Everyone Wants Growth. Hardly Anyone Builds the Conditions for It

I used to think growth was mostly about pace. If I’m honest, being a busy fool, managing more busy fools. You can guess what that leads to, right? If we increased activity, generated more leads, held more meetings, published more content, chased more opportunities and generally kept everyone very busy, I assumed results would follow sooner or later.

What I’ve learned, sometimes the long way round, is that growth is far more sensitive to the conditions people are working in than the effort they are putting in. By conditions, I mean the environment people are operating in day to day: how clear the direction actually feels, how priorities show up in real decisions, how choices get made when things clash, and whether the systems around the work help or quietly get in the way.

You can have capable people, good ideas, and real momentum, talent and tenacity and still stall if priorities are vague, decisions are inconsistent, expectations change at the drop of a hat because of one shiny new idea from the top, and teams are not working to the same understanding of what success actually looks like.

Most organisations are not short on ambition. They are short on the clarity and structure that allow effort to turn into coordinated progress.

Growth is usually discussed as a result. It shows up as a number in a plan, a target in a meeting, or a headline in a board pack. Something to reach, rather than something to design for.

In practice, growth behaves much more like a system. It emerges from the environment people are working in every day. When that environment is clear and coherent, progress tends to follow. When it is not, friction builds quietly and results become inconsistent, even when effort is high.

This is where many organisations get stuck. They increase activity without questioning whether it is the right activity. More meetings, more leads, more campaigns, more content, more outreach. More of everything, except time to stop and ask whether any of it is working. Everyone is busy, but not everyone is pulling in the same direction, and not everyone is working from the same understanding of what actually creates value.

When I talk about the “system” people are working inside, I mean the combination of signals that shape behaviour. What activities are prioritised? How is success defined? What language is used to describe value to customers? Whether teams are aligned on what they are selling, who it is really for, and why it matters. How decisions are made when trade-offs appear. Whether people feel confident acting or hesitate because expectations are unclear.

This is often the point where leaders start diagnosing the wrong problem, usually with the best intentions. Performance becomes the focus. Targets are questioned. Pressure increases. Activity ramps up again.

What gets examined far less often is whether people have been given enough clarity to make good decisions in the first place. Whether the direction of travel has been explained in a way that people can genuinely understand. Whether priorities are clear, or whether teams are trying to interpret strategy on the fly while still delivering day to day.

Research into organisational effectiveness continues to show that clarity around roles, priorities and decision-making improves performance, not because people suddenly work harder, but because they waste less effort on the wrong things. When people understand what good looks like, what matters most, and how their work connects to outcomes, activity becomes purposeful rather than performative.

Seen through that lens, many growth problems are not motivation problems or capability gaps. They are signals that the systems people are working on inside need attention.

One of the most common patterns I see is people using the same words while meaning different things. Everyone talks about growth, but they are often holding completely different pictures of what success actually looks like.

This isn’t only a “big company” problem with lots of departments and politics. It shows up just as easily in small businesses, because even when you’re a team of six, you still have different lenses in the room. Someone is thinking about revenue and cash flow. Someone is thinking about visibility and enquiries. Someone is thinking about delivery and capacity. Someone is thinking about quality and customer experience. Sometimes, one person is thinking all of those things, depending on what time of day it is, how much coffee they’ve had and how much panic there is about moving the business forward.

As businesses get bigger, those lenses tend to map onto functions such as leadership, marketing, sales and operations. Leaders may be thinking about revenue, margin, retention, or moving into a new segment. Marketing may focus on demand, reach, brand visibility, or inbound conversion. Sales often interpret growth as pipeline value, win rate, or speed to close. Delivery and operations can experience growth as pressure on resourcing, process stability, and customer experience.

None of those perspectives is wrong. In fact, they are all valid. The problem starts when they are not connected into one shared story about what matters most right now, how trade-offs should be made, and who decides when priorities clash.

This is where misalignment takes root. People stay busy, but effort becomes scattered. Leaders feel like they are repeating themselves because messages are being interpreted rather than translated. Teams become unclear on priorities, not because they do not care, but because they are trying to reconcile multiple versions of “success” at the same time.

What often goes unexamined is where that ambiguity began. In many cases, it is not a failure of effort at the team level, but a lack of clarity earlier on about how the vision and strategy translate into real priorities and expectations. When leaders are clear in principle but imprecise in practice, teams are left to fill in the gaps themselves.

That is when alignment becomes something people claim rather than something they experience. On the surface, everyone agrees. Underneath, frustration builds because people are working hard without the same understanding of what they are optimising for.

Clarity is one of those things that sounds obvious until you realise how often it is missing in practice. Most founders and senior leaders genuinely believe they are being clear because the vision makes perfect sense in their own head and they live with it every day.

