Leadership due diligence: Keeping teams aligned as companies scale

Keeping teams aligned takes more than communicating the strategy.

Employees also need to understand the reasoning behind it and see how their work contributes. Employees want more visibility than founders realise, and why growth and development matter more than a bigger salary

In part one of this series, I set out what a people-focused due diligence process is really assessing: clarity of strategic direction, unity behind the goals, the capacity to adapt, and dependability on each other across the organisation. In part two, I got practical about how to build that clarity, through genuine strategic dialogue, psychological safety and radical candour.

In this final instalment, I want to turn the lens fully towards the employee. In YFM’s Open Letter series, Rachel McCorry writes powerfully about strategy from the CEO’s chair, on designing the process, bringing the Board and SLT together, and making strategy clear enough that people understand it, relevant enough that they see how they contribute, ambitious enough to drive the business forward, yet grounded enough to achieve it. That is the founder’s job done well.

This article is the appeal from the other side of the table. Because what we consistently find in the due diligence process is that employees are far more interested in the “how” and “why” of strategy than most leadership teams assume. Often what is offered to employees is clarity on the “what”. Investing some effort in rich, regular and interactive communications about company strategy and goals keeps employees aligned, engaged and planning to stay, through the inevitable turbulence of scaling, but it’s not what most founders reach for first.

Employees don’t just want to know what the strategic priorities are. They want to know how those priorities came about.

This might sound like a nuance, but it’s a critical distinction. A goal handed down as a finished statement, however well-crafted, asks people to take it on faith. A goal that comes with visibility into the thinking behind it, the options that were weighed, the trade-offs that were made and the reasons a particular path was chosen, invites people to actually understand it. And understanding is what turns a target on a slide into something an employee can act on with confidence. Employees are hungry for context, learning and growth.

This matters even more when goals shift, which in a scaling business, backed by new funding and operating at pace, they inevitably will. When priorities change and employees are only given the “what has changed”, without the “why it changed”, the response can be confusion, scepticism, disengagement or a quiet assumption that the change is arbitrary. Explaining the why behind a pivot doesn’t weaken leadership’s authority, it reinforces it.

This is exactly the dialogue that Rachel describes from the CEO side when she talks about bringing the Board and SLT together early, rather than letting decisions “happen” to the wider business. The same principle needs to extend one level further down. Employees don’t need to be in the room when the decision is made. But they do appreciate the chance to ask questions about it afterwards, to understand the reasoning, and to see where their own contribution fits into the bigger picture.

Rachel’s letter makes the case for clarity, on roles, on decision-making, and on the space for constructive challenge, as the difference between strategy that sits on a page and strategy that actually drives the business. I want to reinforce and extend that point, because it is one of the most consistent findings in our due diligence work.

Employees want to know, specifically, what their role is in delivering the strategy. Not a generic sense that “we’re all pulling in the same direction”, but a clear line from what they do day to day to the priorities the business has set. Not everyone can influence every objective, but everyone should be able to point to at least one they can.

Employees also want to understand how decisions get made, and to have a legitimate route to raise a question or a concern about the direction of travel without fear of being seen as unhelpful or a drain on patience. This is where psychological safety, which I covered in part two, does its heaviest lifting. A team that has been given visibility into the goals but has no safe channel to ask about them has only been given half of what it needs.

Clarity, dialogue and psychological safety are not “nice to have” culture initiatives layered on top of the real work of scaling. They are the mechanism by which strategy actually reaches the shop floor, the sales desk or the delivery team, rather than stopping at the leadership offsite.

If there is a single finding from our assessment work that consistently surprises founders, it is this: a market rate salary is sufficient, provided the business genuinely invests in people’s learning and development. Money alone doesn’t motivate, not because people don’t care about pay, but because pay stops being a differentiator once it is perceived as fair compensation for efforts invested, relative to peers and the wider market. What differentiates an employer that retains its best people is the intent to help them grow.

The good news for scaling businesses, where every pound and every hour is under pressure, is that development doesn’t need to be expensive, and it doesn’t need to mean time off the job. The well-established 70:20:10 model is a useful guide here:

• 10% of learning comes from formal training, courses and qualifications
• 20% comes from being around others, high performers who model behaviours and expertise that can be learned from
• 70% comes from stretch assignments and learning on the job, being given real responsibility, a harder problem, or exposure to a part of the business an employee hasn’t worked in before, plus actionable feedback to allow for reflection and growth

The majority of development, in other words, doesn’t cost anything beyond intent. It’s about how a founder or manager thinks about the next project that lands on their desk: could this be a stretch assignment for someone rather than simply the fastest route to getting it done? It’s about deliberately pairing less experienced team members with your strongest performers. It’s about making growth part of how the business already operates, rather than a separate program that competes for budget and calendar space against go-to-market or product priorities.

What matters is that the intent is visible, consistent and acted upon, not that it is elaborate. Employees notice quickly whether development is genuinely part of how the business is run, or whether it’s a line in the induction pack that never gets revisited.

There’s a final theme I want to bring into this series, because it sits upstream of everything else, and it can be one of the most sensitive conversations we have in the due diligence process.

Every leadership team has to set targets, for the business plan, for the funding round, for the year ahead. And every leadership team sits somewhere on a spectrum between bullish and cautious in how they do it. Neither instinct is wrong in itself. What matters is whether that instinct is examined honestly, relative to what investors are actually expecting, rather than left unchecked.

This is the difference between over-promising and under-delivering, and being ambitious in a way that’s grounded in objective fact rather than pure self-belief. It’s a classic profile we see in entrepreneurial leaders: high in enthusiasm, high in conviction, and genuinely persuaded that stretching targets will pull performance up to meet them. Sometimes it does. But we have also seen over-ambitious targets get quietly negotiated down as part of the funding round itself, once the numbers are tested against the same objective scrutiny that due diligence applies to everything else.

The businesses that navigate this well are the ones where the leadership team is willing to separate conviction from wishful thinking, and to have that conversation openly and early with their Board and investors, rather than have it happen to them later.

Across this three-part series, the themes have been consistent: clarity of strategic direction, unity behind the goals, dependability across the organisation, and a genuine investment in the people delivering the work. They too want to feel a sense of ownership of the company that they are helping to build. What this final piece adds is a reminder that alignment is not something leadership does to employees, it’s something built with them, through visibility, dialogue and the intent to help people grow.

This is the third and final article in this series exploring the people side of scaling. Read part one and part two on the Entrepreneur Lab, and Rachel McCorry’s Open Letter, Strategy – Up, Down, And Done Properly, for the CEO’s perspective on the same challenge

Sonia Allinson-Penny is the founder of Human Factor Health Check, a specialist people consultancy focused on leadership and team assessment for scaling organisations. Sonia works with investors and portfolio companies to evaluate leadership effectiveness, team dynamics and organisational readiness ahead of and during growth phases. She is also the author of a recently published book exploring the human side of entrepreneurial effectiveness, The Human Factors Behind Start-Up Success.