Growing pains are a great problem to have. However, they are one of the biggest challenges for a company to achieve success. Success at scale means transitioning from a scrappy entrepreneurial mindset to one that follows processes and procedures meant to ensure consistent, measurable, and reliable results.

There are a few reasons this transition is so difficult. One is simply the change in atmosphere necessary for this transitional growth. This seat-of-your-pants entrepreneurial hustle mindset is simply incompatible with success in the scaling and process-driven phase. 

In an up-and-coming organization, the best team members thrive by working with all hands on deck. When a problem arises, these team members don’t wait for permission to solve the problem, they just jump in and help. This builds cohesion and shared buy-in, but it isn’t sustainable long term. When processes don’t exist, these types of employees and leaders thrive on the freedom. Their can-do attitude and ability to be a self-starter is critical to success. The wait-and-see employees who need permission before they can act are likely managed out of this business or are not nearly as acknowledged as their counterparts who are jumping into the fire ready to firefight.

But as an organization grows, especially if it has taken on investment like private equity or venture capital, operating in this entrepreneurial all-hands-on-deck style is untenable. You need to find ways to delegate responsibilities. 

Should the CFO be handling a customer complaint ticket because they were the first to notice the ping and the other customer success employees were busy with another task?

Should the new hire, who has been shadowing and learning from one employee, receive a completely different set of instructions to accomplish the same task from a different employee the week the original trainer was out on vacation?

Should the account executive who is one of the biggest revenue earners for the company be able to skip updating the CRM because “he doesn’t feel like it” and points to his track record as to why he is going to be able to hit his numbers for this quarter?

In a scrappy, entrepreneurially minded organization, these types of situations slide through. They happen because action is rewarded over process. 

But they are very inefficient, and every one of these behaviors causes workload debt to build up in the company. The CFO missed an hour they could have spent preparing for the next quarter. The senior team members are forced to redo the newbie’s work half the time because nobody finished training. And the best client just got a second call this week from a different account executive and just called the CEO to see what was going on. Hours and days of lost time will drag the company down. 

And in an organization that wants to grow and drive consistent profitability, something needs to change to ensure people are being held accountable and that there is consistency across the organization.

And the ironic thing about this change is that oftentimes, the person who created the original process for how things are done is excited to update it. They will readily admit that they just threw something together using whatever resources were at their disposal and they are optimistic that the new system could be better. However, this won’t be the case for every team member.

Change is hard, and those who become accustomed to a routine or way of operating are incredibly difficult to change. 

If you have ever upgraded your ERP or CRM systems you likely have felt this pain and are acutely aware of how hard it is to get people to change. 

Here are 4 steps to driving strategic change in an organization:

1. Having a change plan is critical to successfully driving strategic change in an organization. The key changes need to be laid out, prioritized, and planned so as to avoid too many changes happening all at once. Everyone feels more comfortable following a well-laid plan. Too often organizations try to cram too many changes in at the same time - leading to confusion, change fatigue, and loss of confidence in the executives driving the change.

For strategic change to occur, trust must exist between the executive team driving the change and the employees implementing the change.

2. Too often change efforts are described using words that emphasise what’s in it for the company and not the individual. “With this change, we expect to improve our EBITDA by 67%”. Unless employees have equity in the company, they don’t really care about how the books will change because of this extra work. What they really care about is what is in it for them.

Therefore, every message needs to be crafted for each employee. What drives one person might not drive another. Some people are motivated by work/life balance, and they’ll appreciate how the new processes will reduce emergency all-hands-on-deck situations. Some are driven by professional growth, and they’ll be excited for the new opportunities that come with scale. And others are driven by their passion and their personal and professional mission alignment, and growth can help them make their mark on the world. The Work Orientation of an individual should help the company understand how to portray the change to each individual.

3. Middle management is at the core of where a change initiative succeeds or fails. If middle managers buy into the change, they are much more likely to hold others accountable when they aren’t behaving in alignment with the change. Therefore, they need to be able to communicate the change in their own words and they need to have the space with the executive team to have their questions answered and concerns assuaged. 

For example, let’s say you are changing CRM (customer relationship management) systems. There was a separate system for managing support tickets and another for managing potential new deals. The new system brings it all together so when support answers a customer inquiry, they can quickly touch base with the accompanying account executive to help make sure that the client is successfully onboarded and can cover the concerns the customer has shared without having the customer repeat herself. If a customer support representative accidentally inputs notes about a customer in the wrong spot in the new CRM system because he couldn’t figure out where to put the notes, it is on the customer success manager to educate the representative on why this was wrong and educate them on how to do it properly. If the customer success manager doesn’t fully understand why the change to the new CRM system was implemented in the first place, they may intentionally or unintentionally not correct the bad behavior. If the bad behavior isn’t corrected, bad habits form and it will likely lead to a follow-on change to a system that didn’t get fixed in the first place. 

