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Scale Without Slowing: Embedding Team of Teams in High-Growth Organizations
September 24, 2025
Authored by Ryan Flynn
The Hidden Cost of Growth
Every leader who sets out to scale an organization—whether by headcount, geography, product complexity, or all three—eventually encounters the same challenge. What once felt fast, agile, and deeply aligned begins to slow. Communication breaks down. Decisions require more coordination. Silos emerge. Teams become harder to steer. If you’re experiencing this, know it’s not a sign of failure; it’s a sign of growth.
Leaders know their role is to set strategy and drive results. However, the less obvious—and ultimately more decisive—responsibility is designing the operating system that sustains alignment, coordination, and empowered execution as the organization scales. Too often, this is left unaddressed until cracks appear, when recovery is far harder than prevention.
Anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s research into human cognition explains why:
People can only maintain about 150 trust-based relationships at any given time. Beyond that threshold, trust thins, and complexity grows faster than connection can keep up.
Leaders throughout history have turned to bureaucracy to manage this strain. Hierarchy and process step in where cohesion once lived. But bureaucracy comes at a cost: It slows speed, stifles innovation, and siphons entrepreneurial energy. Over time, growing organizations morph into the very institutions they once sought to disrupt.
Thankfully, this descent is not inevitable. Forward-thinking executives anticipate the strain and deliberately invest in systems that preserve speed and alignment at future scale. That is the essence of the Team of Teams model. Originally developed to transform the Joint Special Operations Command from a siloed hierarchy into a cohesive, fast-moving network, it offers a blueprint for business leaders today. It aims not to repair what’s broken but to prevent it from breaking in the first place.
The Senior Executive’s Unique Role
Only one person in the organization has the vantage point, influence, and credibility to shape how the enterprise truly works: the senior executive. With line of sight across business units, functions, geographies, and time horizons, they are uniquely positioned to design the operating system that enables their teams to succeed at new scale.
The Team of Teams framework outlines four capabilities leaders must preserve:
- Common Purpose: Teams must row in the same direction. A clear sense of purpose aligns people across functions and prevents drift.
- Trust: Faith in the competence, benevolence, and reliability of teammates fuels speed and reduces friction. Without it, coordination deteriorates, and politics creep in.
- Shared Consciousness: A common operating picture ensures leaders understand interdependencies and act in concert, not isolation.
- Empowered Execution: Teams need clarity and confidence to act with established guardrails. Without it, decisions escalate unnecessarily, and agility erodes.
These capabilities are not self-sustaining. They require disciplined and consistent effort from the top. The senior executive must be both architect and steward, embedding these capabilities early and reinforcing them constantly. But how can leaders build this into their never-ending list of priorities? That’s where prehab comes in.
Prehab: A Three-Hour Investment with Exponential Return
Our challenge isn’t convincing you that alignment, coordination, and empowered execution matter but demonstrating the power of investing in these capabilities early, before problems surface. The most effective leaders recognize that their unique role isn’t just to deliver outcomes but to engineer the conditions that allow those outcomes to keep scaling.
That’s the thesis of Prehab. Just as elite athletes build stability muscles before an injury occurs, senior executives must deliberately strengthen the systems that will sustain them at future scale, not just today’s size. What feels optional now becomes essential later.
The good news is that refocusing just three hours in your week explicitly on Prehab—one reinforcing cultural identity, one enhancing cross-team coordination, and one empowering decision-making at the edge—can be enough. This time must be disciplined and well-planned with a clear purpose, a sharp agenda, and the right people so it adds value rather than noise. But done well, it can become the highest-leverage time in your week with a limitless ROI.
Each hour you spend focused on enabling these capabilities unlocks better-directed energy across your organization. When alignment holds, when leaders coordinate without friction, and when teams are empowered to own decisions within an effective framework, everyone’s time is used more effectively. That’s the math of scale.
While the details vary across industries, you are trying to break a universal underlying pattern:
Growth creates complexity, and without deliberate leadership design, complexity calcifies into bureaucracy.
