The most dangerous debt in a growing company is the time between a problem becoming obvious and someone making the decision.
Companies measure the work around this delay. They know sales cycle length, deployment frequency, support response time, and cash runway. Few know how long a pricing exception waits for an owner or why a product tradeoff needs several informal approvals.
Small teams hide this problem because context and authority sit close together. Growth pulls them apart. Information moves up, questions move sideways, and decisions wait in a queue that no dashboard names. Everyone stays busy while the company gets slower.
Leaders usually call the problem complexity. Often the decision rights still belong to the smaller company.
More meetings make the queue visible without shortening it. More process can turn hesitation into paperwork. An executive review on Friday does little for a reversible decision that a local leader should have made on Tuesday.
I would measure management latency for a month. Take a sample of decisions that mattered and record when the issue became clear, when an owner was named, when the choice was made, and when the reasoning reached the people doing the work. The point is not a universal service level or another employee score. The timestamps show where context, authority, and consequence stopped lining up.
The fix requires a real classification of decisions. Local leaders should own reversible choices below a defined threshold. The center should keep capital allocation, security, brand, and other decisions that are hard to unwind. Every escalation needs one decider and a deadline. “Get alignment” does not name either.
Repeated escalation to the same executive is evidence that decision rights have not kept pace with the company’s growth. That pattern should trigger a review of the authority threshold, not another standing meeting.