THREE THINGS THAT BREAK WHEN YOU GROW
(… and why that’s OK)
When you were smaller, you had momentum. Your team was tight. Decisions happened quickly. People knew how to get things done.
Now you are bigger, and it doesn't feel the same.
Decisions that once took days now take weeks. People who should be working together seem to pull in different directions. Someone asks, "What are we actually trying to achieve here?" and you realise the answer is not as clear as it should be.
Here is what most growing businesses do not realise: this is not a sign you are failing. It is a sign you are growing.
Welcome to the messy middle.
The Pattern You Are Seeing
As organisations grow, they reach a point where what once felt natural starts to strain. Nothing dramatic has happened. There is no crisis. But things have shifted.
The habits that worked when you were smaller do not stretch indefinitely. Alignment that once happened through proximity now needs structure. Decisions that once required a quick conversation now need coordination across teams. Culture that once spread informally now needs reinforcing.
Growth has outpaced design.
You have not broken anything. You have simply reached a size where informal ways of working are no longer enough.
That strain tends to show up in three places — and they follow a consistent pattern. At H&A, we call them three organisational mechanisms: Formal, Interpersonal, and Cultural. Understanding them as a connected system, rather than separate problems, is where the work begins.
The Three Mechanisms
1. Formal Mechanisms: When Your Systems Stop Working
These are the visible structures your organisation relies on — your strategy, org chart, roles, KPIs, planning rhythms, and decision processes. When you were smaller, they did not need much attention. Now the business is more complex, more people are involved, and trade-offs are sharper.
You begin to notice things. Your strategy exists, but managers are unsure how to translate it into action. Decisions are made, but progress feels slower than it should. The org chart looks tidy, but it does not reflect how work actually flows.
On paper, everything looks fine. In practice, it feels heavier than it used to. The formal mechanism — the scaffolding your organisation runs on — has not kept pace with the organisation it is meant to support.
2. Interpersonal Mechanisms: When the Human Stuff Gets Hard
Even when the structure looks reasonable, growth puts pressure on relationships. As leadership teams expand, alignment becomes deliberate work. Conversations that once happened naturally now need planning. Information does not flow by default.
You may notice leaders interpreting priorities slightly differently. Collaboration takes more effort, difficult conversations are postponed, and confusion spreads quietly through the organisation.
It is tempting to blame personalities. More often, this is a coordination problem under strain. The interpersonal mechanism — the quality of working relationships and communication at the top — is being asked to carry more than it was designed for.
3. Cultural Mechanisms: When Purpose Gets Diluted
As you grow, identity stretches. The stories that once defined you do not automatically reach new joiners. Long-standing employees talk about how things used to be. Different parts of the business begin to feel like different subcultures.
Purpose is still there, but it is less visible in day-to-day decisions. Values are written down, but not always lived.
Culture is not what is printed on the wall. It is what happens when no one is watching. The cultural mechanism — the shared sense of what you stand for and how you behave — erodes quietly when it is not actively tended.
Why All Three Matter
It is easy to treat these as separate problems. A systems issue. A people issue. A culture issue. In reality, they are usually connected — and that connection is where most organisations go wrong.
When decisions stall, it looks like a process problem until you realise leaders are not aligned on what matters most. When collaboration feels strained, it seems personal until you see that unclear roles are creating friction. When culture feels diluted, the instinct is to fix messaging, but inconsistent decisions may be eroding trust at a deeper level.
Addressing one mechanism in isolation while ignoring the others is a common trap. The organisations that navigate the messy middle well are the ones that understand they are dealing with a system — not a set of unrelated symptoms.
What it looks like in practice
We see this pattern repeatedly in growing organisations.
We worked with a professional services firm that had grown quickly and expanded its executive team. On paper, everything looked right: clear roles, sensible reporting lines, a stronger leadership group. But something was not working.
If you asked each leader what they were really optimising for, you would hear slightly different answers — all reasonable, just not fully aligned. In meetings, decisions dragged. Everyone had a view, but no one owned the trade-offs. Different parts of the business leaned in different directions.
It was not dramatic. Just inconsistent. Clients were beginning to notice. Confidence was dipping. The formal structure was fine. The cultural and interpersonal mechanisms had quietly come apart — the strategic thread had loosened, and the team felt it.
In another case, a client had grown into a national player through acquisitions and steady expansion. Relationships were strong. People trusted each other.
But the organisation they were running was not the same one they had built. New markets, new expectations, new ambitions — and the formal mechanism had not kept pace. Too much flowed through a few key people. Decisions waited for conversations that never quite happened. Leaders were stretched across too many fronts.
The goodwill was still there, but it was carrying too much weight. Their best people were burning out. Nothing had failed — the organisation had simply outgrown the clarity and structure that once made it work.
The Good News
If this feels familiar, you are in transition — not decline. The messy middle is not a verdict. It is a phase.
The organisations that navigate it well tend to do three things.
They name the pattern. They stop asking what is wrong and start asking which mechanism is under most strain — and why. That shift in framing changes everything.
They prioritise carefully. They do not try to fix everything at once. They find the change that will unlock the most progress across all three mechanisms, not just the one that is loudest.
They design for their reality. They do not try to become corporate. They build mechanisms that suit their size: more deliberate than a start-up, more agile than a large enterprise.
If you recognise your organisation in this, you are already ahead. The businesses that struggle longest in the messy middle are the ones that do not realise they are in it. The ones that navigate it well start by naming it.
About H&A
H&A works with growing businesses to navigate the messy middle. We help leadership teams build clarity and connection when systems have started to strain.
If you would like to understand where your organisation stands, let’s talk.