What it means in practice
Rapid growth compresses the time a technology company has to build the coordination mechanisms that strategy execution actually depends on. A company doubling headcount within a year is adding people faster than it can build the shared understanding, cross-functional relationships, and communication habits that made execution feel straightforward when the team was smaller. The strategy itself may be entirely sound and clearly communicated at the leadership level; what breaks down is the translation of that strategy into consistent behaviour across a rapidly multiplying set of teams, each operating with a slightly different, secondhand understanding of what the strategy actually means for their specific work.
Why it happens
Beer and Eisenstat’s research specifically highlights poor vertical communication as one of the silent killers — not an absence of communication, but a gap between what senior leadership believes it has clearly conveyed and what actually reaches and is understood at working level. This gap tends to widen with speed: a company adding people quickly has less time per person to build the layered, repeated communication that actually transfers strategic understanding, as opposed to a single announcement or all-hands presentation that conveys the words of a strategy without necessarily conveying the reasoning behind it clearly enough for people to apply it to decisions the strategy did not explicitly anticipate.
Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety adds a further dimension to why this gap persists invisibly. Her finding — that team psychological safety, not team efficacy, predicts whether people raise problems and learn from them — implies that even where a strategy genuinely has not landed clearly, the people who noticed the gap may not feel it is their place to say so upward, particularly in a fast-growing company where new hires are still establishing their standing and senior leadership can feel more distant with each additional layer of hierarchy growth adds. The silence this produces is easy to mistake for understanding, since a leadership team rarely receives active signals that its strategic communication has failed — it simply does not receive confirmation that it succeeded, and the two are easy to conflate from the inside.
Where this varies
The gap tends to be narrower in companies that have invested deliberately in manager-level communication — equipping team leads to translate strategy into what it means for their specific area, rather than relying on top-down, one-time communication alone — and wider in flatter organisations that have removed management layers without replacing the coordination function those layers used to serve. It is also wider during periods of major strategic change, since an entirely new direction requires far more repeated communication to genuinely land than a continuation of an already well-understood one.
It is also worth noting that the gap between stated strategy and desk-level, or team-level, behaviour is not necessarily a sign that people are ignoring leadership. In most cases, teams are behaving entirely rationally given what they understand of the strategy and what they are actually measured on — which means the fix, where one exists, usually lies in re-examining that understanding and that measurement, rather than in simply asking people to try harder to align.
Distributed and remote-first companies experience a distinct version of this gap. Physical proximity has historically carried a substantial share of informal strategic communication — the incidental conversation, the overheard context, the visible body language in a room — none of which a fully remote or widely distributed team can rely on to the same degree. Companies growing rapidly while also distributed across locations or time zones face both pressures simultaneously, and the coordination mechanisms that would ordinarily have more time to develop have correspondingly less natural opportunity to form at all.
Where this shows up
This perspective is written with technology companies in mind. It sits within the Professional and Knowledge-Based grouping, and the questions it raises recur in other sectors too.
Questions worth considering
- If ten people across different teams in this company were asked to explain the current strategy in their own words, how similar would their answers be?
- Has strategic communication in this company kept pace with headcount growth, or has the same volume of communication been spread across an increasingly larger group?
- Which of Beer and Eisenstat’s “silent killers” — unclear strategy, conflicting priorities, poor vertical communication — feels most present in this organisation right now?
Your team is facing similar challenges?
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