By Kayla Monroe

Every executive who I have worked with has one thing in common.  They want to win – and growth is the goal.   New customers, increased sales, more profit.  In order to do that, the vision is set, the strategy is planned, and the team gets to work.  

And for a while, everything moves forward as planned. Until it doesn’t.  

You can’t see that something is wrong at first, but you can feel it. 

• Priorities across the leadership team start to look a little different.
• Teams start to drift apart and there’s an unspoken competition across departments.
• People are getting frustrated because of re-work or confusion.
• Work across the business starts to feel inefficient.
• Leaders start to get pulled into daily decisions more than they should. 

‘What got you here won’t get you there.’ It’s true for individuals and for organizations. The larger your business becomes, the more intentional you must be about how it is designed. 

When I assess whether or not an organization is designed for growth, I look at these four things: 

How leadership operates through change 

Leadership requirements change as the business grows. What worked when the team was small (making decisions quickly, staying close to operations, being directly involved) stops working when the organization reaches a certain size.

Leaders who don't evolve how they operate become the constraint. Not because they're ineffective, but because the business now requires a different kind of leadership than it did before.

How the organization is structured to carry out the work

Structure isn't just an org chart. It's how work flows, how decisions get made, where authority sits, and how teams coordinate across functions.

As the business grows, informal ways of working stop being effective. What functioned naturally with 50 people requires intentional design at 100. You can grow without redesigning structure, but the friction compounds until something forces the change.                               

If the workforce has the capacity and capability to deliver on what is now being required

Growth changes what’s required of people.  Roles expand, expectations increase and the complexity people navigate goes up. 

Just because you want the organization to operate differently doesn’t mean that the workforce is ready for it.  Capability has to be built intentionally, and capacity has to be planned for. You can’t expect people to execute at a higher level without developing them first. 

Whether or not execution is designed to create and sustain momentum

Most organizations assume execution happens naturally once strategy is set and people are in place. It doesn't.

Execution requires its own design. How priorities are tracked, how progress stays visible, where accountability sits, how obstacles get cleared. Without that, progress depends on the effort of each person individually versus the collective momentum of the whole. 

These four elements work together and must be designed as one integrated system.

What addressing one without the others looks like

I've seen organizations redesign their structure without clarifying decision authority.  Now there's a new org chart and the same confusion about the role each person plays and how they should interact together.

I've seen leadership teams align on strategy without addressing how that strategy will actually execute two levels down.  Alignment that breaks the moment you leave the room is just agreement.

I've seen organizations hire aggressively without building the strategies needed to onboard, develop, or retain those people.  Now they're constantly replacing turnover instead of focusing on moving the business forward.

Why leaders miss this layer entirely

This work doesn’t show up in strategy decks and it’s not a line item on the plan.  It doesn’t feel like tangible progress. It feels like process, so it often gets delegated, deferred or skipped altogether.  

Leaders naturally focus on what’s visible and measurable. Revenue targets, hiring plans, product launches. The organizational infrastructure that I described only starts getting attention when friction starts causing problems. 

What changes when you get it right

When these four elements work together, the organization stops requiring constant intervention. Decisions move forward without needing to be re-explained. Leadership capacity shifts from managing friction to focusing on what actually requires strategic judgment.

People work with clarity instead of spending time coordinating around confusion. Progress happens because the infrastructure is in place, not because individuals are pushing harder.

The business becomes capable of handling complexity.

The work that makes growth possible isn't just deciding where to go. It's designing how leadership will operate, how the organization will coordinate, whether the workforce can deliver, and how execution will create momentum.

That work is mostly invisible. Which is exactly why it's consistently underestimated.

Until next time, 

Kayla

P.S. If you're sensing friction that you believe is hidden under the surface, the Organizational Growth Diagnostic might be a good place to start. Reply to this email and I can tell you more about how it works.

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