People Problems are Growth Problems

How to Grow your Team and Your Business

No matter where they start, most conversations I have with business founders and leaders end up being about people.

Clients and colleagues alike, across a broad range of industries, countries, and levels of firm maturity tell me that they face a triple squeeze: skills scarcity, increasing workforce costs and regulation, and unclear expectations all round.

It’s most often what keeps leaders awake at night.

The impact on firm profitability is material – time and money spent on recruitment, onboarding, training, and development is significant – and in smaller firms with limited or no human resources specialist, these costs distract leaders from strategic priorities.  Even when people are successfully onboarded, I hear concerns about low engagement, ill-defined processes made more opaque with “AI” use, the conflicting need for measuring productivity versus granting agency to deliver outcomes, and facilitating functional teamwork, as just some of the everyday headaches.

Questions I am often asked include:

How do I compete with bigger companies with higher profile brand or better pay or more promotional opportunity? 

Do I need an office if I have a team now? 

What skills should I expect people to bring versus learn, especially if I don’t how to do their job and it’s new role?

How can I improve onboarding and integrating so they don’t leave after 3 months?

Is it ok to let people use ChatGPT or similar to do their job? 

Why am I spending all my time on people and no time growing the business?

There is no silver bullet or single HR toolkit or “AI” fix for this challenge.

There is no avoiding investing the time into getting the basics right – but you can be smarter about it.

Thirty years’ experience as a manager and then leader in multinational, mid-size, and small firms, as a business owner, and as an expert in workplace and workstyle optimisation for global clients, has given me a lot of opportunity to learn what doesn’t work in different contexts.  And to gradually understand that when things go right, there are usually some fundamental approaches at the heart of it.

Much of what I have learned was validated through my involvement in recent research undertaken by James Cook University in Singapore, which aimed to take stock of the evolution of Singapore’s talent market, through a series of interviews and focus groups with local business leaders and experts.  The resultant playbook is designed to helps firms compete for great people by engineering the whole talent system end-to-end, aligning attraction, development, retention, and futureproofing into one coherent operating model^.[i]

In this article I couldn’t possibly cover all of the questions I am asked, and all the common people challenges – and because every company’s situation is unique it would be irresponsible to attempt this!  So I will focus on sharing what I’ve learned about building the right team as you scale up and mature as a business:

1. Assess your own leadership style and communication preferences.
2. Consider where, when and how the work can best be performed.
3. Invest in the onboarding and integration process, a lot can be standardised.
4. Focus on attitude and appetite for learning as well as skills.
5. Build a team to help you shift from doing to leading
6. Be deliberate in how you grow people and culture to grow the business.
7. Lean-in to what makes your company a great place to work.

1. Assess Your Own Leadership Style and Communication Preferences.

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with one of the owner-directors I mentor, I’ll refer to her as Monique.  I asked her how her first employee was working out after a few months.  We had previously discussed employment structure options, remuneration structure, role description, and performance expectations in before contract execution.  I was a bit stunned when Monique said the employee had left, and that both agreed it wasn’t working out.

Unfortunately this is a not an uncommon outcome in business.

As we chatted it became obvious that there was a huge gap in workstyle expectations.  The employee was very intelligent and had all the basic skills needed, but both acknowledged this role need those skills to be applied in a different way.  He preferred clear instructions, and expected more role infrastructure and detailed onboarding.

On the other hand, Monique is very busy running a growing business and thought the employee would take the initiative to work it out and find help and support online, coming back to her only when other avenues had been exhausted.  She believed that their daily 15-minute conversations would avoid bottlenecks.

Neither Monique nor the employee did anything wrong, but the employee’s preferred way to be managed was very different to their employers’ emerging management style.  Both of them also had unrealistic expectations about Monique’s capacity and availability to support her employee during business hours.

I suggested to my client that she takes a different approach before the next hire:

1. Reflect on your preferred management style and implicit assumptions you hold. Ask yourself how do you prefer to communicate and how much time do you realistically have to onboard, manage and develop someone?
2. Include these expectations in the role advertisement and job description
3. During an interview ask the candidate questions about how they like to be managed and supported.
4. Revisit these expectations in your first 100 days feedback session with the employee.

