When You’re Suddenly Managing More People—and Feeling Buried
by Jenny Fernandez and Kathryn Landis
Summary.
On paper, a flattened org chart may look efficient, but the day-to-day can feel overwhelming when you’re a senior leader suddenly responsible for a sprawling team. Without a clear strategy, scale becomes a liability. It’s easy to feel buried by decisions, demands, and sheer volume. But leadership at scale is about leading differently, not simply doing more. Shifting from reacting to intentionally resetting how you lead won’t just help you survive the avalanche; it will help your team find solid ground and start building again.
In today’s uncertain economic climate, organizations often flatten structures to cut costs and accelerate decision-making, eliminating layers of middle management. In 2023 and 2024 alone, companies like Meta, Google, and Amazon laid off tens of thousands of employees, consolidating roles, shrinking teams, and widening managerial spans.
On paper, the org chart may look efficient, but the day-to-day can feel overwhelming if you’re a senior leader suddenly responsible for a sprawling team. Slack messages pile up. One-on-ones multiply. Every fire drill lands on your desk.
We call this phenomenon the “leadership avalanche.” Without a clear strategy, scale becomes a liability. We’ve seen this pattern play out repeatedly through our work advising dozens of companies navigating high-stakes transformations (Kathryn as an executive coach and keynote speaker and Jenny as an executive advisor and learning and development expert). We’ve identified five time-tested strategies that can help leaders rise to the occasion and lead at scale.
1. Reset How You Work—Together
When your team size multiplies overnight but your resources don’t, something has to give. Too often, leaders cling to familiar routines: weekly 1:1s, constant availability, and involvement in every decision. However, what works for a lean team won’t work for a larger, more complex one. Trying to lead the same way just accelerates burnout.
Instead, reset expectations, and do it in partnership with your team. Clarify what you’ll continue to deliver as their leader (e.g., priorities, presence during critical moments, support for blockers) and what may need to shift (e.g., instant responsiveness, deep involvement in every project). Then, co-create new ways of working, like how decisions are made, how meetings are run, and how conflict is surfaced.
One leader we coached who inherited a merged team of 30 direct reports hosted a “Team Reset Workshop” and asked:
- What helps you do your best work?
- What gets in the way?
- What agreements can we establish to work more effectively together?
From that discussion, the team co-authored a few norms: “Assume positive intent,” “Raise risks early,” and “No meetings before 9 am unless critical.” This gave everyone permission to contribute, reduced friction, and fostered a stronger sense of psychological safety.
Keep it simple with no more than five to seven agreements. Make your team norms visible, revisit them quarterly, and hold each other accountable.
2. Prioritize Ruthlessly and Communicate What Matters
When your attention is spread across multiple people and projects, your job becomes one of strategic triage. You can’t do it all, nor should you try. Focus on what’s most impactful, delegate what you can, and let go of what’s no longer essential.
But prioritization is only half the battle. The other half is making it unmistakably visible. As a leader, the challenge often isn’t knowing what matters—it’s making that clear to everyone else. Without shared clarity, teams either try to do everything or hesitate to act at all. Both lead to burnout, misfires, and missed opportunities.
One tech executive, Jane, inherited a team of 25 after layoffs and consolidation. At first, she was overwhelmed, but she quickly realized that her old way of working wouldn’t scale. She pivoted her approach and introduced a weekly “Top 5” priorities message. This simple, high-signal update cut through the noise, aligned everyone around what mattered most, and reduced escalations to her desk by 30% within a few months. It reassured her team she had their backs and gave them clarity to move forward confidently. Jane hadn’t vanished; she was simply operating from a higher altitude.
Use a decision framework, such as urgent vs. important, RACI, or a customized team-wide rubric, to create a shared language for what should make it to your desk and what shouldn’t. This will help the team distinguish between critical, strategic, and nonessential work. The goal isn’t to micromanage—it’s to light the path clearly enough for others to move without you.
3. Level Up Your Delegation
Managing a team that’s exponentially larger requires more than just trusting others. It’s about multiplying your impact through them. You can’t scale by doing more. You scale by focusing on what only you can do and empowering others to lead the rest.
