Align Your Strengths to Your Business Life Stage

It’s a confronting thought, but one that plays out in boardrooms and strategy sessions around the world. Leaders who are talented, hardworking, and deeply committed suddenly find themselves in a season where what once worked brilliantly now feels like it’s creating drag. The strategies that launched the business, the leadership instincts that fuelled growth, even the culture that once defined success, none of it seems to carry the same weight.

In When Leaders Are Lost, I describe this disorienting gap between expectation and experience. Leaders who should be thriving instead feel depleted, unsure of why their influence isn’t translating into the same results. It’s rarely because they lack capability. More often, it’s because they haven’t recognised the season they’re in and how their leadership needs to shift with it.

Businesses, like people, grow in stages. Just as we move from infancy to adolescence to maturity, organisations follow a predictable arc of development. And just like parenting, the way you lead must change as your business matures. Hold on too tightly to yesterday’s strengths, and you slow down growth. Jump too quickly into the next phase without the right foundation, and you risk collapse.

As part of an executive team nearly twenty years ago, I had the privilege of meeting Sunil Dovedy, CEO of the Adizes Institute U.S. It was my first introduction to the notion that the corporate lifecycle is not dissimilar to the various life stages of human development. There are certain behaviours and decision-making patterns consistent with each life stage that provide insight into what needs to change for businesses to reach another level of maturity. This was a game-changer for me. While living in the U.S., I undertook further training with them and have continued to draw on their insights and research on organisational change, what is normal and what is abnormal, and why some businesses struggle to reach the next life stages.

Gratton and Scott (2016), in The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity, argue that successfully navigating a longer life—and, by extension, the growth of a business—requires ongoing reinvention, developing resilience, and a commitment to continue learning and adapting as circumstances change. The same principle applies in business. The real question isn’t just what stage are we in, but what does this stage require of me as a leader, and what strengths will I need to carry us into the next one?

Once you move from concept to reality, everything shifts. Cashflow becomes oxygen. Like a newborn, your business needs constant care and attention to survive. This is where grit really matters, but not the kind we romanticise. It’s the grit of showing up every day, even when the numbers look fragile and the temptation to give up feels overwhelming.

At this stage, many leaders make the mistake of building everything around themselves. They become the business, and the business cannot function without them. It might feel heroic, but it’s not sustainable. If the organisation can’t survive your absence, it isn’t a business—it’s a house of cards.

The alignment question here is: How do I start building some simple systems and resilience beyond myself? Some documented workflows, a basic customer management system, and cross-training your tiny team—can mean the difference between survival and failure.