As I understood Monique’s business and her challenges fairly well, I was also able to suggest a different role might be a better place to start, one where she was likely to be able to find a more mature worker with deep experience in a more routine part of the business.  Someone with a greater level of autonomy, and used to taking responsibility for meeting cyclical deadlines might be better suited to her management style and limited process infrastructure.

2. Do I Need an Office?

This is a fundamental question that nearly every business leader is navigating,  particularly scaling businesses that demand flexibility and prioritise reinvesting profits to fund growth.

The purpose of the physical office has shifted from being a default location for work to being a strategic tool for togetherness and brand identity.  Almost three quarters of employees agree that regularly coming into an office supports them in sharing ideas and strengthening relationships, and that lack of regular interaction with the brand, culture, and their colleagues risks detaching them from your company’s values and purpose.^[ii]  Therefore, if you have or plan to create a permanent workplace, use this opportunity deliberately to encourage employee connection to an organisation they can be proud to be part of.

That being said, a formalised workplace (which could be an office, a coworking space, a restaurant, or a clinic for example) should be considered as part of an ecosystem of resources supporting work.  This includes an enabling culture, tools, processes and systems, and the various other places where work is done at different times – an office, a home, while commuting, at a customer premise, in the street on a phone etc.

A “permanent” office may not be needed at all.  More than 10 years ago (well before Covid lockdowns) I founded a “digital-first” consulting business with the flexibility to employ the best experts around the world who had the attitude and lifestyle to value a more trusted, autonomous, asynchronous, yet deeply personally connected and responsible way of working together.  The money saved in not having a permanent office was invested in paying our people well and bringing them physically together when we could for projects, strategy and innovation workshops, and knowledge-sharing.  It’s a highly context-dependent model – but it worked.

More common is a hybrid approach, although this remains a divisive topic among leaders: from strong endorsement to flat-out rejection.^[iii]  The risks are real – I’ve seen organisations with a hybrid policy inadvertently create a workforce that is “physically present but psychologically disengaged”.^[iv]

While flexible hours and location are consistently valued by most people, including in relatively conservative Singapore[v], individual preferences and ability to self-manage varies significantly across individuals and levels of job complexity and responsibility.  Success in managing remote or hybrid environments therefore requires a significant shift in mindset: “You have to set clear outcomes – be direct about what you expect, then let people deliver.  Review the output, not the process”.^[vi]

The businesses that succeed are unlikely to be those with the best designed office space or the newest workplace apps.  I encourage the clients I work with to deliberately create a coordinated ecosystem in which space, technology, culture, and systems work together to help their people do their best work.

3. Invest in the Onboarding and Integration Process.

When a new employee starts it can be easy to let them rush into things.  If you’re going to ace first impressions, you need to start your onboarding process before day one.  Beyond the onboarding pack and induction checklist, it’s important to think about how you’re going to immerse your new starters into your company culture and instil in them the knowledge and behaviours that will lead to their long-term success.

Common mistakes I’ve made in the past and seen in other firms include

• Not following up with a new starter in the lead up to their first day
• Not being prepared for your employee induction
• Overloading your new starter with information and paperwork
• Not introducing them to the team or wider business
• Not reconfirming their responsibilities and your expectations

While each employee may have a very different job description, I’ve found that a significant part of the onboarding process and toolkits are consistent, so investing in developing them before you start to build a team is time well-spent.  It’s natural that with feedback this toolkit will evolve, because it must be current to be useful.

Ive also found it helpful, once you have some veteran team members, to involve them in the hiring and onboarding process.  Not only does this signal trust in their professional judgement, it also encourages some responsibility for the new employees success.  For the new employee it’s an opportunity to build a broader picture of the firm, its’ culture, and its’ people, before making a decision, and to build rapport more quickly with a peer or manager when they start.

A final tip – remember that as an employer you are ‘on probation’ during the first few months too! 

At one of my previous firms we instigated “First 100 Days” feedback sessions.  Crucially these were clearly communicated as a mutual feedback conversation between our new employee and myself – not as a probationary assessment of their performance and tenure.  The handbook we created suggested the discussion include role expectations versus first impressions, feedback on the onboarding and induction process, any challenges or concerns, and suggestions that may help the new employee to be successful.  We also celebrated this anniversary with the whole team, as we did every “annual anniversary” milestone for every team member.

