Beyond Growing Pains: Leading Adaptive Transitions

The first signs can appear deceptively familiar: a spike in tension across teams, decisions getting stuck, the culture feeling less coherent, and key people quietly stepping back or slipping away.

Leadership responds with what they’ve learned to do: they clarify roles, reset meeting cadences, hire support staff, and tighten priorities.

It helps, for a while.

Then the same tensions resurface.

The new structure buckles. The strategy offsite yields enthusiasm but little traction. Everyone works harder to maintain alignment, yet each fix spawns new complexity. You're running faster just to stay in place.

Eventually, you realize the problem isn't execution. It's coherence.

It’s not that the team is doing the wrong things. It’s that the operating assumptions underneath the system no longer match the scale, complexity, or reality of the work. The organization is holding itself together in ways that made sense before, but now no longer do.

What’s surfacing isn’t inefficiency. It’s disorientation.

This is the first signal that what lies ahead isn't merely structural redesign, but something more fundamental: an adaptive transition that, if navigated well, can become the foundation for genuine transformation.

When Growing Pains is the wrong lens

Most growing pains respond to standard interventions. Leaders clarify decision rights, strengthen coordination mechanisms, redesign roles. These are essential moves, and often effective.

But sometimes the friction persists, not because the interventions failed, but because the system itself has become misaligned with what the organization has become.

Growth stops being an operational challenge and becomes an existential one: a deepening gap between identity and structure, between stated values and actual choices, between where authority formally sits and where it actually lives.

In these moments, you're not just managing complexity. You're confronting discontinuity. The organization has evolved into something its current design and perhaps its current leadership model were never built to sustain.

I call these adaptive transitions. They accumulate gradually, revealing themselves through patterns of confusion, exhaustion, and contradiction. They demand a different question entirely: What is this discomfort actually asking of us, both personally and organizationally?

The Anatomy of Organizational Misfit

The real challenge in these transitions isn’t dysfunction. It’s misfit.

The organization's scale, complexity, and external commitments have shifted, but the underlying design remains shaped by an earlier stage. What was once a coherent system begins to strain under new realities. This misfit tends to surface in two interlocking ways:

Structural misalignment: Decision-making protocols, leadership models, and workflows trail behind the actual scope and complexity of the work.

Identity tension: The organization's self-conception no longer explains or equips it for what it's actually doing and wants to do in the future.

Four patterns typically signal this threshold:

1.The reality outgrows the narrative

Perhaps the clearest sign of a transition is the growing gap between how the organization talks about itself and what it’s actually doing.

• Teams are building sophisticated new capabilities, entering unfamiliar markets, solving problems of greater complexity and impact. Yet the external narrative remains tethered to origin stories and early wins.

• Internally, the fracture runs deeper: different functions operate with divergent definitions of success, competing understandings of impact, parallel vocabularies for the same work. The organization isn't divided by conflict; it's fragmenting through incoherence

This isn't a communications failure. It's an identity crisis. And until you name it as such, your story will fail at its most essential function: creating shared meaning about what you are and what you're building together.

2.Leadership gravity hasn’t shifted

Responsibility has formally expanded, with new roles and teams, but real authority hasn’t.

• Critical decisions still funnel through legacy figures: the founder, the original executive team, the handful of people who "just know." The organization has grown, but its center of gravity hasn't shifted.

  
  

• Senior leaders defer judgment even when explicitly empowered to make it. Middle managers become translators of misalignment rather than leaders through it. The result is a kind of organizational undertow, constantly pulling decisions back to familiar shores.

This transcends bandwidth constraints. It reveals a leadership model that no longer reflects how or by whom value is actually created. The organizational chart shows one thing; the actual flow of authority shows another.

3.When Culture Becomes a Constraint

Early-stage culture transmits through proximity and osmosis: shared space, shared struggle, shared instinct. But at scale, culture requires architecture. It must be deliberately constructed, not just organically transmitted.

The culture that once rewarded improvisation may now require consistency. What thrived on proximity must now work across distance. Where founder intuition was sufficient, distributed judgment becomes necessary.

This demands more than codifying existing values. It requires interrogating whether those values, and the behaviors they reward, still serve the organization you're becoming.