HOUR ONE: Anchor Identity Before It Frays
Scott Malkin, Value Retail
Scott Malkin, founder and chairman of Value Retail, understood from the beginning that growth would test culture as much as it would test strategy. A real estate investor and developer by background, he launched Value Retail in 1995 with the vision of creating a new kind of luxury shopping experience that combined retail with hospitality, curation, and culture. From a single site, the company has grown into a global portfolio of luxury destinations, including Bicester Village outside London, one of the most successful shopping locations in Europe. Today, nearly 1,500 employees operate across Europe, Asia, and the U.S., curating experiences that attract millions of visitors annually and host many of the world’s most iconic brands.
Where others built centralized headquarters, Value Retail never had one. Where others layered formal structures, Malkin resisted calcifying into a pyramid. Instead, he designed for entrepreneurial friction by pairing creative and commercial leaders, encouraging different worldviews to productively collide, and refusing to let the system simplify the uniqueness out of itself.
He drew inspiration from organizations such as luxury conglomerate LVMH, which fused “left-brain” commercial rigor with “right-brain” creative disruption. Value Retail adopted a similar balance: ensuring entrepreneurial freedom while embedding just enough structure to scale globally.
“Executives often talk about returning an organization to a culture of a startup,” Malkin explained. “This seems impossible, which suggests the only logical route is to work to preserve that from inception.”
That philosophy shaped how he connected leaders across a global footprint. Far earlier in his growth journey than many peers, Malkin invested in gathering the 150 most influential people for twice-yearly immersive forums. In between, he convened them virtually each month. On the surface, a call that largely risked inefficiency. But at its best, it became connective tissue across the enterprise: not a venue for updates but for learning together.
On one such call, the China team highlighted how a global brand was experimenting with a new form of experiential retail to engage local customers. It wasn’t Value Retail’s own initiative, but by elevating it to the broader group, the insight became a shared provocation. Leaders debated its implications, drew parallels to their own markets, and considered how Value Retail might adapt.
“The magic of Value Retail is in the consistent fusion of a diversity of expertise, thinking, and mindset,” Malkin said. “My role is ensuring that people who won’t naturally work together are challenged to, because that leads to the truly unique ways in which we curate exceptional experiences for our brands and guests.”
HOUR TWO: Make Coordination Continuous, Not Episodic
Doug Sieg, Lord Abbett
Lord Abbett is one of the U.S.’s oldest independent, privately held investment firms with more than $200 billion in assets under management and a reputation for strong investment performance. When Doug Sieg became Managing Partner in 2018, he inherited a nearly 100-year-old firm that needed a unifying leadership culture and operating model to sustain growth in an increasingly complex and competitive industry.
Sieg began by listening, and what he heard from partners was clear: They wanted more voice, more clarity, and more impact.
“We had spoken often about culture previously, but we hadn’t clearly defined it in a way that could truly unify our team and elevate performance,” Sieg reflected. “We set out to change that—establishing a leadership culture that was principles-based, performance-oriented, and purpose-driven. This created the trust necessary to unleash our people’s potential.”
One of his answers was to create a new operating committee. Distinct from strategy-setting bodies, its singular mission was execution. Sieg made its purpose vivid with a metaphor: It would serve as the firm’s “air traffic control tower,” and the planes in the air were Lord Abbett’s most important initiatives. The committee’s job was simple but not easy: land the planes safely, smoothly, and on time.
“We created an operating committee with a singular mission: not to set strategy but to facilitate execution and communication,” Sieg explained. “This cross-functional team aligns, prioritizes, and drives every firm initiative forward, making the full list of initiatives transparent to the entire firm. It creates accountability, clarity, and most importantly, unity. That allows me to focus on ensuring communication is flowing and transparency is the default, not the exception. I serve as the connector across all dimensions of the firm, reinforcing that we win only when we move together as one team.”
The operating committee was supported by structural and cultural changes. Partner meetings shifted from infrequent and ceremonial to frequent and rigorous, creating a continuous rhythm of alignment. Initiatives were tracked transparently across the firm, making priorities and progress visible to all. The operating committee didn’t run perfectly from day one, nor was it meant to. It evolved as leaders learned how to use it, and its strength came less from flawless process than from the expectation that leaders would show up and adjust together.
The result was a system in which Sieg didn’t have to personally enforce collaboration. Instead, the structure required senior leaders to coordinate across silos, raise the bar for each other, and maintain execution focus without relying on his direct intervention.
