I have the privilege of sitting in a unique role within our organization—one that gives me the opportunity to see across departments, functions, and levels of leadership from a broader, company-wide perspective. As our company continues to grow, one thing becomes increasingly clear: the business isn’t the only thing that has to scale. Our people and leadership have to scale with it.
Growth creates new departments, new responsibilities, and new layers of leadership. Individual contributors become managers. Managers become leaders of leaders. Roles that didn’t exist a few years ago suddenly become critical to the organization. Through this evolution, one thing has become increasingly clear to me: creating a leadership position is much easier than creating a leader who is prepared to succeed in it.
As organizations grow, middle managers become the critical connection between executive strategy and day-to-day execution. They are expected to lead teams, develop employees, manage performance, solve problems, communicate priorities, and deliver results.
That also makes middle management one of the layers most exposed to disconnect and burnout. Many people enter management because they were exceptional individual contributors—but being great at your job doesn’t automatically prepare you to coach, develop, and lead others. If we wait until a leadership position opens to start thinking about who can fill it, we’re already behind.
As a People Operations leader, I am becoming hyper-focused on workforce readiness. We forecast revenue, evaluate operational capacity, and plan for where the business needs to be years from now. Our people strategy deserves that same level of foresight.
Who is ready for more responsibility? Who could be ready with the right development? Where do we have succession gaps? Where should we intentionally recruit externally?
Answering those questions also creates something incredibly valuable for employees: visibility into opportunity.
As the organization grows, employees should be able to see potential career paths growing with it. When people understand what their next opportunity could look like—and know their organization is investing in preparing them for it—talent development becomes a powerful retention strategy.
This is where People Operations makes the shift from administrative support to true strategic partnership. Our responsibility isn’t simply to support the organization we have today. It’s to partner with our leaders to build the organization we’re going to need tomorrow.
Because the best time to start developing your next leader isn’t when the position becomes available—it’s long before you need them.
– Written by Gretchen Mey, Director of Operations, Joe Taylor Restoration
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