Growth is exciting in every organisation. It means your product or service is resonating with people, your market is connecting deeply, and your team delivers successfully.
Growth does come with complexity, and governance is usually the primary reason.
In growing organisations, governance gaps often appear repeatedly, and if not addressed, they tend to create risk, inefficiency, and even hinder further growth.
These are the top three that we notice most often:
- Unclear Decision-Making Authority
As organisations grow, the old “everyone knows who makes the decisions” rule no longer works. Accountability lines become blurred. Senior leaders assume authority is obvious, but employees find themselves stuck, waiting for approval, consulting too many stakeholders, and duplicating work. Board and executive positions are undefined or redundant. No formal governance charter or reporting structure.
The risk: Slow decision-making, duplicated effort, team and stakeholder frustration, missed opportunities, and increased exposure to risk through uncertain ownership.
What works:
- Create a responsibility, role, and escalation matrix. Using basic tools like RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) can truly make a difference in detailing who should be consulted and where escalation will take place.
- Regularly planned board and executive performance reviews. Conduct regular audits.
- Encourage ownership culture through open reporting and feedback sessions.
- Risk Management Is Reactive, Not Proactive
Growth in organisations comes with new operational, reputational, and regulatory risks. Yet most organisations respond only when things go wrong. The Risk – Risk management is not embedded within governance. It’s treated as a separate function and not in the strategic view.
What works:
- Add risk agendas to board and executive meetings.
- Develop a forward-looking risk register that includes regulatory exposure and is reviewed quarterly.
- Encourage a culture where concern-raising is seen as a strength, rather than a threat.
- Misaligned Strategy and Execution
The senior leadership team is expected to come up with a clear strategy, but as the business expands, there are middle layers and front-line teams that cannot connect their day-to-day work to the larger picture. This is a clear strategy and execution gap.
The Risk: Money is spent on the wrong things, incompatible priorities, and low impact. The team’s performance, growth, and strategic agility are sabotaged.
What works:
- A structured performance framework (e.g., balanced scorecards) that breaks down strategy into quantifiable objectives for the teams. And with regular check-ins, everyone knows they are all rowing in the same direction.
- A skills matrix that the organisation can use to map out the skills and competencies across the team to enhance strategic planning, employee training and development and succession planning
Closing Thoughts
In growing organisations, governance should be about compliant growth. enabling wise decisions, creating clarity, accountability, and stability, not bottlenecks. Fast-growing organisations are most vulnerable to governance blind spots, simply because change happens so fast. By bridging these three gaps early on—decision-making power, risk management, and strategy fit, organisations can build a governance framework that scales with them.
If you need help designing a governance model tailored to your organisation’s growth stage, Greydern Associates will be happy to help you create one.