4. Getting quick wins and celebrating (even if it feels over the top) is vital to getting the team to buy in to change. Let’s say a technical team is implementing a kanban board to identify where their weekly sprints are and their upcoming product roadmap and the Director of Product Management is wanting to get the sales team involved with adding issues/product development opportunities to the kanban board. It is critical that the Director of Product Management publicly and privately celebrate anytime anyone from the sales team puts something on the board. It may seem like a small task to the sales team but the Director of Product Management knows that if she wants the sales team to engage in the kanban board and the development of their product, they need to be effectively communicating with each other and she needs to provide dopamine to the sales team for following along with what she wants them to be doing.

These are the 4 steps to driving strategic change in an organization. For resources on how to learn how others are handling this transition, consider joining an executive mastermind group to connect with other executives going through similar challenges as you.

There seems to be one constant in business: change is inevitable.

Whether we are implementing something new with AI, restructuring processes, pursuing a new direction, or any combination of things that would necessitate change - one thing is certain: no industry is safe and most organizations will need to make changes to keep up or risk being left behind.

The question I am pondering is: How can people be at the center of this change?

Peter Drucker once said “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” and I would tend to agree with him.

No matter what promises we made to our board, how rosy a picture could look if we just made this one change, or how dire our situation is, if the people being asked to implement the change are not onboard with the change, it is never going to happen.

Does this mean that we should only change if our people approve of the change? Not necessarily. But it does mean that if we are going to make a change, our people must know what is in it for them and that result must be substantially better than what they currently have.

The purpose of change is typically for one of two reasons. Either:

It is typically easier to create a compelling why to the team in the first reason: if we don’t make this change, we all could be out of a job and if we like our lifestyle and the life our jobs currently afford us, then we should all be bought in to make this change. This requires a level of vulnerability from the executive team but is typically pretty compelling. This message does lose its luster if repeated too often as our people will go to a state of emergency with us but they will not live there (e.g. the lifestyle their work affords them won’t be worth it if they are constantly feeling like if they don’t make immediate changes that the company will go under).

For the latter (making a change that has the potential of improving the business substantially), most organizations struggle to create a clear and compelling WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) for everyone. If a CEO says that making this change will increase EBITDA which will help position the company for an exit - if the employees of this company don’t have equity, they don’t care about achieving an exit because there is no upside for them.

The company must create a compelling WIIFM for everyone involved. This takes a lot of time and effort. But it needs to happen for change to occur. Otherwise, the company will have to hire a consulting company who will charge an obscene amount of money to do the exact same thing and then leave once they gave the company the blueprint of everything they need to do to right the ship.

To align purpose when implementing change, everyone must be accounted for with a WIIFM to get the buy-in necessary for the change to be successfully implemented (and the WIIFM should be catered to people on a person by person basis, not a departmental one because what motivates one person could be different from another person, even if they are in the exact same role).

One final note on purpose, especially if it is for a brighter future instead of avoiding business failure, even if an organization successfully implements a change one time, they need to be mindful of stacking changes. Every change creates a cracking of trust that needs time to repair. The more frequent changes you ask of your people, the less receptive they will be to subsequent changes.

When it comes to aligning leadership during change, it is critical that everyone is on the same page. One of the most common hurdles companies have to overcome is misalignment of organizational goals and priorities. 

The goal: the CEO sets a direction and everyone follows suit. 

The reality: the CEO sets a direction, 25% of the team immediately follows suit, 50% of the team follows the old direction because the new direction wasn’t effectively communicated to them, and 25% are still following the previous direction that hasn’t been the direction for years but because of poor communication and a belief that the new changes will be backtracked and an overall lack of people holding others accountable, they are still following the old and outdated direction.

To align leadership during change, there must be a mechanism for holding people accountable and helping the executive team quickly and effectively understand when there might be a misalignment of priorities.

For example, if the CEO, with the guidance of her board and executive team, decides that the company is going to change the way they operate and transition to a new system that should be more efficient, cheaper, and minimize mistakes - there must be a way for her to know that the rest of the organization is picking up the change. If her VP of Operations says that he understands and to her face shares that he is onboard, and even sets goals in alignment with the new change, but if his team is setting goals not in alignment with the VP of Operations, the team will be working really hard to make very little progress. In this scenario, the VP of Operations thought he did a good enough job communicating the need for change to his team, but obviously he didn’t do that good of a job or else their goals would be in alignment with this new direction. 