As a leader, seeking feedback as well as providing it, signals mutual respect and responsibility for success, paving the way for trust to develop.

More often than not, the decision to part ways is mutual or employee instigated, so it makes sense to have an open mindset towards improving the experience and reducing the risk of failure with every new hire.

4. Hire for Capability and Character as Well as Skills.

As a business leader, navigating the current talent landscape requires a shift in how you evaluate candidate potential versus established proficiency.  This is particularly important in smaller businesses where there is less ability to enable tacit learning and internal training to solidify skills.

The founder of a growing business recently asked me, after a relatively new employee had been unable to master the role requirements despite a clear discussion of the job before signing, “what job-specific skills should I expect an employee to have already versus what is reasonable for them to learn, especially if I don’t how to do their job and it’s new role?”

You are not necessarily expected to know every technical detail of your employee’s job to manage them effectively.  In fact, focusing too much on the “doing” of the job is a common leadership pitfall.

My advice is that you should prioritise capability and ‘character’ as much as specific technical competencies.  Intrinsic character or attitudinal skills I always look for include integrity, curiosity, and motivation to learn, willingness to take responsibility, a degree of agency (depending on the role), and good judgement appropriate to their level of experience.

You should expect a new hire to bring a foundation of job skills (assuming role description and remuneration are appropriate), but their fit with your company’s culture and attitude towards self-driven learning and role adaptability are critical factors for success.

As well as the specific skills needed for the role, a mix of human-centric (soft) skills such as communication and collaboration, practical thinking and problem solving, and foundational digital skills.  Don’t expect digital proficiency unless you are specifically hiring for this, but you should expect a willing learner – employees are highly motivated because many are worried about having future-ready skills.  In fact more than half would be willing to trade a 10% pay increase for opportunities to upskill in AI and digital skills.^[vii]

However, be alert to the risks of allowing less-experienced employees to use generic tools such as Chat GPT to learn on the job – if they are not skilled in crafting questions and qualifying responses you may find yourself unwinding mistakes built on mistakes, or in a few years burdened with an employee who lacks the “apprenticeship time” building foundational capabilities through repetition and making mistakes.

5 Shift from Doing to Leading

Another of my owner-leader clients, we can call him Paul, has a substantial workforce of almost 200 people, with a number of part-time and apprentice employees.  Managing and developing the people, the processes and the financial and compliance systems for this workforce absorbs most of his time.

In fact so much time that detailed planning and implementation of a new service and revenue model within the business has been on hold for almost a year.  As the industry operates under razor thin margins, substantial red tape and often high customer turnover, this opportunity to diversify revenue streams, reduce cashflow risk and bolster margins is critical to ensuring the whole business remains sustainable.

Paul has two employees in different managerial roles, a third keen to develop into a resource manager, and a new team leader starting next month.  This will be the second attempt to fill the team leader role.

Our conversations have enabled my client to step back and visualise the current and desired organisational structure needed to take the business forward.  A structure that will allow him the time to invest in the new venture.  For this to succeed in reality, Paul needs more than simply a collection of direct reports working across different parts of the business.  What we’ve agreed he needs is an effective management team reporting to him.

The new hire creates the opportunity for my client to bring all four seniors together during their first week to share his expectations for how they will work together and coordinate operations across the business.  He is clear about when he expects them to sort things out themselves, and when he expects them to come to him for guidance or approval.  This conversation will also be an opportunity to ensure there is a common understanding of each other’s roles and responsibilities, increasing respect and understanding between the managers. A follow up conversation to coincide with the new manager’s first 100 days will seek the teams’ feedback on challenges and ideas for improvement.

Paul quickly grasped the benefits of this approach – shifting managers’ mindsets towards collective responsibility for troubleshooting across the business, giving Paul more time to invest in onboarding the new manager, developing the assistant into a full managerial role, and valuable time to focus on growth opportunities.

