Which practices that worked when everyone knew everything are now slowing decisions down?
When you started your business, being closely involved in everything was probably one of your greatest strengths. You understood the product, knew the customers, and could move quickly from identifying a problem to doing something about it. People could come directly to you, and decisions rarely had far to travel.
Now the business is larger. You have more employees, more customers, and more people responsible for managing the work. Yet somehow, decisions take longer. Issues move between departments without being resolved, your calendar is full of meetings, and people still come to you for answers you thought they could provide themselves.
You may find yourself asking a reasonable question: if we have more people and more resources, why does everything seem harder?
Part of the answer lies in organizational maturation. As an organization grows, its work becomes more complex. That complexity creates new demands for management, coordination, and business systems. It also changes the work of the person leading the organization, sometimes well before that person recognizes how much their role has changed.
Growth Changes More Than the Size of the Business
In a small business, people can coordinate much of their work through direct conversation. They know what others are doing, understand the immediate priorities, and can usually find the person who has the answer. The head of the organization can stay close to the work because there is still a manageable amount of it to oversee.
As the number of employees increases, more management is needed. Someone must establish priorities, assign work, provide support, and ensure that individual contributions come together to produce the required results. Eventually, as the number of managers increases, their teams need to be organized into functions with clear responsibilities.
Sales, production, operations, finance, and other functions develop because different kinds of work require focused attention. Each function can build the capability needed to do its work well, but its success also depends on how effectively it works with the others.
A sales commitment affects production capacity. A production decision affects inventory and cash flow. A new product may require changes in purchasing, customer support, and distribution. The organization now needs to manage relationships between functions as well as the work within them.
There is no getting around this increase in complexity. The question is whether the management structure and business systems mature sufficiently to handle it.
The Head of the Organization Has a Different Job
In the previous articles, we explored how a promotion can change the complexity of someone’s work and how a role can outgrow its original design even when the title remains unchanged. The same principles apply to the head of the organization.
You may still have the title of founder, president, or CEO, but the work the business requires of you can be fundamentally different from the work that made you successful in its early years.
This can be especially difficult for entrepreneurs. You built the business by being good at something: developing a product, selling, delivering a service, managing logistics, or recognizing an opportunity that others had missed. Those capabilities remain valuable. However, success in those areas does not necessarily prepare you to design a management structure, establish accountability and authority, or develop systems that allow several functions to work together effectively.
Many business owners have had little opportunity to learn these fundamentals. Their education has come through building the business, solving problems, and responding to whatever needed attention next.
That experience provides a strong foundation, but growth introduces demands that cannot always be met by doing more of what worked before. At each stage of organizational maturation, it is worth asking: what is the most important work that only I can do at this level, and what work now needs to be assigned to others?
Your Interest in the Business Continues, but at a Higher Level
This does not mean that the head of the organization loses interest in sales, production, or any other driver of business success. The nature of that interest changes as the organization becomes more complex.
Consider sales. In the early stages, you may have been the person who brought in most of the business. You knew the customers, understood their needs, and could make commitments because you also knew what the organization could deliver.
As the business grows, capable salespeople can take responsibility for the kinds of sales that have traditionally driven its success. Your contribution to sales then needs to develop alongside the organization.
You may focus on whether the appropriate sales system is in place, whether the organization has the right market coverage, and whether its approach can support the next stage of growth. You may still work directly with customers, particularly where an opportunity is larger, more complex, or takes longer to develop.
For example, the sales team may continue building regional relationships while you work on establishing national accounts. Or you may develop a distribution system that gives the business access to markets it could not previously serve.
Your involvement in sales remains important, but you are bringing value at a higher level of complexity. At the same time, the salespeople reporting through the next level of management have the space and authority to do their own value-added work.
The same principle applies to production and operations. Your attention may shift from resolving individual scheduling problems to ensuring that the organization has the capacity, systems, and investment plan needed to meet future demand. You remain accountable for the overall result, while managers take responsibility for delivering the work assigned to them.
When Yesterday’s Work Crowds Out Today’s Responsibilities
The difficulty arises when the head of the organization continues doing too much of the work that now belongs at the next level.
You may remain involved because you enjoy it, because customers are accustomed to dealing with you, or because you can resolve an issue faster than someone who is still learning. Sometimes the reason is simpler: the work has never been clearly reassigned, so everyone continues operating as they always have.
Over time, more decisions come back to you. Managers seek your approval, employees bypass their managers to ask you directly, and disagreements between functions wait for your intervention. You work harder to keep things moving, but your involvement gradually becomes part of the delay.
Meanwhile, the work that requires your attention receives less of it. Developing business systems, ensuring that functions are aligned, building management capability, and thinking strategically about the organization are pushed into whatever time remains.
These responsibilities rarely arrive with the urgency of a customer complaint or a production problem. They can therefore be postponed, even though postponing them makes those recurring problems more likely.
The result is a difficult cycle. The organization needs better systems and clearer management practices, but the person accountable for developing them is consumed by the consequences of their absence.
Delegation Needs a Structure
Resolving this requires more than deciding to “let go.” Work must be assigned in a way that allows other people to succeed.
A manager needs to understand the results for which they are accountable, the decisions they have authority to make, and the resources available to them. They also need context: what the organization is trying to achieve, which priorities matter, and how their work contributes.
Relationships between functions need similar clarity. If sales wants to make a commitment that affects production, people should know how that commitment is assessed and who can authorize it. If two functions have competing priorities, there should be a clear way to resolve the conflict.
Without those arrangements, delegation can leave people carrying responsibility while still depending on the CEO for permission or intervention. The work has been handed over in name, but the organization continues to rely on the same person to make it happen.
A sound management structure helps each level contribute its value. Frontline employees can focus on their assigned work, managers can lead their teams and coordinate delivery, and the head of the organization can address the broader demands that emerge as the business matures.
Start with the Work That Keeps Returning to You
A useful starting point is to examine the issues that repeatedly arrive at your desk.
Some properly belong there because they involve organization-wide trade-offs, significant commitments, or opportunities that require your level of judgment. Others may be returning because accountability is unclear, authority is insufficient, or a necessary business system has not been established.
Think about a recent sales, production, or operational decision that needed your intervention. Was your involvement required by the complexity of the decision, or by a gap in how the work was organized?
That distinction can help you identify what needs to change. Perhaps a manager needs clearer authority. Perhaps two functions need an agreed process for coordinating their work. Perhaps you are still carrying a responsibility that should now sit at the next level.
Addressing those gaps creates room for you to do the work the organization increasingly needs from you. It also allows others to make the contributions for which you hired them.
Final Thought
Growth brings greater complexity, and greater complexity changes the work of leadership. The challenge is to recognize that change and deliberately develop the management structure and business systems that support it.
Where are you still doing work that made you successful in the past, while the work needed for the organization’s next stage waits for your attention?
This can be a difficult question to examine on your own. Your involvement may feel essential, and under the current arrangements, it may be. Seeing how those arrangements could change often benefits from a conversation with people who understand the responsibilities of leading a business.
This is one of the advantages of a Vistage peer advisory group. Confidential discussions with other business leaders, supported by one-to-one coaching, give you a place to examine how your role is changing, challenge your assumptions, and work through decisions about the organization you need to build.
That perspective can help you move beyond managing the immediate pressures of growth and make time for the leadership work that supports its next stage.
Is your business growing faster than your way of managing it is evolving? If you would value a conversation about the support a peer group could provide, learn more about my Vistage executive peer groups.