The VP of Operations reports back to the CEO that he has done an *effective* job of communicating this change and she takes him for his word. The issue with this is that most people, especially middle managers in an organization, believe that their communication skills are far more effective than they actually are. She takes her VP of Operations for his word and then 6-12 months later, some major balls drop, people quit or get fired, the VP of Operations is blaming his people saying they are incompetent and that he needs his CEO’s support to increase headcount for his team and the CEO is left wondering “where did I go wrong?”

At Ambition In Motion, we created a tool called AIM Insights that evaluates the goals of cascading levels of leadership in an organization and reports throughout the layers of leadership, in a one page format, which teams’ goals are in alignment, which are high/medium/low impact, and which are accomplished, and ultimately provide guidance for what each level of leadership in the organization can do to improve the impact, alignment, and achievement of their reporting structures goals.

Whatever tool is used, it must be easy to digest, updated regularly, and those using it must be receptive to the feedback and willing to make adjustments when they discover their are opportunities for improvement. 

Ultimately, profit will be achieved when the purpose of change is clear and has accounted for what is in it for me for every person in the organization and leadership has a system for understanding and better holding the team accountable for the goals/expectations being set, their prioritization of those activities, and their willingness to change their leadership style when they discover that their are opportunities for improvement. 

Reorgs, layoffs, RIFs, corporate restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, business transformation. 

These terms have become the vernacular of business today - but what do they really mean? What are the implications of making these changes? And most importantly, how can we do them right?

At its core, corporate change stems from a realization: the current path isn’t working. A new direction is needed. This applies to both big businesses and small businesses - no organization is immune.

Companies pursue change for many reasons:

These are all valid reasons for making a change. If these changes aren’t made, companies run the risk of going out of business or becoming obsolete.

There is also the human side of change. This includes people getting moved around into different departments, people learning new technologies and adjusting the way they work, people getting fired, and those who are left having to pick up the slack for those who vacated.

Without clarity, the natural result of this is fear. Employees fear:

Fear creates disengagement and reduced productivity. Instead of people focusing on their jobs, they begin to focus on beefing up their resumes. They’ll start wondering if they are going to be fired next, and making personal/life/family plans in a stressed-out manner because they are uncertain of their livelihoods.

To implement change successfully - where the team can innovate, profits rise, and confidence can grow - organizations need to build a CLEAR vision that drives execution.

Clear is the most critical word in this statement because that is where most companies drop the ball.

Clear means that people:

A litmus test for knowing whether or not your organization did a good job of implementing change is if every employee at the company can go home to their family and say “The company has made some positive changes to the organization and I am excited about my role in this organization moving forward.”

Not just say it to their boss. Say it—and mean it—to their family.

What are common pitfalls companies pursue when trying to create a clear vision that drives execution?

So how do we build a clear vision that drives execution?

If upper managers, middle managers, and individual contributors can all communicate why a change decision was made, the company is much more likely to pass the litmus test of every employee going back to their families and saying “The company has made some positive changes to the organization and I am excited about my role in this organization moving forward.” If an organization does these 4 things, they will be well on their way to building a clear vision that drives execution.

Are company reorganizations (reorgs) bad?

It depends on who you ask and how the reorg was handled. 

Most people associate reorgs with negative experiences because they often signify significant changes to the business. For better or worse, people tend to resist change, making reorgs an uphill battle when it comes to winning hearts and minds.

Whether a company has determined a business unit is no longer profitable, their success metrics need to change, or that they are simply moving in a different direction, a reorg means that change is coming.

The challenge most companies run into when attempting to successfully enact a reorg is effectively communicating the strategy, getting buy-in, and achieving adoption of the new status quo. 

A typical reorg looks like this: 
The CEO, often under pressure from the board, decides to implement a change in how the business operates. Perhaps the company isn’t profitable enough, early indicators suggest the need for proactive adjustments, or a new strategy seems necessary. The CEO shares this plan with the executive team, expecting them to communicate and champion the change with the same enthusiasm.

In an ideal world, employees would immediately understand, embrace, and adapt to the changes.

In reality, direct reports—wanting to appear as team players—often say, “I’m on board and looking forward to this change!” whether they genuinely feel that way or not. This lack of transparency creates a false sense of confidence for the CEO, who believes their team is fully aligned.

But then... the wheels fall off.

And then…egg on his face (metaphorically). The proposed changes fail to gain traction. Confused and frustrated, the CEO demands answers: “Why isn’t everyone as excited about this change as I am?!”

The truth might eventually surface, often at great cost. A brave executive who explains the lack of adoption risks being labeled insubordinate—and perhaps even losing their job. Others in leadership take note and quickly learn that honesty about these matters is unwelcome.

So what actually happened when the CEO proposed these changes? 