Another founder I work with as an advisory board member has a very successful practice in the health and wellness industry.  As a former practitioner, Liam still consults directly with clients as well as running the business, which in its third year is running at full capacity and seeking larger premises to support more customers and new adjunctive services.  While these are outward signs of a successful business, margins are thin and Liam has very little ability to pay himself a consistent and reasonable salary and build financial reserves for lean times and future investment.

We discovered that Liam was consulting at the same hourly rate as all his practitioners, despite having more experience and additional credibility as the business owner.  We agreed that raising his rates by 20% while cutting back his consulting hours by 20% would give Liam valuable time back to plan and build new premises and new services, and allocate additional hours to consultant team members in higher margin areas of the practice.

6. Lean-In to What Makes Your Company a Great Place to Work

As a leader of a growing business, it is easy to feel outmatched by the deep pockets, brand cache, and promotional opportunities of large corporations.  The challenges are real – a Singaporean research study found that candidates often choose larger firms and well-known brands over mid-size firms – even at lower pay.^[viii]

However, my experience is backed up by data that suggests that SME’s possess hidden advantages in agility and flexibility, as well as culture and personal connection that larger firms often struggle to replicate.

To compete effectively for talent, shift your strategy from trying to “out-pay” multinationals, to out-performing them on employee experience, personalised development, and connection to purpose and team.  In a smaller firm, employees can see the direct impact of their work, which leads to a sense of belonging that is often lost in large corporations.

Many candidates value meaningful work and a cohesive, family-friendly environment more than a logo on their CV; but you need to craft a persuasive (and realistic) employee value proposition (EVP) as part of your marketing, back it up with the onboarding experience and evolve it as your people grow.

One professional services client I work with has done this very well.  The employee journey has been carefully crafted to position the firm as distinctive, family-oriented, fun, and able to accommodate diverse employee needs and pathways.  From school work-experience programs, student interns, a rotational graduate program through to values-based reward and recognition, Carly the Operations Leader has collaborated strategically with her management team colleagues in marketing, finance, technology and project delivery, to create a strong and consistent EVP.

If you cannot offer the highest starting salary, offer a higher “future value.”  Younger employees, particularly those anxious about AI, are often willing to trade immediate cash for long-term career relevance.^[ix]  Development opportunities can be through external training (courses through LinkedIn, Udemy and Courser can be good value) as well as through on the job exposure, such as the ‘career bouldering’ short term lateral assignments outlines in the next section.

A final talent card you can play as an SME is a powerful one: high-performing people are often driven away not by pay, but by a “frustrating or inefficient workplace environment.”^[x]   Global firms often suffer bureaucratic bloat and systemic drag borne from decades of adding processes and programs on top of each other.  Smaller firms have often been able to design digital-native systems and processes that are more streamlined, better integrated, and able to scale and adapt with the business more easily.  It’s also often easier to take employee feedback on board and actually use it to improve work process.

By having fewer bureaucratic layers, you can remove the friction that frustrates productivity.

7. Be Deliberate in How You Grow People to Grow the Business

To scale, you must overcome the instinct to keep your best people buried in the tasks they are currently good at.  You need to develop your best people into higher-level responsibilities, which requires a mindset shift in how both of you view their roles.  But be warned – promoting high-performing individual contributors into managerial positions without adequate training is a recipe for failure.

In an SME you may not have a traditional “corporate ladder” with three or four rungs of management providing a clear promotional pathway.  Instead of promising linear promotions, consider “bouldering” opportunities –  short and intense lateral moves across different functions or project teams that build the broader skills needed to manage a team or business group.  This approach allows your firm to benefit by “keeping more of your high performers engaged in roles where they perform best”^[xi] while preparing them for broader leadership opportunities.

Building employee capability is the first step, but this is thwarted when the leader remains the bottleneck for approvals and task-tracking, causing the friction and frustration that results in more than half of employees considering leaving.^[xii]  Reframe your role to remove the frictions that prevent your reports from making decisions on their own.

Your goal is to move from monitoring output to enabling performance through clear expectations of results and impact.

About 10 years ago we developed the “3E Performance Framework” for our consulting business, at a time when traditional performance reviews and metrics were being called into question.  Focussed on engaging and empowering our team through a regular cadence of mutual feedback and development sessions (education), it allowed us to create visible alignment between our business plan (for example to win 3 projects over a certain size, or secure a client in a new industry) with our team’s strengths and development ambitions.

