When Growth Begins to Pressure on Company Management
Growth increases organisational complexity and can expose limitations in how responsibilities, processes, information and decisions are structured.
BUSINESS GROWTH
There comes a point when growth stops meaning simply selling more. As a company expands its operations, new people become involved in decisions, responsibilities are distributed, processes multiply and the amount of information that needs to be monitored increases. The challenge then also becomes the organisation’s ability to coordinate a business that has become more complex.
Gulati and DeSantola (2016), in an article published by Harvard Business Review, observed that young companies often face difficulties when they need to scale because the informal mechanisms that worked at the beginning are no longer sufficient to coordinate a larger organisation. Among the responses discussed are the specialisation of roles and the creation of management structures compatible with increasing complexity.
One of the clearest signs appears in decision-making. At the beginning, it is natural for the founder to be involved in almost everything. The problem arises when this model remains unchanged after the company no longer fits within the same logic. Sandino (2026), in a recent analysis published by Harvard Business Review, describes a breaking point in decision-making in fast-growing companies, associated with factors such as operational complexity, alignment, financial management and oversight.
Another sign is the distance between growth and processes. A company can increase its customer base, hire people and expand its operations without redesigning its processes for this new reality. This does not mean bureaucratising everything. It means making critical processes, responsibilities and the criteria required for the organisation to operate sufficiently clear, without relying continuously on the intervention of the same people.
Information also changes in nature. When a company is small, knowledge can circulate informally. As it grows, it becomes distributed across functions, systems and people. Management may continue to receive numbers while finding it increasingly difficult to relate them to what is happening in operations.
For this reason, growth should not be analysed only through revenue, number of customers or team size. There is another dimension: the management capacity required to sustain what is being built. McKinsey research on operating model redesign, published in 2025 based on responses from 2,000 executives, highlights the importance of aligning leadership, processes, people and organisational design with the way the company creates value (WEDDLE et al., 2025).
Growth itself is therefore not the problem. The point of attention lies in the difference between the complexity the company has begun to manage and the management capacity available to coordinate it. Before asking which tool should be implemented, it is worth asking: does the company know exactly where its management capacity has stopped keeping pace with its evolution?
References
GULATI, Ranjay; DESANTOLA, Alicia. Start-ups that last. Harvard Business Review, Mar. 2016. Available at: https://hbr.org/2016/03/start-ups-that-last. Accessed: 15 May 2025.
SANDINO, Tatiana. How fast-growing companies can make better decisions. Harvard Business Review, 8 May 2026. Available at: https://hbr.org/2026/05/how-fast-growing-companies-can-make-better-decisions. Accessed: 15 May 2025.
WEDDLE, Brooke et al. The new rules for getting your operating model redesign right. McKinsey & Company, 25 June 2025. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organization/our-insights/the-new-rules-for-getting-your-operating-model-redesign-right. Accessed: 15 May 2025.