I’ve noticed a sentence that comes up in my coaching sessions with leaders at fast-growing companies. It comes up so often it’s almost a marker, a way to tell what kind of environment the coachee is in. It’s this:
“We are making it up as we go.” — Recurring sentence from leaders in rapid-growth organizations
They say it with a mixture of pride, exhaustion, and low-grade anxiety. Pride, because they’re being trusted to improvise at a level most leaders don’t get to. Exhaustion, because improvising without a playbook is more work than working from one. Anxiety, because there’s no reliable way to know whether their improvisations are any good.
The Specific Shape of Growth-Company Leadership
Rapid growth creates a recognizable set of leadership problems. I see the same ones across industries and organizations.
People get promoted before they’re ready, because the need for the role outruns the pipeline. New leaders are doing jobs that their own bosses couldn’t yet teach them how to do, because their own bosses have just been promoted too.
Structures keep changing. Just as you figure out the reporting line, it changes. Just as you build a relationship with a peer, that peer gets promoted out of the peer set. Just as you master your scope, the scope gets redrawn.
Processes lag behind the work. You’re using systems that were designed when the company was a third its current size. Workarounds become institutional habit. Nobody has time to build the replacement process, because everyone is too busy doing the work the old process wasn’t built for.
And a particular exhaustion sets in. Not the exhaustion of failure. The exhaustion of continuous velocity. You’re not struggling. You’re running, and the run has no scheduled end.
What the Coaching Work Looks Like
When I coach leaders in these environments, the work looks different than in steady-state organizations. In a steady-state company, you can talk about skill development over a multi-year arc. In a growth company, that arc keeps collapsing — the role keeps changing under the leader, and by the time they’ve built the skills for the job they were doing, they’re in a different job.
So the coaching tends to focus on a few specific things. Staying grounded while the environment shifts. Building habits of self-care that don’t depend on the work slowing down, because the work isn’t going to slow down. Learning to tolerate the discomfort of not knowing, because not knowing is the default condition now.
And asking the central question more often than usual. What do you want? Because in a fast-growing company, the opportunities flow at you so quickly that it’s easy to let your career happen to you rather than shaping it. If you don’t know what you want, the growth will decide for you, and the decisions won’t always serve you.
A Word of Encouragement
If you’re leading in a fast-growth environment right now and you feel like you’re making it up as you go, I want to tell you something. You are. And that’s okay. Every leader in that environment is. The ones who have the work figured out are in boring companies. You’re in an exciting one.
The trick is to keep your ground underneath you while the company does its thing. Who are you? What do you want? What do you stand for? Those answers need to be yours, not the company’s. Because the company is going to keep changing. You need to be the thing that doesn’t.
If the growth stopped tomorrow, would the leader you’ve become still be the person you wanted to be?
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Image by congerdesign from Pixabay
