← Insights · Scaling Lessons
By Mike Dickerson | CEO and Managing Partner, The Tacitus Group, LLC
When I was Staff Director for the ODNI Directorate for Mission Integration, I ran the day-to-day operations of a 300-person organization responsible for some of the most sensitive mission integration work in the Intelligence Community. Budget. Personnel. Policy. Stakeholder engagement across the IC, DoD, Congress, and OMB. All of it running at the same time, all of it under pressure, all of it with consequences if the machinery didn't work.
That role taught me something I've carried into every engagement since. When organizations grow in the wrong way, the same things break in the same order. Every single time.
The private sector isn't different from government on this. The context shifts. The urgency doesn't.
This is always the first thing to go, and most leaders don't notice it because it never shows up as a line item.
In a small organization, communication is ambient. Everybody knows what everybody else is doing because they're in the same room, the same hallway, the same Slack channel. Information moves without a process because proximity does the work for you.
Cross 100 people and proximity stops doing the work. Cross 200 and it fails entirely. Suddenly people in one part of the organization don't know what people in another part are doing. Decisions get made without the right inputs. Work gets duplicated. Conflicting guidance goes out to different teams. Leadership doesn't realize it because the information that used to reach them organically now has to be routed deliberately, and nobody built the routing.
At ODNI we managed this with a structured staff engagement model. A regular cadence at every level; weekly syncs between the front office and component Chiefs of Staff, monthly all-hands, a deliberate flow of information up and across the organization. It was designed, not assumed.
Most growing companies don't do this. They rely on the communication model that worked when they were small and then wonder why nobody seems to know what's going on.
In a small company, decision-making is simple. The CEO decides. Three or four people weigh in. The cycle is fast.
Growth doesn't just slow this down. It breaks it.
As the organization grows, more decisions need to be made, more people have equities in each one, and the CEO's calendar fills up to the point where they can't sit in every conversation. So one of two things happens. Either decisions stall because everyone is waiting for the CEO, or decisions get made at lower levels with no framework for how to make them. The first creates bottlenecks. The second creates inconsistency. Both are bad.
The fix is a decision-rights framework. Who can approve what, at what threshold, with what inputs. It sounds bureaucratic. It isn't. It's the difference between an organization that moves and one that's stuck. At ODNI I had clear authorities at every level. I didn't go to the Associate Director for every personnel decision; I had defined parameters. If it was within my authority I acted. If it wasn't, I knew exactly where it needed to go and how fast it needed to get there.
GovCon companies at the growth stage almost never have this. The CEO approves everything. The CEO is the bottleneck. The CEO is exhausted. The organization interprets the slowdown as the CEO not caring, when in fact the CEO is drowning.
By "the middle" I mean middle management; the layer between the CEO and the people doing the work.
In early-stage companies there is no middle. The CEO talks directly to the program managers, engineers, and analysts. It's flat. It's fast. It works.
Past about 150 people, you need a management layer. Not because you want one; because the organization literally can't function without it. Somebody has to translate strategy into execution across multiple teams. Somebody has to manage people. Somebody has to handle the conflicts, the resource allocation, the performance issues, the cross-team dependencies. That is what middle management is for.
The problem is that most GovCon companies grow by adding individual contributors; billable heads on contracts. They don't invest in management because management isn't billable. So you end up with a 300-person company, a five-person management layer, and every one of those five is also doing the work themselves.
This is where things turn painful. Projects slip. Good people leave. Morale drops. The CEO can't figure out why because the revenue looks fine. The revenue is fine, because the contracts are performing; the organization underneath the contracts is fraying.
At ODNI the Chief of Staff structure was the management backbone. Every component had one. They ran the operations, the people, and the processes; they were the connective tissue between leadership intent and organizational execution. Without that layer, a 300-person directorate would have been ungovernable. I know, because I watched what happened to organizations that tried to operate without it or worse, operated with the wrong person in the seat because they sought the title without being willing to put in the work.
Communication breaks lead to decision-making breaks. Decision-making breaks lead to management gaps. Management gaps lead to cultural erosion. Each failure compounds the last.
Culture is always the last thing to go. By the time you notice, the damage is deep.
In a small company, culture is the founder. The founder's values, work ethic, way of treating people; that's the culture, and it radiates outward because everyone interacts with the founder regularly.
Once the organization grows past the point where the founder can personally touch every employee, culture has to be transmitted through systems instead. Through how you hire, how you onboard, how you promote, how you handle conflict, how you communicate. If you haven't built those systems, culture doesn't transmit; it dilutes. What replaces it is whatever local norms develop on their own, which may or may not reflect what the founder ever intended.
I saw this at ODNI, DIA, and NRO. The organizations that maintained a coherent culture at scale embedded their values in their processes; not posters on the wall, processes. How they ran meetings. How they made decisions. How they treated people during hard conversations. Culture was operational, not aspirational.
The companies that tell me "our culture used to be great" are the ones that never operationalized it. They assumed it would sustain itself. It won't. Nothing sustains itself at scale.
I lay this out in order on purpose, because the sequence matters. Communication breaks lead to decision-making breaks. Decision-making breaks lead to management gaps. Management gaps lead to cultural erosion. Each failure compounds the last.
The good news (and there is some) is that if you know the sequence, you can get ahead of it. You can build the communication infrastructure before it breaks. You can establish decision rights before the CEO becomes the bottleneck. You can invest in management before your best people start updating their LinkedIns. You can operationalize culture before it dilutes.
None of this requires a massive investment. It requires attention, somebody who has seen the pattern before and knows where to look, and a willingness to prioritize the machine alongside the mission.
Twenty years in the IC taught me that the organizations that win aren't the ones with the best strategy. They're the ones that built the infrastructure to execute the strategy. The organizations that lose usually had the same strategy on paper. They just couldn't execute it because nobody built the systems that make execution possible.
That lesson applies everywhere. It applies especially here.
Mike Dickerson is the CEO and Managing Partner of The Tacitus Group, LLC, a fractional executive leadership firm serving growth-stage federal contractors and national security companies. He brings 20+ years of IC/DoD operational leadership experience, including senior roles at ODNI, the Joint Staff, NRO, and DIA, and roughly 12 years managing IC task order portfolios at Booz Allen Hamilton.