Most companies grow before they are ready. They grow in size, complexity, and speed faster than their leaders, teams, systems, and cultures are prepared.

This is normal and should be expected. But it is also stressful and confusing. At times, it creates awkward or painful lessons.

My oldest son is 14. He had a growth spurt last year. He sprouted up about six inches in just a few months. Combine that with puberty, and he’s discovered himself in a body that he has never had before.

The growth came quickly. Maturing into all of that growth will take some time.

And that’s ok. It’s normal.

The only thing that would be wrong is if he didn’t choose to mature.

Most organizations go through a similar experience. They focus on external growth, more sales, services, teams, locations, customers, opportunities, and revenue, without recognizing that growth will challenge “how we’ve always done things.”

External growth requires internal maturity to be sustained.

Imagine the local manufacturer that catches Costco’s eye. Exciting. But the volume, consistency, and quality standards Costco demands may represent dramatic internal growth.

Or imagine a medical clinic that has run an effective marketing campaign and has maxed out both its clinicians’ time and exam rooms. To continue growing, a larger team and a new location would be required. A new location requires better coordination, communication, and systems.

None of these changes are gradual. They require a jump. A sudden shift. Six inches taller over the summer. New shoes and clothes. Figuring out how to walk around the house without running into things.

That’s all normal.

Look up and down the street—odds are every business you can see that has ever made a similar jump in growth wrestled with the same thing: Who was willing to mature internally to match their external growth?

Two Kinds of Growth

There are two kinds of growth.

External growth is growth in size, revenue, opportunity, reach, team, complexity, or speed.

Internal maturity is the growth of the leader, the relationships, the systems, and the culture required to carry that external growth.

If you try to grow in size and never mature, you can and should expect problems.

Your organization is different.

If it doesn’t mature, it almost certainly will adjust down to a size that aligns with your organizational maturity level. That downward adjustment may look like stalled growth, increased turnover, shrinking margins, missed opportunities, constant firefighting, or a business that becomes harder and harder to enjoy leading.

The bad news is the good news: if you are an owner or CEO, you own this. Which also means you can do something about this.

Four Kinds of Maturity

There are four areas where a leader should look when the organization needs to mature: leadership, relationships, systems and structures, and culture.

Growth in these brings freedom, autonomy, and the ability to do more than ever before.

Leadership maturity: The “chief” leader needs to mature. Maybe that’s you.

They need to grow in their understanding of their role. Most people grow into executive positions because they were good, technically, at the operations side of the business, managing finances, or sales.

However, the higher up you go in leadership, the more your job is about people. Dealing with conflict, motivation and morale, negotiations, alignment, accountability, and mentoring—to name a few skills.

Along with this, the role will test the leader internally. Fear of failure, perfectionism, ambiguity, isolation, the use of power, the desire for approval, and the leader’s own honesty and character all tend to surface under pressure.

Leadership isn’t for the weak. However, if you embrace the lessons it offers, it’ll make you strong.

Relational maturity: Healthy relationships are tested at times. And they will be tested through the stress of growth.

As organizations grow, departments begin to experience each other differently. Sales blames operations. Operations blames sales. Finance gets frustrated with everyone. Longtime employees wonder why the newer people don’t understand “how we do things here.” Newer employees wonder why people who “have been here since the ice ages” seem so attached to old habits.

Informality begins to create confusion. SOPs are undeveloped. Handoffs break down. Communication gaps occur. People begin to interpret ‘growing pains’ as ‘personality problems.’

Relational maturity means learning to use these problems as diagnostic information rather than merely blaming each other.

Maturity can look like forging clarity from ambiguity. Building trust out of conflict. Showing respect when under stress. Being patient with others’ weaknesses. Confronting because you care.

It’s not easy for relationships to mature. It’s not easy in marriages, friendships, or at work. But not easy doesn’t mean not worth it. And it also doesn’t mean impossible. It just means it takes effort to mature.

Those who do mature build the relational robustness that allows them to survive both challenges and successes together, because both can strain relationships.

Systemic and structural maturity: Every organization runs on systems and structures, whether intentional or not.

In business, these include financial management systems, lines of reporting and authority, hiring and onboarding systems, compensation systems, safety processes, communication rhythms, decision rights, accountability practices, and the ways work gets handed from one person or team to another.

In a smaller company, many of these things can remain informal. People know who to ask. They know what the owner wants. They remember what happened last time.

But growth challenges the limits of informal systems.

At some point, what used to be obvious isn’t. What used to be remembered should be documented. What used to be handled by one person now needs a team. What used to depend on proximity to the leader now needs to be built into the organization.

Growth challenges the limits of your current systems and forces the need to mature.

Cultural maturity: Organizational culture is a shared sense of identity, values, and purpose. All organizations build some form of culture. This will happen without even trying. Leaders tend to draw people who “match” them, and those people take their cues for acceptable behavior from their leaders. It’s self-reinforcing.

In a small team, this can often be informal. Informality can work because people are close to the leader.

But as the company grows across departments, locations, generations, or levels of experience, different cultures will emerge unless a shared culture is intentionally built and maintained.

This is why leaders need to nurture a common sense of identity, a commonly understood set of core values, and a shared purpose. People need to understand not only what the company does, but what kind of company this is supposed to be.

Once you’ve built this, your organization builds a greater capacity to self-manage, self-correct, and self-heal. People have something larger than their own preferences, department, location, or history to orient around.

Without it, your management burden becomes too high. The need for correction becomes overwhelming. And you may find yourself struggling with an organizational illness you can’t easily fix.

The Opportunity

One of the things I love most about my work is that helping people grow their businesses always equates to helping them grow as people. It’s very difficult to grow one without growing the other.

However, if the leader is willing to grow, their organization grows as well. And then that provides a new opportunity for the leader to grow.

It’s a virtuous cycle. It doesn’t need to stop until you do.

If you want to grow your business, go for it. But understand what growth will ask of you.

Growth creates the opportunity. Maturity creates the capacity to keep it.

Take good care,

Christian