08-19-2026IMPACT COUNCIL

4 management lessons for scaling your team

When my company expanded from 10 to 90 people, I learned that more people meant more process.

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When my team consisted of 10 people, I could keep track of each team member’s tasks and their capacity. I understood the limits of people’s workload and even the circumstances that might affect their work. I hardly needed to delegate formally: if a task was difficult, I could redistribute the work myself, reinforce someone, or sit down and do part of the task with my own hands.

But then we grew to 50 employees, and then 90. Suddenly the habits that had once helped me be an effective leader began to get in the way. Decisions took longer, information was harder to keep aligned across the team, and too much still depended on me.

At first, it seemed that the problem was simply growth: more people and more processes. Over time, however, I realized the problem lay in the mismatch between old approaches and the new reality. Here are four lessons I learned on my leadership journey.

1. You can’t hold all the context in your head

While my team was made up of 10 to 20 people, I could see the tensions between them, notice who was stuck on a task, who had taken on more than they could handle. As the team began to grow, I could no longer see all the dependencies and simply did not have the physical time to talk with everyone individually.

Then another issue appeared: The higher my position, the fewer people wanted to talk to me about problems in projects. This is called the MUM effect, and according to a survey of HR leaders and their teams, only 39% of........

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