By Andreas Pettersson, Founder, Leaders ADAPT
A board director once told me I'd built an efficient company solving the wrong problems. He was right. At Arcules we had said yes to 47 initiatives at the same time. It cost us over $1M in lost revenue and put us 14 months behind the market.
We were perfect at everything that didn't matter.
That's the part of leading through change nobody puts on the slide. The company grows, the org chart grows, and the CEO keeps adding work instead of changing how decisions get made. The fix turned out to be two words. I'll get to them.
Quick answer: Leading through change is the CEO's job of deciding what changes, who owns each decision, and how the leadership team commits to it, then running that change in small, visible steps. In a company that is doubling, the hard part is rarely the plan. It is moving decision rights, cutting priorities, and rebuilding how messages travel before the new structure sets.
What does leading through change mean for a CEO?
For a manager, change is something that arrives. For a CEO, change is something you cause, even when you didn't choose it. Every hire, every new layer and every new market changes who decides what.
Change leadership is the executive part of change work: setting direction, moving authority, and holding people to commitments, as distinct from change management, which plans and administers the rollout.
Most change advice is written for managers carrying out someone else's change. If you run a $5M or $40M company, nobody hands you the change. You decide what stops.
If you've ever walked out of a leadership meeting where everyone agreed and nothing moved, you already know the problem isn't the plan. It's the decision rights underneath it.
What breaks first when a company doubles?
When I was running Arcules, we made 30 hires in the first three months, reached 70 by year two, and passed 150 people at peak. That's several doublings in a row. Here's the pattern I now see in the companies I coach.
| Threshold | What tends to break | What the CEO changes |
|---|---|---|
| $1.5M to $3M revenue | The founder wall: responsibility is handed out, authority is not | Hand over decision rights, not just tasks |
| Around 30 people | The CEO can no longer fix each new problem personally before hiring | Hire ahead of the problem instead of behind it |
| Around $50M revenue | The Valley of Death: a new VP and director layer with no new authority | Redefine who decides before adding boxes to the org chart |
| Toward 250 people | Cascading messaging, the path a decision takes from the leadership team to the front line | Rebuild the meeting cadence and the operating system |
Source: Andreas Pettersson's scaling and coaching practice, Leaders ADAPT, 2026. The thresholds are observed patterns from operating and advisory work, not survey data.
The Valley of Death is a growth plateau that hits when a company installs a management layer of VPs and directors without redefining who holds authority. In Pettersson's practice it shows up most often around $50M in revenue.
When CEOs blame the economy for that plateau, I tell them: "The market did not cause it. Adding boxes to the org chart without moving decision rights caused it."
The second thing to watch is communication. "Cascading messaging is the first thing to break, and it starts breaking toward 250." Below that size, people hear the CEO directly. Above it, they hear a copy of a copy.
The third is you. Under about 30 people, you can solve a problem yourself and then hire. Past 30, you hire ahead of the problem or you become the switchboard.
If every decision already routes through your inbox, learn how to stop being the bottleneck in your company before you add another layer.
And watch your instruments. When A players go quiet and meetings run too smoothly, the gap already exists. "My door is always open" is often the clearest sign.
What are Kotter's 8 steps for leading change?
John Kotter, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, set out an eight-step model for leading change in his 1996 book Leading Change. The current version published by Kotter Inc. lists these steps:
- Create a sense of urgency.
- Build a guiding coalition.
- Form a strategic vision.
- Enlist a volunteer army.
- Enable action by removing barriers.
- Generate short-term wins.
- Sustain acceleration.
- Institute change.
Kotter Inc. notes that the model later evolved from a linear sequence into the "8 Accelerators" in Kotter's 2014 book Accelerate. Another widely used model, Prosci's ADKAR, focuses on individual adoption: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement.
Where standard change management misses the leadership team
Here's where I part ways with how change is usually led. Not with any one model. With the way companies use them.
"Which framework is printed on the cover does not matter." Every scaling system I've worked with reduces to three things: strategy, cadence, and roles with real authority. Miss one and the framework can't save you.
The second failure is size. Companies launch change as a big bang: a program, a kickoff, a new vocabulary, all at once. My rule is the opposite.
"Every time you do change management, you have to start wicked small. Get the wins, convince people it's working, then expand. Big projects are dead instantly."
The third is who designs it. I've watched a mid-size company pay a top consultancy about $500K for a high-level AI strategy nobody could use. As I told a CEO group: "They have no credibility because they haven't run a company that actually implemented it."
The fourth is the one nobody likes. "You need to break concrete and cast new. That means some people got to go and some people got to stay."
Announcing a reset while the person who set the old culture is still in the room tells everyone the reset isn't real.
Frameworks aren't useless. But the leadership team is the change. If the executives don't move their own decisions, no rollout plan will. That's most of what I work on in 1-on-1 CEO coaching.
The construction company that cut 13 priorities to 3
A $40M construction company with 85 employees came in with 13 critical priorities.
