EP #085 - Your Company Outgrew You and You Didn't Notice

I spent five years as a junior officer on nuclear submarines and the leadership structure was simple. Ten junior officers, three department heads, one executive officer, and the commanding officer running the boat.

During my service, I served under about a dozen department heads. I could tell that some of them had been genuinely excellent junior officers. They knew every system cold, solved problems faster than anyone, and worked harder than everyone around them.

Then they got the department head role, and everything broke because being a department head was a fundamentally different job.

A department head couldn't do everything personally anymore. The role required delegating decisions, setting priorities, and trusting other people to execute.

And some of these officers, genuinely talented people, never made that adjustment. They stayed in the weeds, fixed problems personally, and tried to outwork the complexity of their new role.

Their hands-on instincts, the very thing that earned them the promotion, became a liability once they had it.

Releasing the junior officer mindset was only the first career transition on the submarine. A harder one came later. The next step in the career ladder was Commanding Officer, Captain of the boat, and some officers who did learn to lead through others eventually became candidates for the role. The Captain's job was a different thing entirely.

The Captain set the course for the entire submarine. The job meant deciding where the ship was going, communicating that vision to 130 sailors, and building a culture where the crew could make good decisions without the captain in the room.

The Captain was also the face of the boat. To the admiral, to the squadron, to the families on the pier, the Captain represented what the crew stood for.

To recap the full arc, three completely different jobs across one career. Junior officers execute the work, department heads lead the people doing the work, and captains set the direction, shape the culture, and represent it to the world.

Every officer I watched struggle had one thing in common. They couldn't release the habits from their previous role.

And even as a junior officer, I had a gut sense that the same three-stage progression had to exist somewhere outside the military. But it took me years to realize where.

Where the Same Breakpoint Appears in Companies

I now work with CEOs across growth stages, and the submarine parallel maps almost perfectly onto the experience of a CEO scaling a company past about 50 employees.

At 20 employees or fewer, you can still be everywhere. You sell personally, approve most decisions, stay close to every hire, and fix problems yourself.

But at 50 employees, a hands-on approach stops working and at 100, it becomes impossible. By 200 employees, you're a stranger to half the company.

And here's where the submarine parallel becomes uncomfortable. Your work doesn't get worse. You're still making good decisions. But you can't do brilliant work that nobody sees, nobody understands, and nobody can repeat to a new hire.

So new hires start learning your culture secondhand, and the version they absorb is diluted. Priorities you mentioned once in a leadership meeting get lost before they reach anyone who needs to act on them, so your team starts guessing at what you'd want…and they guess wrong.

When I describe these problems to clients, almost every one of them tells me they've been trying to fix the dilution by working harder. More hours, more meetings, more direct involvement.

But the extra effort doesn't solve anything, because one person's voice can't physically reach a company growing faster than their calendar allows.

Amplifying Your Voice Across a Growing Company

Fixing culture dilution and lost priorities looks different depending on the company, but every fix I've seen starts with putting the right leaders in place and trusting them to carry the message.

Beyond delegation, the repetition of key points has to increase until you're sick of saying them. Then you say them again, because your newest hire hasn't heard any of it once.

And you use LinkedIn. 

I bring up LinkedIn specifically because it's one of the few channels where your internal team, your job candidates, your investors, and your customers all see the same message at the same time.

One CEO I work with runs an 850-person healthcare software company. He posts regularly on LinkedIn, but a huge part of his LinkedIn audience is his own employees because at 850 people, he can't be in every room or have a hallway conversation with everyone.

So he built a full communication system. Bi-weekly town halls, an internal newsletter, a dedicated Slack channel, regular Ask Me Anything sessions, LinkedIn, and office visits across locations. LinkedIn is one speaker in a surround system.

This CEO uses LinkedIn to reinforce vision, celebrate wins, and signal values, and it works because it's layered on top of five or six other channels all saying consistent things. His employees hear the same priorities on LinkedIn that they hear in the town hall, in Slack, and from their managers.

The principle behind his approach applies to any company past 50 people. If you're only communicating through one or two channels, someone else is filling the narrative vacuum. And you probably won't like what they're saying.

LinkedIn Affects More Than Your Pipeline

If you're post-Series A, you're probably still measuring LinkedIn by leads generated. I get it. Leads are concrete, and you can point to them in a board meeting.

But LinkedIn also affects hiring quality, internal alignment, and market perception in ways that a pipeline report will never capture.

Every priority you emphasize, every value you repeat, every win you celebrate on LinkedIn sends a signal to your employees, your job candidates, your investors, and your customers simultaneously, whether you intend to send that signal or not.

Job candidates are reading your posts before they apply and forming opinions about whether they'd want to work for you. Investors, partners, and customers do the same research before meetings happen, because every great board member knows perception matters, even when perception never appears as a line item.

Every one of those audiences is forming an opinion about your leadership based on your LinkedIn presence, which is exactly why the submarine parallel matters here.

The Commanding Officer never tried to be the best operator on the boat. The captain's entire job was to make sure every person on board understood the mission, trusted the plan, and could make the right call independently.

Your company asks the same thing of you now. If you've grown past the point where you can personally reach everyone, your job has already changed. And every week you spend grabbing the wrench yourself is a week your team spends guessing at priorities you never amplified.

— Justin

Justin M. Nassiri | Founder & CEO
M: 650.353.1138 | E: [email protected]
250 Fillmore St Suite 150, Denver, CO 80206
www.ExecutivePresence.io

Executive Presence specializes in helping top-tier executives boost their visibility, activate their network, and position themselves as thought leaders via our premium, fully-managed LinkedIn service.

Our unique process involves ex-McKinsey, BCG, and Bain consultants conducting monthly hour-long interviews with our clients, and turning them into impactful daily LinkedIn posts to establish their unique voice and authority. On average, our clients see a 500% bump in engagement in their first 30 days with us. Data is continuously analyzed to improve engagement and identify impactful messaging that you can use for conferences, podcasts, and internal communications.