What Growth Really Does to a Company.

Somewhere between the first ten hires and the first hundred, something breaks that nobody budgeted for.

It isn't a bad hire. It isn't a bad manager. It's structural: the person-management work that used to fit in the margins of someone's day no longer fits and most companies don't have anyone whose job it is to catch that.

The numbers back this up. 88% of people who've worked at a small company say there was no one dedicated to managing people issues and only 27% of small businesses have even one person staffed in that role at all. For nearly three in four, the responsibility for people problems sits with someone who has an entirely different job description. For most of them, that someone is the boss.

That gap is not neutral. In a recent survey of over a thousand employees, half said the absence of dedicated people support contributes to a toxic workplace. Three in ten said it signals leadership doesn't really care about employees. Nearly three in ten said they've personally watched leadership take advantage of the fact that no one was minding the gap.

Meanwhile, the person the gap usually falls to — the founder or CEO — is already stretched. Harvard research on how chief executives actually spend their time found that roughly a quarter of a CEO's calendar goes to developing people and managing relationships: one-on-ones, culture, talent decisions. That's a quarter of the highest-leverage hours in the company, spent on work that's important but rarely the reason that person was hired.

See what the research says.