HOUR THREE: Empower for the Scale You’re Heading Toward
BJ Jones, Biohaven
Biohaven is a biotech company that went from startup to disruptor in less than a decade. Its breakthrough migraine treatment, Nurtec ODT, became one of the fastest-growing launches in the sector, propelling the company’s commercial team from six people to more than 800 in under a year, ultimately leading to a $11.6 billion acquisition of Nurtec ODT by Pfizer in 2022. BJ Jones was at the center of building and leading that commercial engine.
From the beginning, Jones recruited differently. He didn’t just hire for functional expertise; he hired for leadership readiness, people he believed could, and would, scale with the company.
“The question I started with was, ‘Are they capable of growing and leading in a growing organization?’” explained Jones. “Some will be, and some won’t, and that’s okay. The key is making that decision early. When I grew the commercial organization, I didn’t start off with a thousand people. I started off with just hiring my leadership team—it started with those six, and I hired them with the expectation they were going to lead big teams. The expectation for them to act like it started on day one.”
He also made empowerment explicit in how decisions were made. Decision rights weren’t left vague; they were defined and reinforced in practice.
“I wasn’t going to make every decision,” Jones recalled. “I’m going to give the decision to others on the team, and everybody’s going to respect that and respect their expertise in their area of responsibility. Yes, we’re going to engage each other and continue to give input, but we’re not looking at crossing lanes or taking what someone else is responsible for.”
That clarity was critical. Leaders knew what they owned. Their peers respected those boundaries. And Jones shifted his own time away from approvals and toward removing obstacles, aligning vertically, and painting the broader vision of where the team was heading. Not every hire scaled as expected, and Jones was candid about that. But by setting the expectation early, he could anchor people in the right roles, rather than letting mismatches drag down the team later.
The payoff was enormous. Biohaven maintained the speed and agility of a much smaller team, ultimately positioning it for one of the industry’s landmark acquisitions.
Systems and Tools That Make Prehab Stick
The three Prehab hours are about behavior and focus. But to make them durable at scale, they need the right systems behind them. In our work with executives, three enablers stand out:
Hyper-Disciplined Operating Rhythm
Time is your most strategic resource. Work with your EA, Chief of Staff, or ops team to ensure your calendar reflects your priorities. Audit your schedule regularly: Are you visibly investing in alignment, coordination, and decision-making? The best leaders lead with their calendars.
Modern Listening and Analytics
Proactive leaders don’t guess where friction lies; they measure it. Use employee listening tools, social network analysis, and pulse surveys to surface where trust is eroding or silos are forming. Let data guide where you spend your Prehab hours.
Leadership Accountability
Prehab isn’t just your responsibility; it must cascade. Hold your leadership team accountable for reinforcing culture and collaboration, not just hitting financial targets. Build it into performance conversations, promotion criteria, and recognition. When the leadership team mirrors your behaviors, the system sustains itself and cascades across the organization.
Your Next Steps
Scaling a high-performing organization isn’t just a matter of hiring more people, launching more products, or expanding into new markets. It’s a leadership test—a test of whether you can preserve the speed, cohesion, and adaptability that made your team great in the first place.
Most leaders fail to meet this test, not because they undervalue alignment, coordination, or empowered execution but because they wait too long to invest in them. By the time silos have hardened, trust has thinned, and decision-making has slowed, recovery is far harder than prevention.
That’s why Prehab matters. Three hours a week may not sound like much, but these are not ordinary hours. They are the most high-leverage hours in your calendar because each one ensures that thousands of hours across your organization are spent more effectively.
Alignment keeps teams rowing in the same direction. Coordination keeps execution moving without friction. And empowered execution keeps decisions flowing at the right level, at speed.
Together, these three hours form a simple, durable system that will future-proof your culture and operating model. When supported by the right discipline, analytics, and leadership expectations, they become habits that scale with you.
So as you lead your organization into its next chapter, don’t just ask where you’re going. Ask how you’re preparing your team to get there. You have the vantage point. You have the responsibility. And now, you have the roadmap.
Growth won’t slow you down if you’ve already built the system that makes speed inevitable. Start investing in how your team works today—before scale reshapes it for you.
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