11/04/2026
📈 The leadership approach that helped you succeed with five people may not be the one that helps you lead fifty.
I came across this Harvard Business Review article by Julie Zhuo, As Your Team Gets Bigger, Your Leadership Style Has to Adapt, and it reinforces something I’ve seen throughout my career.
As organizations grow, leaders must grow differently, too.
Early in their leadership journey, success often comes from being highly responsive, personally involved, and close to every decision.
Yet as teams expand, those same strengths can become limitations.
🔹 Being accessible cannot mean becoming the bottleneck for every decision.
🔹 Being accountable cannot mean holding on to responsibilities others need to own.
🔹 Being supportive cannot mean protecting managers from the opportunity to develop their judgment.
🔹 Being effective increasingly means creating the conditions for others to succeed.
Through executive coaching and DiSC facilitation, I’ve seen how often capable leaders continue relying on behaviors that worked at an earlier stage of their careers.
The challenge isn’t that those behaviors were wrong.
It’s that the leadership assignment has changed.
💡 This is why leadership development and succession planning must go beyond identifying high performers. We need to prepare people to lead at the next level of complexity.
That requires intentional development, feedback, self-awareness, and the willingness to lead differently.
A question for leaders: What is one leadership habit you’ve had to change as your responsibilities grew?
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