the organization to another. Priorities can be interpreted differently, and regions or functions can become increasingly focused on their own immediate needs.
The company’s long-tenured regional leaders bring valuable relationships and shared context. But as the business expands, coordination cannot depend entirely on those informal connections.
Leaders need clearer ways to share information, coordinate decisions, and connect priorities across functions and locations. They need to understand not only what their own part of the business is trying to accomplish, but how it fits into the company’s broader direction.
That does not mean every team or location needs to operate exactly the same way. It means leaders need enough shared context and clarity to make decisions that support the business as a whole.
Reinforce Culture at Scale
Growth can also make culture more difficult to sustain.
As the company adds people and enters new markets, employees may experience the organization differently depending on their manager, team, or location. Fewer people will have direct exposure to the longtime leaders who helped shape the business.
At this stage, culture cannot depend entirely on proximity to those leaders. It needs to show up in leadership expectations and in the way the company hires, develops, promotes, communicates, and creates accountability.
Long-tenured leaders have valuable perspective on what has made the company successful. The opportunity is to translate that knowledge into clear expectations that leaders throughout the organization can carry forward.
Reinforcing culture at scale does not mean preserving every way of working exactly as it is. It means being intentional about what should remain consistent as the business evolves.
Leading the Enterprise Forward
For a company in this position, several priorities stand out:
- Reassess the leadership roles and layers the company will need for its next stage of growth, particularly in middle management and project leadership.
- Make succession and development more systematic across critical roles while identifying where outside experience may be needed.
- Strengthen communication and coordination across functions and locations.
- Reinforce culture through clear and consistent leadership expectations and practices.
This is what Leading Enterprise requires: building the structure, leadership depth, and consistency needed to support a larger, more complex organization.
Final Takeaway: Build for What Comes Next
Each scenario in this series started with a clear growth goal. What changed from one stage to the next was the leadership work required to support it.
For the Emerging-stage company, that meant reducing dependence on the founder and strengthening the next layer of leadership. For the Scaling-stage ESOP, it meant building greater depth and preparing the next generation for future responsibility. For the Enterprise-stage business, the focus expanded to creating the leadership capacity, structure, and shared direction needed for a much larger organization to operate as one company.
No two companies will move through these stages in exactly the same way, but what remains consistent is this: growth changes what the business requires from its leaders.
That is ultimately the purpose of our Growth Leadership Model™: to help organizations better understand where they are today and what they need to begin building for what comes next.
If you’re thinking through what your own growth plans will require from your leadership team and organization, we’d be happy to talk it through with you.