When culture and strategy diverge, leaders face an uncomfortable truth: some of what got you here won't take you further. The question becomes not just what culture you need, but what you must be willing to relinquish.

4.Purpose that no longer orients strategic choice

The founding purpose still gets invoked in all-hands meetings, on websites, in pitch decks, but it no longer illuminates the choices you're actually facing. Not because it's unclear, but because it was calibrated for a simpler set of trade-offs.

What once unified now obscures. The mission statement that brought clarity to early decisions feels increasingly abstract when confronted with today's complexity. You find yourselves making significant strategic choices without meaningful recourse to your stated purpose. This is not mission drift, it's mission obsolescence, a signal that you've reached the boundaries of your current organizational logic.

Leading Through the Transition

Adaptive transitions aren't necessarily crises. They're inflection points, subtle at first, but cumulative in consequence. They require discernment.

Meeting this moment demands a different leadership stance entirely:

1.Begin with sense-making, not answers

The instinct is to move immediately to redesign: new org charts, revised role descriptions, updated strategic plans. Resist it. In adaptive transitions, diagnosis precedes intervention. The first task is to understand what is actually changing.

This means looking beneath the symptoms to surface foundational questions such as:

• What assumptions about authority, culture, and purpose are we still unconsciously operating from?

• What is no longer working, not because it’s broken, but because it’s outdated?

• Which tensions keep resurfacing regardless of how many times we've "solved" them?

  
  

Before anything is rebuilt, it needs to be re-understood.

2.Let go of What Worked

Adaptive transitions exact an emotional price: they require releasing what worked. Abandoning practices that once defined success. Acknowledging that the instincts that built the organization may be precisely what now constrain it.

This isn't repudiating your history. It's recognizing when history has hardened into limitation.

3.Rebuild Shared Meaning

You may not need a new identity. However, you need an updated one, a way of describing yourselves, leading yourselves, and orienting yourselves, that reflects your current reality and emerging trajectory.

This requires genuine collective sense-making:

• Not repeating the mission, but reinterpreting it for current complexity

• Not just reinforcing culture, but deciding which behaviors still serve

• Not updating processes, but confronting the question: What kind of organization are we becoming?

4.Own the Work

The temptation to delegate or defer runs deep. But organizational coherence cannot be outsourced. It must be owned, internally and visibly, by the people who will live with its consequences.

This doesn't mean leaders must do everything themselves. But they must show up with sustained attention, genuine openness, and willingness to release familiar anchors.

This is not leadership-as-expertise. It's leadership as stewardship, a fundamentally different stance.

Without it, every intervention remains provisional. The real work, the transition that enables transformation, stays perpetually unfinished.

The Choice Before You

Organizations rarely break suddenly. More commonly, they enter extended periods of misalignment when strategy evolves, scale accelerates, but identity and operating logic remain static.

These periods are dangerously easy to misread. The symptoms mimic routine growing pains. But when friction persists despite competent structural interventions, you're not facing a capacity problem. You're facing a coherence problem.

What comes next isn't a transformation, not yet. What comes next is transition: the hard, adaptive work of reconsidering not just how you operate, but how you cohere.

Whether that transition leads to transformation depends on how it is understood and engaged.

Treat it as a technical problem, and you'll manage symptoms indefinitely. Recognize it as a fundamental shift in organizational identity and logic, and it becomes the foundation for genuine transformation. The difference isn't semantic. It's strategic, and it will determine whether your organization merely survives its growth or is genuinely transformed by it.

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This is the second in a two-part series on organizational growth in impact-driven organizations. The first article examined the nature of growing pains and how to respond to them.

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About the Author

Nazly Frias is the founder of Leadership Impact, a boutique leadership advisory practice specializing in leadership teams and senior leaders in impact-driven professional service firms and organizations.

With over 15 years of international experience, Nazly brings a unique dual perspective: she has served as both an insider—leading and being part of leadership teams in global impact consulting firms and public innovation labs—and as an external trusted advisor.

Originally from Colombia, Nazly works with clients across the globe in English and Spanish and is based in Berlin.

Get in touch with Nazly