When Growth Makes Leadership Harder (and why that’s normal)
It’s not just you.
In a world that feels increasingly unstable—economically, politically, and socially—complexity is growing fast. Organizations are expanding into new regions, navigating new risks, and coordinating across more systems, partners, and priorities than ever before.
Growth is supposed to be exciting. And it is.
But it also has a funny way of making leadership feel harder, not easier.
Most leaders sense this long before they can name it. Things don’t feel broken exactly—but they don’t feel smooth either. Progress takes more effort. Conversations take longer. Decisions that used to be straightforward now require three meetings and a follow-up.
This isn’t a sign that something has gone wrong.
It’s a sign that the way leadership works needs to catch up with the world you’re now operating in.
What leaders often notice first
As complexity increases, a predictable pattern tends to emerge:
Decisions slow down.
Accountability gets fuzzier.
Senior leaders spend more time coordinating than actually moving things forward.
Leadership teams often notice things like:
Decision cycles stretching as more regions, systems, and risks come into play
Accountability becoming harder to hold across governance structures
Senior leaders quietly absorbing more escalation, coordination, and risk
If this sounds familiar, take a breath. These are not leadership failures.
They’re early signals that leadership systems designed for a simpler environment are being asked to do more than they were built for.
The part we tend to get wrong
Here’s where things often go sideways.
Leaders know something isn’t working, but the diagnosis is usually off. The default explanation tends to sound like this:
“Maybe the teams aren’t structured quite right.”
“Maybe roles need to be clarified.”
“Maybe we need another re-org.”
Structure is visible. It feels actionable. And sometimes it’s part of the answer.
But this is also why organizations in expansion mode can find themselves cycling through multiple reorganizations without ever quite solving the problem. The boxes change. The friction doesn’t.
Because more often than not, the real issue isn’t who reports to whom. It’s how decisions are expected to happen under new conditions.
What’s really happening beneath the surface
As organizations grow, leadership systems that once worked beautifully start to strain… often quietly, at first.
Decision rights that used to feel clear blur as more stakeholders need to be consulted. Risk thresholds that made sense when things moved slower begin to feel overly cautious. Information multiplies, but clarity doesn’t automatically follow.
So leaders step in.
Not because they want control—but because the system no longer reliably produces decisions without them. Senior leaders become the glue. They arbitrate trade-offs, absorb uncertainty, and keep things moving through sheer judgment and effort.
It works. For a while.
But it’s exhausting. And it doesn’t scale.
Over time, progress becomes fragile—dependent on a few people carrying an ever-growing coordination load. From the outside, it can look like indecision or inefficiency. Inside the organization, it usually feels like people are working harder than ever… and still not quite getting ahead.
Why jumping to solutions too quickly can backfire
When pressure builds, the urge to do something is strong:
Hire more people
Tighten performance management
Restructure teams or governance
Sometimes these are the right moves. But taken too early, they can actually make things harder by treating symptoms before the system is understood.
At this stage, the most valuable work isn’t fixing—it’s seeing.
Seeing how leadership decisions are actually made today (not how they’re supposed to be made on paper). Seeing where pressure is building. Seeing where people are compensating quietly to keep things working.
The power of getting specific
What I notice about organizations that navigate growth well: they tend to pause here not to slow momentum, but to get oriented. Instead of “Ready, Fire, Aim!” they “measure twice” to make sure the changes will have the needed effect.
They ask clearer, more useful questions:
What’s no longer working in how we communicate, decide, and align?
Where are the highest areas of risk as complexity increases?
Where are we relying too heavily on individual leaders to hold things together?
What strengths are already working in our favour, and need protecting?
What, specifically, needs to happen differently?
This kind of clarity changes the conversation. Instead of defaulting to structural fixes, leaders can make intentional choices about how decision-making, accountability, and leadership effort need to evolve together.
Growth asks something different of leadership
Growth doesn’t require perfect answers.
It does require leadership systems that can adapt as complexity increases.
Getting ahead of the curve means making those systems visible. We do that by naming what’s changing, understanding where pressure is building, and adjusting how leadership effort is distributed across the organization.
When organizations do this early, expansion remains challenging, but manageable. When they don’t, the strain shows up everywhere else.
The goal isn’t to do more.
It’s to make sure the way leadership works is fit for the world you’re now operating in.
A practical place to start
For leaders who recognize these patterns and want to get ahead of them, an Expansion Readiness Snapshot can be a practical starting point. It offers a moment-in-time view of how leadership decisions, coordination, and accountability are actually working today—so you can see where pressure is building, what’s holding, and what may need to evolve before complexity increases further.
However you choose to “measure twice,” remember that when your leadership and decision-making systems don’t work any more, that’s not a failure of leadership. It’s an opportunity to build new ones that will grow with you.