Reasons aren't results. We killed 10 and kept 3.
Twelve months later, service revenue had gone from 15% to 37% of the business, acquisition cost had dropped 44%, and revenue was up 38%. Fewer priorities, finished completely.
That's the same discipline that fixed my 47 priorities, and it comes down to the two words I promised you: choose enough. When a company doubles, the list doubles with it unless the CEO cuts it on purpose.
How do you lead through change in the workplace in the first 30 days?
Here's the sequence I'd run if your company is doubling. You can start most of it this week.
- Cut to three priorities. List every initiative. Keep three. Tell the leadership team in writing which ones stopped.
- Map decision rights before you add boxes. For each new VP or director role, name the decisions that move to that person. If you can't name one, the role isn't ready.
- Start wicked small. Pick one team, one workflow, one number. "Introduce one number, not five." Expand only after the first win is visible.
- Hold a weekly leadership meeting. Same time, same agenda, decisions recorded. Without it, you're the switchboard again by week three.
- Close every decision the same way. My standard: "said, heard, understood, accepted or rejected, but always committed." Debate is welcome. Relitigating after the meeting is not.
- Decide who can't come with you. Not in week one. But by day 30 you should know whose behavior is protecting the old way.
- Check your instruments. Ask your leadership team what they saw coming this month. If it surprised you and not them, the information gap is already open.
This is also where the step up changes you. If you've moved from C-level to CEO recently, or you're building leaders for the VP to C-level step, the same rule applies: the title changes on day one, the authority changes only when you move it. For the first 90 days in a bigger seat, see our guide to executive transition coaching for leaders stepping into a larger role, and the earlier version of this shift is the leadership vs management transition point around $5M.
Frequently asked questions about leading through change
What is change leadership?
Change leadership is the executive side of change: setting direction, deciding which priorities stop, moving decision rights to the right people, and holding the leadership team to its commitments. Change management is the planning and administration of the rollout itself, such as training, communication plans and adoption tracking. Growing companies usually need both, but a rollout without change leadership from the CEO tends to stall once it reaches the management layer.
What does leading through change and uncertainty require from a leadership team?
It requires a small number of clear priorities, named owners with real decision rights, a fixed weekly meeting cadence, and an agreed way to close decisions. Uncertainty makes teams wait for complete information. One working rule that holds: each decision should be said, heard, understood, accepted or rejected, but always committed, so debate happens in the room and execution starts afterwards.
What are the 5 C's of change leadership?
There is no single standard list of the 5 C's of change leadership. Different training providers and consultancies publish different sets of five words beginning with C, so any list should be checked against the source that uses it. A simpler test is whether strategy, cadence, and roles with real authority are in place. If those three are missing, the name of the framework does not matter.
Why do big change programs fail in growing companies?
Big programs ask the whole organization to change at once, before anyone has seen the change work. The pattern that holds is to start with one team or workflow, produce a visible win, then expand. A mid-size company that paid a top consultancy about $500K for an AI strategy it could not use is the typical failure: the plan was not built around how that company actually made decisions.
When should a CEO hire ahead of growth?
Andreas Pettersson's rule of thumb is based on headcount. Under about 30 people, a CEO can usually solve a new problem personally first and hire afterwards. Past about 30 people, the CEO has to hire ahead of the problem, because solving it personally turns the CEO into the bottleneck for every decision. The same logic applies to management layers: define the decisions a new role owns before creating it.
How long does it take a leadership team to absorb a major change?
Expect months, not weeks. Pettersson plans a minimum of three to four months for a leadership change to hold: roughly eight weeks for people to change how they think and another eight weeks to see results and believe them. Operating system changes take longer. His own leadership team took about 18 months to get really good at the EOS operating system.
What to do before your next leadership meeting
Most CEOs treat leading through change as a communication problem. It's a decision problem. The company doubles, the list doubles, and the leadership team waits for you to choose.
My 47 priorities cost over $1M and 14 months. That was the price of not choosing. "It's pain now or pain in the future. You pick."
Picture your next quarterly planning session. Three priorities on the wall instead of thirteen. Every VP knows which decisions are theirs and makes them without checking with you first. You leave the room with nothing new on your plate, and the company still moves faster.
Lead the doubling instead of absorbing it
This is the work I do with CEOs of $1M to $50M companies in the middle of a growth step. We start by finding out where decision rights actually sit, which is rarely where the org chart says. Then you cut the list and move authority to your leadership team, with me in the room until it holds.
If you want the numbers before a conversation, here's what executive coaching costs and what drives the price.
And one diagnostic question I open every engagement with. It's the fastest way I know to see whether your change will hold. I'll ask it on the call.
If leading through change is the job in front of you this year, book a discovery call for 1-on-1 CEO coaching.
Andreas Pettersson built and sold an AI company before ChatGPT existed. He was one of Canon's youngest CEOs, and today he works with non-technical CEOs on leading in the AI era.
