Notes from the Gray Area
Every growing organization follows a familiar pattern
Sales becomes more specialized
Engineering develops deeper expertise
Delivery introduces new operating models
Finance strengthens governance
As the business grows, every major function evolves to handle greater complexity.
That seems obvious.
What isn’t obvious is whether the leadership office evolves in the same way.
The role of leadership changes as organizations grow.
In a smaller business, leaders stay close to customers, products and day-to-day decisions. Information travels through conversations. Patterns are easier to spot because the organization itself is easier to understand.
Growth changes that.
Information now arrives through reviews, dashboards, operating metrics and leadership meetings. Each function develops a better understanding of its own business.
The questions facing leadership also change.
They no longer begin within Sales, Delivery or Engineering.
They begin somewhere between them.
–> A customer opportunity depends on multiple business units.
–> An operational issue appears insignificant inside each function but becomes meaningful when viewed together.
–> A strategic initiative has broad support, yet gradually loses momentum because no single organization owns it end to end.
These situations don’t necessarily point to weak execution.
They seem to be a natural consequence of scale.
That’s because every business function is designed to answer questions about its own domain. Leadership faces a different class of questions, the ones that sit between functions. They rarely have a single owner, yet they often shape the direction of the business.
The larger an organization becomes, the more important the connections between functions become.
There may be a simple reason for this.
–> Business functions scale through structure.
–> Leadership often scales through personal capacity.
When Sales grows, organizations create regions, introduce new roles and refine operating models. The same happens across Engineering, Delivery and Finance. The work is well understood, ownership is clear and progress is relatively easy to measure.
The leadership office is different.
Its work is not centered on running a function. It is centered on connecting functions.
That responsibility is harder to define. Its outcomes are less visible. As a result, much of this work remains embedded in the daily rhythm of senior leaders rather than developing into an organizational capability of its own.
Perhaps that’s why organizations continuously strengthen business functions while assuming the leadership office will naturally keep pace.
Whether that assumption holds over time is an interesting question.
Organizations redesign business units as they grow.
They introduce new operating models, specialist roles and governance structures.
We accept this as part of scaling.
I wonder if we think about the leadership office the same way.
Not in terms of hierarchy or reporting lines.
In terms of capability.
If the role of leadership changes as organizations become larger and more interconnected, should the operating model supporting leadership evolve as well?
I don’t have an answer.
I just think it’s a question worth asking.
Why does this question matter?
Because every organization eventually reaches a point where talent, customers and execution are no longer the primary challenge. The challenge shifts to making sense of an increasingly interconnected business.
How leadership responds to that complexity may shape the organization’s next phase of growth.
As organizations scale, functions become more specialized while leadership becomes more integrative. Organizations invest heavily in improving visibility. Whether they invest equally in strengthening executive decision making is an interesting question.
Perhaps the next phase of growth begins not inside another function, but in how leadership sees the business as a whole.
This note comes from a question that stayed with me after working across consulting, corporate leadership and operating businesses.
This note left me with more questions than answers.
Some of the questions I’m currently exploring are:
- Does the leadership office scale with the business?
- If it does, what capabilities should evolve first?
- Why do business functions scale more predictably than executive decision-making?
- Who owns the work that sits between organizational functions?
- Do leadership operating models deserve as much attention as business operating models?
Perhaps these are different ways of asking the same question.
