Growing midsized companies can’t scale on the backs of a few heroes. The real heroes are strong teams. The strongest midsized companies intentionally strengthen their teams’ agility to perform to consistently drive growth.

The Journey from “I” to “We” Leadership

Owners of small businesses say “Jump” and employees say “How high?” Isn’t that what any founder or CEO thinks he wants? Well, as companies grow, and their operations and challenges become more multiform and complex, that leadership style just doesn’t cut it. It won’t work. It can’t. It doesn’t. To thrive, owners or CEOs of midsized companies really have no choice but to adopt a team-leadership model, where they collaborate with a cohesive group of top department leaders, and delegate responsibilities to them. That frees up the CEO to think about the future (and powerfully motivates the other, empowered leaders), which is vital for an organization’s long-term growth.

To sustain growth, midsized companies must adopt a team-based approach to leadership

Small businesses and startups often run quite efficiently with a single smart, visionary leader who acts as a hub, with a staff of helpers acting as spokes. The consolidation of decision-making in this model allows small company leaders to be flexible and nimble – just what you need when you’re starting out. When you’re small, business-building is conducted on a relatively small scale. Building out a customer-service function in a two-person department may mean having one person answer all incoming calls and passing angry customers on to the person who’s better at dealing with them. That’s a decision you don’t need a team of leaders to plan or implement.

Transitioning to team-based leadership

Midsized companies can bypass these and other problems common to transitioning from a hub-and-spoke to team-based leadership model if they build the following five elements into their approach:

• Designing and writing a business plan and review process
• Vetting leaders for collaborative skills
• A top leader focusing on the future
• Emphasizing collaboration and team cohesion
• Making strategic delegation a core business process

Designing and writing a business plan and review process

A clear business plan and a process to review it on a regular basis serve as the foundation of strong leadership teams. You can’t just tell leaders what they need to do. For a leadership team to work in a way that moves the company toward shared goals, you must commit those goals to writing. We often say, “If it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist.” And you must create a process to keep the team accountable for meeting the goals you have written.

Vetting leaders for collaborative skills

If your company is changing from a hub-and-spoke model to a team-led approach, you can’t just assume that the people stepping into team leader roles will have the appropriate skills to execute on the plan and guide their direct reports. They may. But based on our experience working with leaders of midsized companies, the chance is greater that people will be promoted past their level of competence, often out of a sense of loyalty to long-term employees. If those people can’t execute, you can rest assured the plan will fail. You must have people who are ready and hungry to step into team leader roles or hire them. We guarantee that if you move people who are helpers into leader roles without any help or professional development, they’ll make some bad decisions and you’ll pay the price.

In our practice, we’ve identified several reasons why long-term employees whom a CEO assumes are capable of becoming leaders fail when company’s growth reaches a tipping point. Robert Sher wrote about these in his book Mighty Midsized Companies. Since then, we’ve said it again and again:

• The problems become more complex
• The CEO’s direct reports aren’t top-level leaders
• The company’s leaders lack more sophisticated skills
• The team doesn’t focus on the long term

A top leader focusing on the future

For a team-leadership model to yield the biggest dividends, an increasing amount of short-term work must take place at lower levels in the organization. If it does, the CEO can spend more time on the future, leaving operational decisions to the top leadership team. And those leaders should delegate more day-to-day work to their direct reports, giving themselves more time to make those big operational decisions.

Emphasizing collaboration and team cohesion

For the workflow that just described to operate smoothly, efficiently, and successfully, leaders must work together, and they must work together well. That doesn’t happen by chance or accident. Great leadership teams start with people who want to be team players, rather than a bunch of soloists. Getting that band to harmonize together requires being intentional about building trust, respect, and adopting language and processes that weave people into a cohesive team.

Making strategic delegation a core business process

Strategic delegation is assigning tasks in a deliberate, intentional way to help people gain the knowledge or experience they will need to take over for someone higher up in the company.

How do you make this work? Involve your teammates in the process of development by asking for their support of teaming with your direct report as you shift your focus elsewhere. In growing midsized companies, teams are everywhere, and they’re dynamic, changing drivers of growth.

Convert One Leadership Position at a Time

Most companies can’t move from hub-and-spoke to team-leader model in one fell swoop. That puts too big a burden on an owner or CEO who may already feel overwhelmed handling the business’s day-to-day operations and long-term strategy. Such a transition also may incur too heavy a financial burden – especially for companies on the smaller end of the midsized-company spectrum.

A more practical approach is for the CEO to pick one or two functions where replacing helpers with effective leaders would fuel the most growth. Then, move quickly to upgrade those positions. If you already have a person in that spot who’s a high-potential employee, coaching can bring them up to the team-leader level. Otherwise, hire from outside.

Enjoying the fruits of team leadership

As midsized companies grow, an owner or CEO should strive to surround themselves with top team leaders who know more about their particular area of expertise than the CEO. When you have those people in place, the CEO ceases to be the company’s leading expert on everything. Instead, the CEO becomes the ringmaster, directing the show. If you founded the business, it is certainly not how you operated when you started but it’s how you need to develop as a leader to keep the company growing.

Teams Assessment

We’ve created a quick free assessment on leading with teams. These are many of the same questions we’d ask as consultants to understand where a client company stands on its use of these leading practices.