Tony R Sanders

New episode with @SteveCadigan is LIVE!

What if your company was getting ready to scale from 400 employees to 4000? How would you look at culture? Leadership? AI? My next guest @SteveCadigan lived this while leading LinkedIn from 400 employees to 4,000 and through an IPO

“Oh crap. I sound exactly like my dad.” Most of us have had that moment. You say something to your kid and you stop mid-sentence and think to yourself, ”When did I become my parents?” This happened to me the other day and it gave me a good laugh. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t choose it. But somehow in the moment I defaulted to what I saw growing up. Which lucky for me was great! The same thing often happens in leadership. When a manager gets promoted with no development, no coaching, no training and the pressure hits, they don’t reach for a framework or a best practice. They reach for whatever they’ve seen before. If their previous bosses ruled through fear they’ll find themselves running that same playbook now. If their prior leaders only gave feedback during a crisis…they inherited that rhythm too. It’s not just about bad managers. It's about unsupported managers who lean on borrowed behavior because they weren’t taught anything different. And here’s the part that should concern every executive leader at a growing company: Your managers are defaulting to something right now. The question is — is it what they saw or what you taught? Because if nobody ever taught them intentionally, they’re teaching themselves from memory. And that’s how corporate trauma gets passed from one leader to the next. #Leadership #TheGrowthTrap #MidMarket #Growth #Management

Chipotle lost over $600 million in revenue — and it started with a training problem during their rapid growth stage... By the mid-2010s, Chipotle had grown to over 1,700 locations. More locations meant more complexity. People were hired fast and put to work even faster. Processes that worked at 500 locations were being stress-tested at 1,700. Between 2015 and 2016, foodborne illness outbreaks spread across multiple states. Over 1,100 people were affected. Employees also reported being pressured to work, even when sick. The US Attorney said Chipotle "failed to ensure that its employees both understood and complied with its food safety protocols." This was a black eye for a company that prided itself on fresh ingredients. The result: $600 million in lost revenue, a 50% stock drop, a $25 million fine, and a complete overhaul of their TRAINING SYSTEMS. They shut everything down. Rebuilt the training infrastructure from scratch. This is what happens when a business grows faster than its leaders can manage it. A simple oversight can turn into national headlines and federal court cases. Of course, it's not always this dramatic. But the pattern is the same. I call it The Growth Trap. And it doesn't only happen to large publicly traded companies. I've watched it happen to 80-person regional businesses, 150-person service companies, and 300-person multi-location operators. The Growth Trap doesn't care about your size. It cares about whether your leaders are ready. What's an example you've seen — big or small — where growth outpaced leadership? #TheGrowthTrap #LeadershipDevelopment #BusinessGrowth