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Your Organization Can’t Scale Without a Talent Strategy
Organizations often address talent after a strategy has been developed and resources have been secured. They determine what they want to accomplish, design the programs and budgets to support it, and then begin adding positions as the work increases.
It’s helpful to consider talent as part of strategy from the beginning: What will the organization need to be able to do, and what kind of organization will be required to do it well?
As organizations grow, they do not simply need more people. They need different capabilities, clearer roles, stronger managers, different ways of making decisions, and leaders—including the CEO—who are able to operate differently.
That is why we believe talent strategy should be developed alongside organizational strategy, not after it.
What We Have Learned About Talent and Scale
Across our work with organizations navigating growth and change, several patterns show up repeatedly.
1. More people do not necessarily create more capacity.
When everyone is overloaded, the obvious answer is often: We need another person.
Sometimes that is exactly right.
But before adding a position, it is worth asking a different question:
What is actually causing the capacity problem?
Consider five possibilities:
Volume: There is simply more work than the existing team can reasonably accomplish.
Priorities: The organization is trying to do too many things at once.
Role clarity: Work is duplicated, dropped, or repeatedly renegotiated because ownership is unclear.
Decision-making: Too many decisions travel upward, creating bottlenecks.
Capability: The organization needs expertise or leadership capacity it does not currently have.
Only the first problem is necessarily solved by adding staff.
We have seen organizations hire into structural problems and discover six months later that everyone, including the new person, is still overwhelmed.
A useful test before approving a new position: Ask, If we hired an excellent person tomorrow, what specifically would become easier—and what would remain broken?
If the answer reveals unclear priorities, overlapping roles, slow decisions, or weak management, the organization may have an organizational design problem rather than a headcount problem.
2. Design roles for where you are going, not where you have been.
Organizations often accumulate positions over time. A role is created to solve an immediate problem. Responsibilities get added as needs arise. Strong employees take on work because they are capable of doing it.
Eventually, the organizational chart reflects the organization's history more than its strategy.
A growth strategy is a good moment to start again.
Take the major priorities in the strategic plan and ask:
What capabilities must exist for us to accomplish these priorities three years from now?
Then map those capabilities against the current organization.
For each critical capability, determine whether you should:
Build it by developing someone internally;
Buy it by hiring new expertise;
Borrow it through consultants, partners, technology, or shared services; or
Stop doing something else to create capacity for it.
That exercise is much more useful than beginning with, Who should we hire next?
3. As an organization scales, the CEO has to scale too.
One of the hardest transitions in organizational growth is often not structural. It is behavioral.
Early-stage organizations frequently succeed because of highly involved CEOs. They know everything. They solve problems quickly. They maintain key relationships, review important work, make decisions, and step in whenever something needs attention.
Those behaviors can help build an organization.
They can also eventually constrain it.
At a certain size, the CEO cannot remain the organization's primary decision-maker, quality-control mechanism, relationship holder, and problem solver. If every consequential decision still requires the CEO, adding another layer of management will not create meaningful leadership capacity.
The question becomes:
What work can only the CEO do—and what work is the CEO still doing that someone else must learn to own?
A simple exercise can help. Have the CEO review the previous two weeks of their calendar and categorize their time:
Only I can do this.
Someone else should own this, but isn't ready yet.
Someone else could own this now.
This probably shouldn't be happening at all.
The second category is particularly important. It identifies where delegation alone is insufficient and where the organization needs to build someone else's capability, authority, or confidence.
CEO transition at scale is therefore not simply about “delegating more.” It is about deliberately building an organization that can lead without everything flowing through one person.
4. Managers are the leverage point organizations routinely underinvest in.
Organizations often promote talented individual contributors into management because they are excellent at their jobs.
Then we expect them to know how to manage.
Those are different skills.
Managers translate organizational priorities into daily work. They set expectations, make tradeoffs, give feedback, develop people, resolve conflict, communicate decisions, and help employees understand how their work contributes to larger goals.