First, his executive team who report to him, conceptually understand why the change is being proposed, but they aren’t fully sold on the solution. It wasn’t their idea and they haven’t had enough time to think through the ramifications and determine the best outcome. The change feels very sudden.

They then go to their next level of leadership and say “A change is being made. We are now transitioning from operating like xyz and are now going to be operating like abc.” The team asks “Why?” And those leaders say because the CEO has determined that we need to make this change.

That next level of leader now has to communicate down to their direct reports admonishing “I didn’t make this change! My hands are tied. I can’t control it but the executives at this company are now making us operate like this. Don’t kill the messenger!” You might have seen this exact scenario play out at your company on remote work policies as we get further from the pandemic. 

The individual contributors doing the work at this company do one of two things:

The result…complete and utter failure at worst, and a major distraction at best

But reorg’s don’t have to be this way. Shoot, if reorg’s were always failures, companies would stop pursuing them.

It is just critical that companies pursue reorgs in the right way.

Here are a few tips on how to successfully enact a reorg:

Ultimately, reorgs are hard but necessary things for companies to innovate and continue to grow. If a reorg can be enacted successfully, that company will be in an incredible position to thrive moving forward.

If you are interested in engaging further into this conversation, follow the Ambition In Motion YouTube channel and look for virtual Pre-Symposium Panels covering this topic (Pre-Symposium Panels are virtual panels covering relevant business topics). And if you happen to be in Austin, TX on 2/13/25, come to the Executive Symposium which will debate and discuss this exact topic - RSVP’s here: ambition-in-motion.com/events. 

As the economy reverts back from the 2021 hiring boom, companies are increasingly removing middle managers in favor of one leader for very large teams. For example, as opposed to marketing being led by one middle manager, outside sales by another manager, customer support by another manager, and customer success by another manager, many companies are opting to remove the layer of middle management and have one leader in charge of all of those functions without any leaders in between.

This has led to a major need for companies to increase their focus on helping their employees effectively communicate and collaborate across functions to achieve desired business outcomes. While somewhat redundant, there was still a lot of information handled by those middle managers that is now the responsibility of the employee.

Why have companies opted to remove middle managers in the first place?

The simple answer is lack of perceived value.

The logic behind creating a layer of middle management is that the guidance of a manager of a smaller team that owns and is fully accountable for their outcomes will be greater than if there was one manager for multiple functions within the organization.

This logic is sound if:

This logic doesn’t make sense when:

For example, let’s say we are a recruiting company in 2021 and the market is hot. All the outside sales team needs is a pulse to close deals. There was a process that the middle manager leading outside sales followed to maintain a base level of competence but because sales are coming in from everywhere, bad habits are overlooked.

Fast forward to 2023. The market has completely dried up, and the outside sales team is really struggling to meet their goals. The CEO is begging and pleading for his team to close more deals. The outside sales team blames the economy and all these other factors for why their numbers are down. But in reality, the middle manager in charge of the outside sales team hasn’t been holding her team accountable to the standard business development process they have found to be tried and true. And now she’s out of practice at holding her team accountable, and the team is out of practice taking hard advice from their manager. This is a recipe for failure. 

The CEO then asks the middle managers in other departments to help pickup the slack in sales. He implores his customer success team to focus on upselling current customers. The customer success middle manager says that she is up for the task. She and her team have devised a plan for trying to turn open support tickets and queries into opportunities for upselling. 

The plan looks great, but they run into a brick wall with customer support. The customer support middle manager is incentivized to close support tickets as quickly as possible, and this clashes with the overarching business goals of upselling to current clients. To resolve this, the customer success manager has a 1:1 with the customer support manager. The customer support manager knows that him closing support tickets hurts the customer success managers goal of upselling the existing customers and closing more deals, but mentions that “his hands are tied” because in order for him to achieve his end of year bonus, he needs his time to closed ticket ratio to be under a certain level. They are at an impasse.

The outside sales manager isn’t effectively holding her team accountable, the customer support manager is only focused on his end of year bonus for the metrics he is accountable for, and the customer success manager is stressed out because her team is putting in overtime to try to pick up the slack for the outside sales team but keeps running into hurdles from the support team.

Executive teams look at this situation and have determined…screw it! Let’s remove middle managers and have one overarching manager over a wide group of people so they can adjust incentives effectively and ensure everyone is rowing in the same direction. The executive team can’t guarantee that this new model will be any more effective, but they can guarantee that it will cost a whole lot less to not have all of these middle managers than to have them. 

Their logic is that if it isn’t working with middle managers right now, why keep paying for them?

In order to achieve effective cross-functional communication and collaboration, there needs to be:

If companies cannot effectively achieve all four of these points, they will continue to struggle to achieve effective cross-functional communication and collaboration.