What Your 2027 Growth Plan Will Ask of Your Leaders
It’s that time of year. Your leadership team builds a thoughtful, even strategic, growth plan. You feel excited for the year to come. Everyone is on board, rowing in the same direction.
The plan has revenue targets, hiring projections, perhaps a new office or acquisition. Everyone has spent hours discussing what the business will add. Then the meeting ends, and you all go back to approving routine decisions, sorting out disagreements between functions, and reminding people to have conversations they’ve been avoiding since May.
As you prepare for 2027, I’d ask a question alongside the financial ones: What will growth ask your leaders to own, decide, and address differently?
Look at where the work goes today
Leadership capacity can be hard to spot on an org chart. I look for it in the path work takes when something gets complicated.
When a client request affects 2 teams, who brings them together? When a deadline slips, who has the direct conversation? When people disagree about a priority, can they make the tradeoff at their level, or does it travel up the chain?
If the answer is repeatedly the CEO, the managing partner, or the same 2 senior executives, you have useful information for planning. Those leaders may be excellent at solving problems. Their availability has also become part of how the organization operates. Is that the most valuable use of their time?
That arrangement can work for a while. In a smaller firm, leaders carry context in their heads and settle issues over a quick call. Growth adds more people, more handoffs, and more decisions that affect colleagues who weren’t in that call. Personal intervention gets harder to sustain.
The plan contains leadership assumptions
Imagine an organization plans to make an acquisition next year. The financial case is sound, and the deal team has mapped out the transaction. What’s less clear is how the leaders of both organizations will work together afterward: who will make decisions that affect the whole firm, which ways of working will carry over, and how they’ll handle disagreements when loyalties still sit with the original teams.
Those questions will get answered somehow. Usually, they get answered under pressure, with a client waiting and several people holding different versions of the decision. The senior team then spends time repairing a situation the plan never accounted for.
The same pattern appears in other parts of the business:
A manager gets a larger team but still waits for approval on decisions they’re expected to own.
A senior leader says they want candor, then moves past disagreement in the meeting. The conversation continues afterward behind closed doors and texts.
Two functions agree on a priority but tell their teams different things about timing.
Feedback gets saved for a formal review, long after a smaller conversation could have helped.
Each instance costs time. Together, they tell you how much growth the current leadership habits can carry.
Ask where responsibility needs to move
Bring one real 2027 priority into your next planning conversation. Then ask the team:
Which conversations are we already postponing? Growth usually makes an avoided conversation more expensive.
Which decisions will become more frequent if this works? Name who should make them and whose input they need.
Where do teams receive different messages from us? Listen for decisions that sound settled in the senior meeting but change as they travel through the organization.
What are senior leaders still handling that someone else will need to own? Be specific. “More ownership” is too vague to act on.
Pick one answer and examine a recent example. If a decision was escalated, find out why. Perhaps authority was unclear. Perhaps the person had authority on paper but had seen a previous decision reversed. Those call for different changes.
Make the agreement visible
I use the Trusted Leadership Operating System to help teams make consistent agreements about meetings, decisions, communication, feedback, behavior, and speaking up. The value is in what leaders do the next time an agreement gets tested.
For example, a team might decide that a practice leader can approve a client request within defined limits after getting input from Operations. Write down the limits. Tell the people affected. When a difficult request arrives, let that leader make the call within those limits and review what happened afterward.
That is how capacity grows. People gain room to lead, and the senior team learns where its guidance is still unclear. It takes repetition, especially when stepping in would feel quicker.
Before you sign off on the 2027 plan, choose one place where the business expects leadership responsibility to expand. Look at who carries that work today. Then agree on what will change before growth makes the decision for you.
