Strategic planning without planning strategically for your staffing is an exercise in futility. Strategic staffing is a critical component that often gets overlooked—until it’s too late.

Imagine you lead a $20M company. You’ve worked hard to get where you are. As you survey the horizon, you realize that another $20M in growth is possible in the next 2–3 years.

But your current management team is already stretched to capacity. Your technical team is too.

What do you do? You want to grow—but you can’t blow your team’s circuits. Also, what about overhead? How do you protect margins?

A typical answer has been, “Build a strategic plan.” Don’t leave success to hopes and dreams. Create your road map.

That used to be a good answer. It used to be the answer I gave.

Why Strategic Planning Isn’t Enough

Planning is easy. Implementation is hard.

It’s easy to set Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals and sketch out a path to make them a reality.

But you need people to implement. If you don’t have the right people, when you need them, you won’t accomplish your goals.

This is even more true when scaling. Businesses don’t scale incrementally on a smooth curve. They scale in jumps, like a set of stairs.

Companies that successfully scale—and sustain their success—plan for and build the team they anticipate needing. They don’t wait until the need is urgent.

They build the team, then they build the company that justifies the team. And they do this quickly.

Strategic staffing bridges the gap between where you are and where you want to go.

Here’s What Makes Staffing for Growth so Difficult:

1. Growth (at scale) isn’t a comfortable 10% annual bump. It’s a stair-step pattern. What got you here won’t get you there. Each new level demands a leap in capacity.
2. Staff bottlenecks stall growth more than external market conditions. Growth benefits from momentum. An empty bench breaks that momentum. It causes you to miss or fumble opportunities.
3. The hiring pool is tighter than ever. Fewer working-age people are available. Many lack the experience or professional maturity needed—even for entry-level roles. Qualified candidates aren’t just unavailable—they’re often nonexistent. Even unqualified, ‘raw material’ ones can be hard to find.
4. The temptation is to violate the Peter Principle. The Peter Principle, coined by psychologist Laurence Peter, says: “People tend to get promoted to their level of incompetence.” Sometimes no formal promotion happens at all—just a surge in complexity. A role grows beyond the person in it. And if they can’t—or won’t—grow with it, the business suffers.

More on the Peter Principles (Because it is so common…)

I know a company (not a client) that had an adequate bookkeeper managing $5M in revenue. Then a new CEO came in and quickly scaled the company to $100M.

Instead of hiring a seasoned CFO, they promoted the bookkeeper. Why? Loyalty, perhaps. She liked reporting to the CEO. But she had no appetite—or ability—to grow into a strategic financial role.

She could keep the books balanced. But she couldn’t navigate complex contracting, couldn’t see around corners, and couldn’t design systems to manage scale. Most of all, she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—lead the financial strategy for growth.

They didn’t just stall. They started to spiral. Not because she was disloyal or dishonest—but because she was in the wrong seat. And serious damage was done by the time this was acknowledged.

The mistake wasn’t in rewarding a loyal employee. The mistake was in how they went about it. Specifically, assuming she wanted or had the ability to grow with the company. She didn’t. And the company paid for it.

What is meant for good, too often ends up creating frustrations and damaged relationships.

If you wait to plan for your staffing needs, you’ll be stuck with trying to fit square pegs into round holes. This isn’t fair to anyone. This applies to executives as much as to frontline roles.

Strategic staffing planning helps avoid these common pitfalls before they become crises.

Strategic Staffing to the Rescue

How is this avoided? Strategic staffing.

Strategic staffing is a disciplined approach to ensuring your organization has the right people in the right roles at the right time. Based on Succession360™ principles, here are the key steps:

1. Clarify Your Vision
   Start by defining 3–5 primary goals over a 2–5 year horizon. Be specific.
   Example: “In three years, we will double revenue to $40M and increase margins from 10% to 15%. We’re fully staffed, and our team reports an average of 90%+ job satisfaction.”

2. Draw Your Future Organization Chart
   Design the ideal team for your future. Focus on functions, not current individuals.

   

• What new roles or functions will be needed?

• What changes in scale or scope must be made?

• What transitions or retirements are foreseeable?

3. Identify Core Capabilities
   For each critical role, list 3–5 top-level responsibilities or competencies. Not job descriptions—just key qualities that will help you quickly screen for and identify fit.

4. Assess Talent
   Match current staff to future needs:

• Who has the potential to grow?

• Who needs mentoring or coaching?

• Who’s likely to be outgrown by their role?

• Who is currently looking at retirement/life changes and may not be here?

• Which roles have no internal candidates?

5. Plan for Development and Recruitment
   Create a roadmap:

• Create a per person plan to develop internal candidates – with timelines.

• Identify roles that require external hires—and when you must start looking.
  For example: If you anticipate needing a new role filled a year from now and you know it usually takes three months to get up to speed and four months to recruit and hire for that position…You should begin your search five months from now. Not a year.

6. Strategic Planning
   Fold all staffing insights back into your overall strategic plan. Double check for bottlenecks or likely friction between the projected growth and the staffing needs.

7. Build Contingency Plans
   Prepare for disruption due to growth, turnover, or unexpected departures:

• Name successors for key roles.

• Set emergency staffing strategies.

8. Review and Update Regularly
   Strategic staffing is dynamic. Update your plan annually or during major shifts, such as changes in your team or updates to your strategic planning.

Strategic staffing keeps your growth proactive, not reactive.

Panic hiring is expensive—for you and your team.
Strategic staffing helps you get ahead of the curve. It protects margins, positions your people to succeed, and puts the right leadership in place before you’re forced to hire in a hurry.

Let’s schedule a Strategic Staffing Review—a focused conversation to map out the team you’ll need next.

Or download your free Strategic Staffing guide as part of the Succession360™ Toolkit.

Take good care,

Christian