When growth depends on workarounds, the operating model has stopped supporting it

By Adam Wall

Repeated intervention can keep a growth strategy moving while leaving what stands in its way unresolved. The cost falls on the business and the people asked to make it work.

Consider a business whose growth plan depends on selling and delivering a more integrated offer. The strategy has been agreed, but regional leaders still control staffing and specialist teams defend competing methods. Nobody has settled who will fund the capability the offer requires.

When work stalls, a senior executive asks someone with credibility across the business to make it happen. They negotiate access to people and broker compromises. The client work keeps moving. The business can point to progress without changing the arrangements that made the intervention necessary.

I’ve often been the person brought in to develop a capability, integrate teams or help get a client relationship back on track. It’s part of why I distinguish between being trusted to intervene and having a mandate the organization actually backs. Operating effectively from a place of influence as opposed to authority is a skill worth developing for any rising executive. But an enterprise should never rely on influence as a substitute for clear authority.

Intervention has a place. Colleagues who know the work and trust each other can solve problems that no process anticipates. A difficult exception may need a senior executive’s judgment. Repeated dependence is the warning: the same conflict returns, and progress requires another personal negotiation.

What the strategy requires that the business hasn’t built

An operating model puts a strategy into practice: how work is organized, which capabilities are available, how decisions are made and what people are rewarded for doing. Withholding those rewards for behaviour that works against the strategy is just as important, if not more so. If a growth ambition changes none of those things, people are left to reconcile the difference themselves.

Hiring specialists doesn’t establish the ability to deliver a new offer. Neither does announcing it. Teams may need to learn how to scope the work, combine disciplines and judge its quality. Someone needs to fund that learning, protect time for it and keep reinforcing that capability development is a strategic imperative.

If the same expert has to rescue every assignment, the business has access to expertise that can produce examples of the business’s full potential. But it hasn’t necessarily built a capability or process it can rely on more widely.

Competing methodologies create a different problem. Teams may disagree about whose planning process to use or how to judge the work, while also disagreeing about the strategy those methods serve. One group may favour a common offer across markets; another may believe growth and culture-building depend on local tailoring. Both positions can have merit. Leave the choice unresolved, and delivery teams have to negotiate a strategic disagreement through each piece of work.

Uniformity isn’t the point. The business needs to decide what must be shared, where variation creates value and how the parts will work together.

When the difficult decision becomes somebody else’s ‘special’ assignment

Executive avoidance is a particularly damaging version of the problem. Even that, however, doesn’t explain every workaround. Sometimes the operating model has simply fallen behind the business, or the capability is still being built.

In a matrixed business, choosing a direction can mean asking a powerful leader to surrender control, change a method they helped establish or accept a different basis for success. Across geographies, those choices can reopen questions about whose priorities count. Leaving decision rights vague can become the path of least resistance.

Sending in a fixer lets work proceed while the executive team postpones the conflict. The person assigned may have political capital and influence, but insufficient authority or visible endorsement to secure lasting agreement. Their sponsor wants integration. The leaders whose cooperation it requires haven’t been told what they must no longer resist changing.

The individual’s effectiveness and reputation are at risk. If every commitment can be renegotiated elsewhere, their judgment can start to look like indecision. Repeatedly asking colleagues to support something leadership won’t clearly back can wear down confidence and morale on both sides. And a successful rescue, despite all of that, can make the underlying decision easier to postpone again.

An executive can delegate the integration work, but still has to resolve the trade-offs that only their authority can settle.

A mandate the organization will back

I’d start with one growth commitment that repeatedly needs intervention. Follow what it takes to sell, staff and deliver it. Where does the work depend on a favour or an exception? Where is it relying on someone’s willingness to absorb a conflict that has no agreed resolution?

Then make the necessary choices explicit. Which approach will govern the work, and where can teams vary it? What capability needs to be developed, by whom and with what time and funding? Which competing commitment will give way when both can’t be met?

These are operating decisions. They aren’t details to leave with the person coordinating the project.

The people affected need to see the sponsor’s backing. They should know what the appointed leader can decide, what cooperation is expected and where a disagreement will be resolved. Private reassurance to the fixer leaves everyone else free to interpret the assignment differently.

That agreement needs incentives and consequences too. If a leader is expected to contribute people to a shared growth priority, their objectives must recognize that contribution. If they withhold an agreed commitment, the sponsor needs to address it. Otherwise, the person leading integration is left negotiating against the organization’s own signals.

The individual still has work to do. Formal authority can’t replace influence, judgment or the ability to build capability. And anyone accepting a difficult assignment needs to surface its limits, rather than quietly promise that relationships will compensate for them indefinitely.

The test comes with the next piece of work. Can the team deliver without reconstructing the same agreement? Are more people able to do the work? When priorities collide, does the sponsor uphold the choice or reopen it?

Growth will create demands nobody fully anticipated. The aim is to build a business that can respond without making exceptional personal intervention the price of ordinary progress.

Before asking someone to make the strategy work, give them a mandate the organization will back.