Chris Majer: Why Organizational Coordination Matters More Than Company Culture

Growth doesn't usually fail because people stop caring.

It fails because the systems that once made success effortless eventually become obstacles.

In the early days of almost every business, coordination happens naturally. Five people sit around the same table, everyone hears the same conversations, decisions are made in minutes, and problems rarely survive until tomorrow. Communication feels effortless because it is. There is little need for elaborate processes when everyone shares the same context.

Then success arrives.

The team grows to twenty people. Then fifty. Departments emerge. Meetings multiply. Customers become more demanding. Suddenly, information moves slower than the business itself, and leaders begin asking a familiar question:

"How do we get our startup culture back?"

According to Chris Majer, founder of the Human Potential Project and a leadership expert whose work has shaped Olympic teams, Special Forces units, and Fortune 500 companies, that question is based on a false assumption.

"People keep wanting to try and simplify it or keep that startup feeling. It's like, no—you're not a startup anymore. You've got to go to the next level. And that's learning a whole new set of practices for coordination."

That distinction changes everything.

The real challenge is not preserving the past. It is learning how to lead an organization that has fundamentally become more complex.

Complexity Is Not the Enemy

Most entrepreneurs spend years trying to simplify growing businesses. They reduce meetings.

They flatten hierarchies. They eliminate procedures. They introduce another collaboration platform, hoping technology will restore agility.

Sometimes these efforts help temporarily. More often, however, they simply delay an uncomfortable reality: every successful organization becomes more complex as it grows.

More customers create more expectations. More employees create more relationships.

More products create more dependencies. More opportunities generate more decisions.

Complexity, therefore, is not evidence that something is broken. It is evidence that the company is succeeding.

The mistake lies in assuming that complexity should disappear instead of learning how to coordinate it.

Research from McKinsey consistently shows that organizational complexity—not market competition—is among the biggest barriers to productivity in growing companies. As organizations expand, unclear decision rights, fragmented communication, and disconnected teams begin consuming increasing amounts of management time, leaving leaders trapped inside the business rather than leading it.

Many founders instinctively respond by working harder. The better response is designing better coordination.

We No Longer Work in the Industrial Age

One of Majer's most provocative ideas is that management has failed to evolve alongside the workforce. He argues that many organizations still operate according to management principles developed more than a century ago, when work was predictable, repetitive, and primarily focused on supervision rather than collaboration. Today's organizations look nothing like that.

Software companies coordinate engineers across continents. Healthcare providers depend on multidisciplinary teams making rapid decisions. Professional service firms create value almost entirely through collaboration. Manufacturing itself increasingly relies on knowledge work rather than repetitive manual labor. In other words, people are no longer simply producing output.

They are coordinating with other people who are coordinating with still more people.

Majer describes this shift as entering a "coordination era." Rather than supervising tasks, modern leaders must build environments where thousands of small interactions happen smoothly enough to create value for customers.

That idea aligns closely with recent findings from Deloitte's Global Human Capital Trends, which argues that organizational performance increasingly depends on how effectively people collaborate across functions instead of how efficiently they execute isolated roles.

For entrepreneurs, this changes the definition of leadership itself.

Success no longer depends primarily on making the smartest decisions.

It depends on building an organization capable of making thousands of good decisions without you.

Why Information Rarely Changes Behavior

This is where leadership development often goes wrong.

Every year, organizations spend billions on books, online courses, keynote speakers, executive retreats, and leadership seminars. Employees leave inspired. Managers fill notebooks with ideas.

Six months later, almost nothing has changed.

The assumption is usually that people lacked motivation. Majer believes the real problem is much simpler. Organizations confuse understanding with learning.

"Understanding is the booby prize... No amount of understanding ever produced competence. Only practice does."

It is a remarkably simple observation, yet one that challenges much of corporate learning.