The catch is that teams do not experience your internal clarity. They experience clarity through what gets decided, what gets prioritised, what gets deprioritised, what gets rewarded, and what keeps changing, depending on which conversation they last had.

This is also the point where founders can feel a bit irritated, and I do get it. You are carrying a lot. You are making difficult calls with imperfect information. You are holding a thousand moving parts at once. It can feel reasonable to assume the team will “join the dots”.

Sometimes they can, especially in small businesses where everyone is close to the details. As you grow, it becomes less reliable. People join at different times, hear different versions, and interpret strategy through the lens of their own job. The dots are not obvious if you are not holding the same picture in your head.

This is why clarity shows up as a performance driver, not just a communication preference. Mercer’s 2025 Executive Outlook highlights how strongly executives connect effective leadership with communicating a clear vision, and the reason is simple: uncertainty is expensive. Confusion creates hesitation, rework, duplicated effort, and decisions that do not stack up. Clarity reduces that hidden cost.

When leaders are not clear, teams fill in the gaps themselves. Humans dislike ambiguity, so we create explanations that help things make sense. That is not a character flaw. It is normal. The problem is that ten people will create ten different versions of the story, and misalignment starts to look like poor performance when it is really unclear direction.

This is where I want to be direct, because it’s one of the biggest blind spots in growing companies.

Founders often treat clarity like a one-off event. You share the vision, you explain the strategy, you send the update, you do the meeting, and you assume the message has landed. Then, three months later you are wondering why people are still pulling in different directions.

Clarity does not work like that, because understanding does not spread evenly through a business. It gets diluted. It gets reinterpreted. People join later, miss context, and make sensible assumptions based on the slice of information they have.

If you want people to come on the journey, they need a destination they can describe in their own words, in language that makes sense for their job. They need to understand why that destination matters, and what you actually expect of them along the way, not just in terms of effort, but in terms of decisions, priorities and behaviours.

That is true when you are a team of five, and it stays true when you are a team of five hundred. The difference is that the cost of vagueness grows as you grow. The bigger you get, the further your words travel, and the more room there is for interpretation.

If you are leading a growth business, it is worth asking yourself a simple question: could someone on your team explain the strategy in plain English without borrowing your phrases?

If the answer is no, you probably do not have a motivation problem. You have a clarity gap.

This is where I offer a bit of humble pie.

In an earlier chapter of my career, including my time at Tiny Wizard, there were periods where we had energy, ambition and plenty of activity but we had not been explicit enough about the conditions that would make that activity effective. We were busy, but we were not always clear enough on what we were busy doing, or whether it was the right thing to be busy with.

What I mean by that is not a lack of effort or capability. It was more about an assumption. We assumed people knew who we were, really trying to reach, which opportunities were worth pursuing, how much activity was enough, and what good looked like in practice. We assumed people were telling a consistent story to customers, asking the right questions, and prioritising the same things in their conversations.

That kind of implicit alignment can work early on, especially when teams are small and close to the details. Everyone hears the same conversations, sits in the same meetings, and fills in the gaps instinctively. As soon as the business grows, even slightly, that stops being reliable. Activity increases, but direction becomes less consistent. People start doing what feels sensible to them, rather than what is collectively agreed.

The biggest shift in how I work now is that I take those conditions seriously much earlier, even when it feels like slowing things down. That means being clearer about who we are trying to reach and why, what types of activity actually move us forward, how we want people to talk about the value we offer, and how we will measure progress without creating noise or box-ticking.

In Alchemy, and in any commercial leadership context I am involved in, we spend more time agreeing on the basics that often get skipped. What we are prioritising and what we are not. How much activity is meaningful versus performative? What questions do we want people to ask in conversations? How marketing and sales activities should support each other rather than compete for attention. How do we know if something is working, and how often we review it.

None of this is particularly exciting, and it rarely makes for a good slide. It doesn’t look like growth from the outside. But it reduces wasted effort, stops people pulling in different directions, and makes progress far more repeatable.

When growth stalls, the most common response is to increase activity. More marketing output. More sales outreach. More meetings. More reporting. More tools. Sometimes, more people. It feels logical because activity is visible and measurable, and it creates a sense of momentum.

It looks like something is being done, even when the underlying issues remain untouched. The quieter work of building conditions, clarifying expectations, tightening priorities, and fixing decision bottlenecks rarely gets the same attention, because it does not look like progress from the outside.

This is where many organisations get stuck. They become very good at motion while staying in roughly the same place. Everyone is busy, calendars are full, and dashboards are populated, yet outcomes refuse to shift in a meaningful way. Busy feels productive, which makes it one of the easiest traps to fall into.

What research into role clarity and organisational effectiveness consistently shows is that performance improves when people understand what is expected of them and how their role fits into the wider picture. Not because people suddenly try harder, but because they stop wasting energy second-guessing priorities, duplicating effort, or working at cross-purposes.