An important callout in this approach is that it recognises not only that employees need to have the ability to do the work, but also the opportunity.  Performance is a result of capability (knowledge/skills), motivation (extrinsic and intrinsic incentives), and opportunity (discretion and involvement in decisions).^[xiii]  A version of this was adopted in “Decoding the D.N.A.S of Australian Businesses in Singapore: A workforce strategy playbook on navigating talent management”^[xiv] that I contributed to, namely:

• Engage: Establishing the foundation of mutual respect, trust, and feedback to improve employee performance and experience.
• Enhance: Building capability through structured development and on the job opportunities.
• Empower: Delegating responsibilities and granting the autonomy to make decisions (individually or with colleagues) with clear expectations of when and what to escalate.

Building the Right Team, One Fundamental at a Time

There’s no silver bullet for the people challenges keeping you up at night – no single hire, tool, or AI shortcut will fix skills scarcity, rising costs, or unclear expectations overnight.

But the seven fundamentals above aren’t theory; they’re the difference between founders who stay trapped doing everything themselves and those who build teams that let them lead.  The firms that get this right don’t wait until the cracks show, they invest in the basics deliberately, before growth forces their hand.

So pick one fundamental – the one your gut says you’re avoiding – and start there next week.  Your business won’t outgrow your people problems, it will only grow as fast as you solve them.

If this feels worth exploring further, I’d welcome the conversation.

Caroline M Burns

A shorter version of this article was also published in the July 2026 edition of my newsletter The Regenerative Edge.

References

Some company and situational details in the examples shared have been changed or blended with other cases to protect confidentiality.

^[i] “Decoding the D.N.A.S of Australian Businesses in Singapore: A workforce strategy playbook on navigating talent management”, by Tan, Sook Rei; Wang, Pengji; Tan, Kim Lim; Pillai, Ratna Devi; Sun, Ren Jie; Wood, Jacob; Thirumaran, K., AustCham Singapore and James Cook University (JCU) Singapore’s Centre for International Trade and Business in Asia (CITBA), 2025.

^[ii] “Focus Forward”.  Leesman, 2025, p26.  The report draws on 1,443,500 Leesman Workplace Experience survey respondents in 9,724 workplaces spanning 122 Countries over 15 years.

^[iii] “Singapore Workplace Report 2026: Powering Singapore’s Future – The Case for a National Engagement Infrastructure”, by Singh, Kanika; Kraitzman, Alon P.; Rastogi, Shruti; Santa Maria, Angie; Ong, Genevieve.  Singapore Institute of Directors and Gallup, Inc., 2026, p30.

^[iv] “The State of the Workplace 2026: The Workplace Performance Gap”.  Worktech Academy in Association with SPS, 2026, p12.

^[v] “Decoding the D.N.A.S of Australian Businesses in Singapore: A workforce strategy playbook on navigating talent management.”

^[vi] “Decoding the D.N.A.S of Australian Businesses in Singapore: A workforce strategy playbook on navigating talent management,” p33.

^[vii] “Mercer Global Talent Trends 2026”.  Mercer LLC, 2026, p217.

[viii] “Decoding the D.N.A.S of Australian Businesses in Singapore: A workforce strategy playbook on navigating talent management,” p90.

^[ix] “Mercer Global Talent Trends 2026”.  pp182 and 203.

^[x] “Singapore Workplace Report 2026: Powering Singapore’s Future – The Case for a National Engagement Infrastructure”, p658.

^[xi] “Decoding the D.N.A.S of Australian Businesses in Singapore: A workforce strategy playbook on navigating talent management”, p38.

^[xii] “The State of the Workplace 2026: The Workplace Performance Gap”.  Worktech Academy in Association with SPS, 2026, p10.

^[xiii] “Routledge Handbook of High-Performance Workplaces”, by Candido, Christhina; Durakovic, Iva; Marzban, Samin (Eds.).  Transdisciplinary Workplace Research with Routledge, 2024, p166.

^[xiv] “Decoding the D.N.A.S of Australian Businesses in Singapore: A workforce strategy playbook on navigating talent management”, p34.