No one expects to become an elite pianist after reading a book about Mozart. No athlete believes watching instructional videos replaces practice. Pilots spend countless hours in simulators before flying passengers. Military units rehearse the same scenarios repeatedly under pressure because performance—not knowledge—is what ultimately matters.

Yet business often assumes leadership can be mastered after a two-day workshop.

The disconnect becomes obvious when viewed through that lens. Knowledge creates awareness.

Practice creates capability. That distinction explains why many organizations possess shelves full of leadership books while continuing to struggle with execution.

Research published by Harvard Business Review similarly emphasizes that deliberate practice, repeated feedback, and real-world application consistently outperform information-based learning when organizations seek lasting behavioral change.

The question every leadership team should ask is not, "What have we learned this year?"

Instead, it might be: "What new leadership behaviors have we actually practiced often enough to become habits?"

Why Growing Companies Lose Their Culture

Ask a founder when the company culture began to change, and the answer is often surprisingly similar.

"It happened when we reached about fifty people."

Or one hundred. Or after opening a second office.

The number itself is less important than what it represents: the point at which personal relationships can no longer carry the organization. When that happens, many leaders assume culture has weakened because employees have become less engaged. In reality, engagement is often the consequence rather than the cause. People disengage when coordination breaks down.

Gallup has consistently found that only a minority of employees worldwide describe themselves as fully engaged at work, while a significant proportion remain disengaged or actively disconnected from their organizations. That isn't simply a morale problem—it is an operational one. When communication becomes fragmented, expectations become unclear, and accountability becomes inconsistent, people naturally begin protecting themselves instead of collaborating.

Majer illustrates the problem with a question that immediately reframes the issue:

"On what sports team would it be okay to have only 50% of the team engaged? None. Zero."

No coach would accept half the players deciding whether to participate depending on the day.

Yet many organizations quietly normalize that reality because they continue relying on management systems designed for a completely different era. If your best people appear less motivated than they once were, it may be worth asking a different question. Are they actually less committed—or have they become exhausted trying to navigate a system that no longer helps them succeed?

Before You Change Processes, Change the Mood

One of Majer's most distinctive ideas is that organizational transformation begins somewhere leaders rarely look. Not with strategy. Not with technology. Not with structure. It begins with mood.

At first glance, the concept sounds almost too intangible for business. Yet Majer defines mood very differently from emotion. Rather than being a passing feeling, a mood is a predisposition for action—the invisible state that determines what people believe is possible before they even begin working on a problem.

Every organization has one. Some operate from confidence, curiosity, trust, and ambition.

Others quietly settle into resignation, resentment, complacency, or distrust.

The critical insight is that these moods shape every leadership initiative that follows.

A company can introduce an innovative strategy, redesign workflows, or invest millions in new technology, but if employees fundamentally believe that nothing ever changes or that leadership never listens, those improvements rarely survive long enough to produce meaningful results.

Majer offers a simple metaphor. Painting over old, peeling paint without scraping away the damaged layers first might make the house look better for a short time, but eventually the new paint peels away with it. Organizational change works the same way. Unless leaders first address the underlying mood, every new process eventually inherits the same old problems.

How often does this happen inside businesses?

A leadership team launches a transformation initiative.

Employees attend workshops. Excitement lasts several weeks. Daily pressures return. Old behaviors quietly reappear. Six months later, everyone concludes that "change doesn't work here." The initiative wasn't necessarily flawed. The foundation simply never changed.

The Hidden Cost of Outdated Management

Many leaders still equate management with supervision. They monitor performance, approve decisions, review work. Correct mistakes. While those responsibilities remain important, they no longer define effective management in knowledge-intensive organizations.

Today's professionals expect something different.

They expect clarity rather than control. Alignment rather than micromanagement. Context rather than constant instruction.

Majer argues that many management practices remain rooted in the Industrial Era, where consistency depended on supervision because work itself was repetitive and predictable. That logic breaks down when employees solve complex problems, collaborate across departments, and make independent decisions throughout the day.