Identify and develop your next-level leaders, team leads, trusted lieutenants, or senior individual contributors who can own decisions and drive outcomes in their domains. Then empower them: Give them autonomy, coach them regularly, and provide the context they need to lead with insight, not just instructions. Done well, it doesn’t just lighten your load; it grows your influence and your bench.
For instance, an SVP at a healthtech company implemented this strategy by appointing “area leads” across her major functional domains. Each had ownership to make decisions, run meetings, and escalate only when necessary. This resulted in faster decision-making, higher morale, and better execution. It also positioned three team members for future leadership roles.
Use a delegation ladder to clarify expectations and signal trust. For example, instead of telling a report, “Draft a recommendation and I’ll decide,” try, “You decide and loop me in only if there’s a risk.” The more explicit you are, the more confident others will be. Delegation isn’t abdication; it’s a strategic investment in your team’s growth.
4. Simplify the System to Accelerate the Work
As your team grows, what once felt like structure can quickly become clutter. Communication gets noisy. Processes multiply. Tools overlap. What began as a helpful structure becomes a drag on speed, clarity, and motivation. We’ve seen firsthand that the more systems expand, the more teams go through the motions instead of moving the work forward.
Your job isn’t to control the chaos but to eliminate what slows the work down. That means questioning legacy systems, removing unnecessary steps, and aligning processes to what matters now. Ask yourself and your team what’s creating unnecessary drag. Is it clunky handoffs? Endless status reporting? Meetings that feel like time sinks? These aren’t small irritants; they’re system-wide energy leaks. One study found that bad meetings alone cost large companies as much as $100 million a year, with respondents reporting that they could’ve skipped 30% of the meetings they attended in a week.
Dave, one fintech executive we coached, realized that critical updates were being shared across multiple platforms, including email, Teams, and team-specific update decks. Information was often repeated, missed, or misunderstood. He launched a two-week “process audit sprint,” empowered his area leads to map what was working and what wasn’t, and simplified the team’s internal communication flow. The payoff? Less noise, faster alignment, and more time spent on work that moves the needle.
Not every system change needs a transformation roadmap. Start with the systems closest to you, considering how priorities are communicated, how decisions are made, and how progress is tracked. Ask your team what’s getting in their way and then remove it. Simplification at this level may seem small, but it sends a powerful signal about what you value.
5. Protect Your Energy and Model Resilience
When your team grows quickly, the demands grow with it. Your calendar fills up. Your energy drains, too. And if you’re depleted, your team will feel it. How you show up under pressure becomes the emotional baseline for everyone around you.
Leadership at scale is a marathon, not a sprint. While protecting your energy may seem indulgent, it’s an investment in your leadership. You’re not just managing deadlines; you’re setting the tone. This means being honest about your bandwidth, building in recovery time, and making choices that prioritize sustainability over urgency. Modeling resilience and sustainability for your team requires presence over performance.
At the end of each week, take a few minutes for a simple red/yellow/green check-in to spot unsustainable patterns early. This is a self-reflection tool for you as a leader, not a performance assessment of your team.
Ask yourself: How am I doing right now? What pace have I been keeping? Then assign a color rating:
- Red: Depleted and need recovery
- Yellow: Stretched, but managing
- Green: Energized and focused
You can keep this private or occasionally share your status with your team to normalize conversations about capacity and sustainability. When you protect your energy and trust your teams, autonomy and creativity rise.
Resist the temptation to push through at all costs. Resilience requires knowing when to step back so you can step up when it counts. Whether it’s conducting walking 1:1s, putting up clear calendar boundaries, or having a “no meetings” block, protect your energy like it’s part of the job—because it is.
. . .
When your span of control stretches overnight, it’s easy to feel buried by decisions, demands, and sheer volume. But leadership at scale is about leading differently, not simply doing more. You won’t get it perfect—you don’t need to. But if you can shift from reacting to intentionally resetting how you lead, you won’t just survive the avalanche; you’ll help your team find solid ground and start building again.
Fonte: hbr.org