Weak management creates costs everywhere: senior leaders get pulled into problems that should be resolved elsewhere, high performers become frustrated, struggling employees do not receive timely feedback, and CEOs find themselves managing several layers below their role.
Before adding another organization-wide talent system, ask:
Do our managers know what we expect of them as managers?
Organizations do not necessarily need elaborate management programs. But every manager should be able to answer:
What decisions can I make without approval?
What outcomes am I accountable for?
How often should I meet individually with my staff?
How do I give and receive feedback?
How do we address underperformance?
What am I responsible for developing in my people?
When should I solve a problem, and when should I escalate it?
If managers cannot answer those questions consistently, management infrastructure may be one of the highest-leverage talent investments the organization can make.
5. Talent systems should create clarity, not bureaucracy.
As organizations grow, informal systems stop working.
When there are twelve employees, everyone may know what everyone else is doing. Decisions can happen in a hallway or on Slack. The CEO can personally communicate priorities.
That becomes much harder with 30, 50, or 100 people.
The natural response is to add systems: performance reviews, competency frameworks, approval processes, goal-setting tools, new meetings, dashboards, and communication protocols.
Some are necessary. Too many can create a different problem.
The goal should not be to professionalize for the sake of professionalizing. The goal is to introduce the minimum amount of structure required to create clarity and accountability.
A good talent system should make six things easier for employees to understand:
What matters most?
What am I responsible for?
What does success look like?
How will I know how I am doing?
How can I grow here?
If a system does not make one of those things clearer, it is worth questioning whether the organization needs it.
A Simple Talent Strategy Stress Test
Organizations do not need to wait for a major restructuring to examine whether their talent strategy is keeping pace with their ambitions.
Leadership teams can begin with eight questions:
Strategy: What capabilities will our strategy require over the next three years that we do not have today?
Priorities: Are we clear enough about what we will not do, or are we trying to solve capacity problems created by too many priorities?
Structure: Does our organizational structure reflect our future strategy or our organizational history?
Roles: Are there important responsibilities that are duplicated, unclear, or falling between positions?
Decisions: Where do decisions consistently get stuck, and why?
Leadership: What decisions or responsibilities still sit with the CEO that should move elsewhere?
Management: Do managers have the authority, skills, and expectations necessary to actually manage?
Talent: Where are we most vulnerable if a key person leaves tomorrow?
The answers usually reveal much more than a list of vacancies ever could.
Build for the Organization You Are Becoming
The biggest mistake may be waiting until talent problems become obvious.
By the time turnover rises, managers are overwhelmed, decisions are bottlenecked, the CEO is stretched too thin, or new hires are struggling to understand their roles, the underlying organizational problems have often existed for some time.
Talent strategy should therefore be forward-looking.
As leaders develop a three- or five-year strategy, they should simultaneously ask:
What organization will this strategy require us to become?
That means thinking not only about who needs to be hired, but about the capabilities the organization needs to build, the work it should stop doing, how leadership must evolve, where decisions should sit, how managers will lead, what culture the strategy requires, and where succession risk exists.
None of these questions belongs exclusively to HR.
They are questions about whether an organization is capable of executing its strategy.
And that is why talent strategy is organizational strategy.
Throughout September, we will explore some of these questions more deeply, including what leaders across sectors are learning about attracting and retaining strong people, building leadership capacity, and adapting roles and systems as work changes.
On September 15, Danielle Pickens, CEO of the Urban Schools Human Capital Academy, who works with school districts and human capital leaders across the country, will share the talent challenges and patterns she is seeing nationally. On September 22, she will discuss findings from the Academy's new report on human capital trends in school districts and what those trends may mean for the broader nonprofit sector.
School districts and nonprofit organizations operate in very different environments. But they increasingly face a common leadership challenge:
How do you build an organization—and a workforce—capable not simply of doing today's work, but of delivering on tomorrow's strategy?
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