This explains why many founders experience an uncomfortable transition as their companies scale.

The leadership habits that helped build the business gradually become the very habits limiting its growth.

Being involved in every decision once accelerated progress. Eventually, it becomes the bottleneck. Personally solving every problem once demonstrated commitment. Eventually, it prevents others from developing judgment. Keeping information centralized once ensured consistency. Eventually, it slows the organization more than it protects it.

The most successful leaders don't become less involved because they care less.

They become less involved because they have built systems that allow others to coordinate effectively without waiting for permission.

Why High Performers Still Need Practice

Perhaps the most surprising lesson from Majer's career comes from outside business altogether.

Before working with corporations, he spent years studying elite athletes, professional teams, and military organizations where performance could be measured objectively and failure carried immediate consequences.

Across those vastly different environments, he discovered something remarkably consistent.

The highest performers never stopped practicing. They didn't assume experience guaranteed future excellence. They trained continuously because excellence is not a destination; it is a discipline.

Business, however, often behaves differently. Managers are promoted because they excelled in technical roles, then expected to lead people with little structured practice beyond occasional seminars or annual training sessions. The assumption seems to be that leadership develops naturally through experience. Evidence suggests otherwise.

Whether developing emotional intelligence, improving difficult conversations, learning delegation, or building trust across teams, leadership is fundamentally behavioral. Behaviors improve only when they are repeated, observed, refined, and repeated again.

As Majer puts it:

"Your body only learns one way, and that's through practice."

That sentence captures a truth many organizations continue to overlook. Leadership is not primarily an intellectual activity. It is a practiced one.

What Every Leader Should Do Next

The temptation after reading ideas like these is to launch another initiative. A new leadership framework. A different organizational chart. Another communication platform. Yet none of those changes will matter unless they improve the way people coordinate with one another every single day.

Before investing in another leadership program, ask your team a few uncomfortable questions.

When was the last time we deliberately practiced leadership—not just discussed it?

Where does decision-making consistently slow down?

Which meetings exist only because people don't trust information to flow elsewhere?

Do our reward systems encourage collaboration, or do they still recognize only individual achievement?

Most importantly:

If our company doubled in size over the next two years, would our current way of working become stronger—or would it simply become more chaotic?

The answers reveal far more about your organization's future than another employee engagement survey.

Because scaling successfully is not about preserving the intimacy of a ten-person startup. It is about intentionally building the coordination capabilities that allow hundreds—or eventually thousands—of people to move in the same direction without losing clarity, trust, or momentum.

As Majer discovered through decades of working with elite performers, sustainable excellence is never accidental. Whether the environment is an Olympic team, a Special Forces unit, or a multinational corporation, extraordinary performance emerges when people repeatedly practice the behaviors that matter most until those behaviors become second nature. That is what he calls "embodied competence"—the ability to take the right action instinctively because it has been developed through consistent practice rather than simply understood intellectually.

The Future Belongs to Organizations That Learn Together

Business history is filled with companies that possessed brilliant strategies yet struggled to execute them. Rarely was the problem a lack of intelligence or ambition. More often, the organization itself could no longer support the complexity that success had created.

The leaders who will thrive over the next decade will not necessarily be those with the most innovative ideas or the most sophisticated technology. They will be the ones who recognize that organizational coordination is becoming a competitive advantage in its own right.

Every additional employee, customer, product, and market introduces new complexity. The question is whether your organization has developed the leadership habits, management practices, and shared ways of working required to transform that complexity into momentum instead of confusion.

This week, challenge your leadership team to identify just one recurring coordination problem that everyone has quietly accepted as "the way things are." Rather than asking who is responsible, ask what practice is missing. Then commit to improving that practice consistently for the next thirty days.

Real organizational transformation rarely begins with a dramatic announcement.

More often, it starts when leaders stop searching for better answers and begin practicing better behaviors.