Clearer roles and clearer expectations reduce friction. When friction is reduced, more effort goes into work that actually moves things forward rather than internal guesswork and course correction.

That is how conditions convert into results. Not through volume, but through focus. Not through pressure, but through clarity.

I am not interested in pretending there is a single framework that guarantees growth, because there isn’t. Different organisations, at different stages, need different answers. What does show up consistently, though, across sectors and sizes, are a small number of conditions that make progress far more likely when they are in place.

They are not complicated. They are just easy to skip.

If growth is the goal, it needs to be defined in a way that makes sense across the organisation, not just within one role or function.

That means being explicit about what matters most in this phase. Is the priority revenue, margin, retention, pipeline quality, speed to onboard, customer experience, or a deliberate combination of those things? Until that is clear, people will default to whatever success looks like from their own seat.

This sounds obvious, but many businesses skip it. Targets get set without shared meaning being built around them, and teams are left to interpret what “good” looks like on their own. Execution then feels messy, not because people are failing, but because they are solving slightly different problems.

This is why alignment conversations keep circling back to definitions of success. Alignment is not about harmony. It is about agreement on what you are trying to achieve and what trade-offs you are willing to make along the way.

How you measure progress shapes behaviour, whether you mean it to or not. People will naturally prioritise what gets noticed, discussed, and rewarded, especially when things feel pressured.

The problem is that a lot of businesses measure parts of growth in isolation. One person is chasing more leads. Someone else is chasing closed deals. Someone else is trying to protect time, quality, or delivery capacity. Everyone is acting logically, but the business ends up pulling itself apart at the seams.

This is where growth starts to feel harder than it needs to be. Marketing can “win” by generating volume that sales cannot realistically convert. Sales can “win” by closing deals that create chaos for delivery or damage retention. Delivery can “win” by protecting efficiency in ways that slow down revenue. No one is being difficult. They are simply responding to the scoreboard in front of them.

When measures are joined up, teams stop optimising for their own corner and start optimising for the whole. People can see how their success depends on someone else’s success, and progress becomes more coordinated because the incentives point in the same direction.

If your measures reward behaviour that makes another part of the business harder, growth will always come with unnecessary friction.

Most organisations have reporting. Far fewer have feedback loops that genuinely influence decisions.

A useful feedback loop does two things. It helps teams learn quickly, and it helps leaders adjust direction based on what is actually happening, not what was hoped for.

This is where clarity becomes practical. If you want people to surface issues early, they need to feel safe doing so. Not in a dramatic, values-on-the-wall way, but in a normal, adult way where problems can be named without fear of blame or overreaction.

If the only information travelling up the organisation is positive, you do not have a high-performance culture. You have a cautious one.

This is where founders and leaders often underestimate the work required.

People do not buy into a strategy because it exists. They buy into it because they understand it, and because they can see how their own work connects to it. That understanding only travels if the language is simple enough to be repeated without explanation.

You do not need lofty statements or clever phrasing. You need language that moves through the business intact. Where you are going, why it matters, what you are focusing on right now, what you are not focusing on, what good looks like, and what you expect from each team.

Vision that stays at the top is not vision at all. It is context that never quite reaches the people who need it most.

Markets change, competitors shift, and customer needs evolve. That part is unavoidable, and pretending otherwise usually leads to plans that look confident on paper and panic-inducing in real life.

What you can control is the stability of the environment your team operates in. Clarity, decision rights, role expectations, and feedback loops are not “nice to have” extras. They reduce the hidden tax of confusion, which shows up as rework, hesitation, duplicated effort, and people pulling in slightly different directions while believing they are doing the right thing.

When those conditions are in place, growth becomes less dependent on luck, timing, or heroic effort. It starts to look more like the natural output of a business that is set up to move together, even when things change.

When those conditions are missing, you end up relying on individual brilliance and sheer force of will. Sometimes that gets you through a phase, especially in a small business where people care deeply and will stretch themselves. The problem is that it rarely holds for long, and it becomes a very expensive way to operate.

If you want a quick way to sense whether you are building conditions or just chasing outcomes, try this.

Ask three people in different parts of the business to answer the following in their own words, without looking at slides, docs, or the latest update thread:

If the answers are clear and consistent, your conditions are probably in a good place.

If the answers are vague, conflicting, or full of copied phrases that sound right but do not actually help someone decide what to do next, you have found a clarity gap. That gap does not mean people are disengaged. It usually means they are trying to be helpful without a usable map.

Everyone wants growth. The organisations that tend to get it more consistently are the ones that build the conditions that make growth possible, even when it feels slower in the short term. 

It is not the most exciting work in the world, but it is often the difference between progress that repeats and progress that depends on luck and late nights.

Useful Links.

Get your free brand audit
Browse our services.