The importance of developing a broader leadership group as you scale

Up: § Buffer thoughts and decisions, § Business philosophies

In the early stages of a company (say until around 50 people), you generally have a leadership team of adequate size to handle the most important decisions and to have enough context into the organization.

As you scale beyond 50 people, I’ve found that there’s a lot of value in establishing a “leadership group” as a second layer of leadership beyond the executive team. This group would be a larger number of people and include anyone who is a manager or a senior individual contributor.

The benefit of setting up this type of leadership group, is that you can activate them to participate in some of the larger decisions and more difficult situations that you need to navigate as a company.

Without explicitly setting up a leadership group in this way, I found that more of the burden and challenges fell on a small group and this is both more weight to carry than necessary, and is a missed opportunity to have a larger group positively affecting the company. Additionally, it is a gift to those who have reached that level of seniority and leadership in the company, to explicitly ask them to step up even more.

The leadership group is also a way to create useful connections and knowledge sharing between leaders of different areas who may not necessarily interact week to week otherwise. There are many transferable and similar challenges across areas where it can be useful to tap into the knowledge of another leader.

The goal isn't to have important decisions become consensus-based among this larger group, I don't believe that is an effective way to arrive at the best or most timely outcomes.

Instead, the goal is to help people understand and start to experience a broader set of challenges and more difficult calls to make. In that process, you create valuable alignment and awareness, and also help those leaders continue to grow.

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