The situation
In this case, the leadership team had been built over time, largely around trust and shared experience.
Many of the individuals had been with the business for years, had grown alongside it, and were closely aligned with the founder, which created a strong sense of continuity and stability.
There was no suggestion that the team had underperformed. If anything, the opposite was true. They had played a key role in getting the business to where it was.
But as the business had continued to grow, there was a quiet sense that what had been enough previously was starting to feel stretched.
It wasn’t being expressed in direct terms, more as a feeling that the next phase might require something different, without a clear articulation of what that difference looked like or how it should be addressed.
What wasn’t obvious
What sat behind it wasn’t simply a question of capability in isolation.
It was more a question of how the business had developed around the team, and how roles had expanded over time without ever being fully reconsidered against what the business now needed.
There was a strong level of trust within the group, and a shared history that made it harder to separate the individual from the role they were performing.
That tends to create a situation where gaps are recognised but not clearly defined, and where the idea of change is acknowledged, but not yet translated into something specific.
The difficulty is that the longer that continues, the more the business adapts around those gaps, often by placing additional weight on the founder or a small number of individuals.
What we focused on
Rather than moving straight to hiring, we spent time understanding how the leadership team was operating in practice, how responsibilities were being carried, and where the business was beginning to feel the strain.
That involved speaking to individuals to understand how they saw their roles, how those roles had evolved, and how they viewed the next phase of the business.
From there, the focus moved to defining what the business actually needed from its leadership going forward, not in general terms, but in a way that made it possible to distinguish between what could be developed internally and where additional strength would be required.
As that became clearer, it created a more grounded basis for thinking about the team as a whole, rather than as a series of individual decisions.
The outcome
The changes that followed were introduced in a way that reflected that understanding.
There was greater clarity around roles and responsibilities, which allowed the existing team to operate with more focus, alongside the introduction of additional capability where it was needed.
The impact developed over time. The pressure on a small number of individuals reduced, decision-making became more consistent, and the leadership team was better aligned with the scale and complexity of the business.
It allowed the business to move forward without losing the continuity that had been important to how it had been built.
The TWYD view
Situations like this are often approached as a question of whether the team is good enough, when in practice that’s rarely the right lens.
The more useful question is how the team relates to what the business now requires, and where that alignment begins to fall away.
In this case, progress came from separating loyalty from role definition, which made it possible to look at the structure more objectively without losing sight of the relationships involved.
That tends to be the point where decisions become clearer. Not when capability is judged in isolation, but when it is considered in the context of what comes next.