Growing our leadership without losing our way
Growth is a good problem to have. It pushes you to build a business that can carry it well.
Why this change was needed
Over the last few years, Brightec has changed quite a bit. We’re doing bigger projects, with more people, across more moving parts, often involving multiple stakeholders at once.
That growth brings a different kind of complexity. It isn’t a bad thing, but we do have to think carefully about how we respond to it. As we’ve grown, we’ve had to be more deliberate about how we handle that complexity, so it doesn’t turn into pressure, confusion, or burnout.
There’s also a cultural angle to this. Growth always puts pressure on culture. Growth doesn't automatically threaten culture, but culture doesn't scale by accident. It only works if you keep building it, on purpose.
What started to feel stretched
As we’ve grown, a few things started to break down.
1. Decision making
Knowing who had responsibility and authority had become less clear. Roles have evolved over time, and ownership has shifted between people. That’s sometimes meant too many people being involved in decisions, which slows things down and creates frustration.
2. Ownership
We’ve also had moments where more than one person thought they were responsible for the same thing. That’s always come from a good place, but it leads to duplicated effort and unclear outcomes.
3. Reliance on instinct
We’ve got a very experienced team, which is a strength. But as we’ve grown, we’ve realised we rely heavily on instinct. Our instincts are good, but we need clearer, repeatable ways of working, and to insist on evidence to validate instinct, so leadership isn’t dependent on a small group of people and the whole business can have full confidence in decisions and understand how they are made.
4. Too much with too few
There have been times when too many initiatives and responsibilities have sat with too few people. It comes from a strong sense of ownership, but it isn’t sustainable as we grow.
What these challenges have shown us is simple. What got us here isn’t enough for where we’re going.
How we’ve been working on it
This hasn’t been a sudden change. It’s something we’ve been working towards deliberately over the last few years, and we have made great progress.
One of the first steps was introducing a Brightec Steering Group. A small group of three people who meet regularly to discuss the big topics, make decisions, and help us stay on track.
That group has been Rob, Georgia and me.
More recently, we’ve expanded that group to include Jotham, bringing a stronger product perspective into those discussions.
It gave us a clearer centre for decision-making and made it more obvious where responsibility for major decisions sits. It also forced us to justify our decisions with evidence, so the whole group had confidence in the direction of travel, and we could support and challenge each other.
But it also made the next challenge obvious.
Clarity at the top helped, but it wasn’t enough on its own. If anything, it made it clearer that we needed to build leadership more broadly across the business.
So alongside that group, we’ve been steadily empowering and developing leadership across product, design, business development, and the wider team. The aim has been simple: clear ownership, closer to the work, with fewer bottlenecks at the top. Trusting our people to make good decisions, supported by the right information, has become key to how we operate.
The outcome
What we’ve landed on is a clearer leadership structure that reflects how the business actually runs today.
Josh O’Riordan – CEO
Georgia Edmonds – COO
Rob Redwood – CTO
These titles don’t change how we work day to day. They simply make it clearer for our team, our clients, and the people we work with.
With Andy stepping into the role of Founder and Chair, this group now carries responsibility for running Brightec, supported by a wider leadership team across the business.
This is a small change on paper. But for us, it’s an important step.
What won’t change is how accessible leadership is, and how intentional we are about culture.
It gives the whole business and everyone in it the clarity we all need as we grow, while protecting the things we care most about: how we work together day to day, the culture we’ve built over time, and the incredible service we deliver to our clients.
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