The Challenge: A Leadership Team Stretched by Rapid Growth

 

Scaling from 200 to 1,500 employees in five years is no small task. This organisation was growing fast, but their leadership approach wasn’t keeping up. What had worked in the early days—quick decisions, informal collaboration, and instinct-driven leadership—was now causing friction.

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• Senior leaders agreed on the big picture but interpreted priorities differently.

• Department heads weren’t fully equipped to lead at scale, leading to bottlenecks and misalignment.

• Newer leaders struggled to integrate, while long-standing team members unconsciously held onto old ways of working.

 

Growth was happening, but not smoothly. Execution was slowing, tensions were rising, and the leadership team knew they needed to work differently to deliver at scale. Beneath it all, there was something deeper—change fatigue. After years of constant shifts, leaders and teams were exhausted. The pace of transformation had outstripped their ability to adapt, and it was starting to show in hesitancy, resistance, and a lack of momentum.

 

The Work: Strengthening Leadership Alignment & Capability

 

We worked closely with the CEO and CPO to address the challenge at  two levels:

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1. Aligning the Senior Leadership Team – We facilitated targeted offsites to surface hidden tensions, clarify priorities, and ensure leaders challenged and supported each other in the right ways. Instead of relying on assumed alignment, they built a shared, working understanding of what needed to happen and how to navigate the complexity ahead.

2. Developing the Extended Leadership Team – The organisation’s next tier of leaders was crucial to sustaining growth, but they hadn’t been fully equipped for the shift. We ran sessions focused on real-time leadership challenges, helping them develop the skills and confidence to manage at scale.1

 

The Outcome: A Leadership Team Ready for Scale

 

By the time they had gone through the process, the shift was tangible. Leaders stopped working in silos and began making decisions together. Instead of second-guessing or working around each other, they started actively aligning—checking assumptions, clarifying intent, and adjusting together as priorities evolved.

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With the senior team aligned and the next tier of leaders stepping up, leadership was no longer playing catch-up to growth—it was shaping it. For the first time, alignment wasn’t just about keeping up with change, but about leading it.