Leading Communication Through Growth and Scale
As organisations scale, communication either becomes a strategic multiplier or an accelerator of chaos. This article offers pragmatic frameworks to keep your internal communication strategy and growth-stage brand coherent as teams, markets and expectations expand.
Why communication breaks when you scale
You’ve done it! You’ve built something real – the team is growing, the market is opening up, and you’re ready to evolve again. And yet, somewhere between the new hires, new markets and new expectations, there’s a growing sense that your communication isn’t keeping up. As headcount rises and markets diversify, even the strongest communicators hit predictable failure points.
Common pressure points:
Too many channels, no clear purpose for each, and leaders “spraying” messages everywhere.
Different teams (product, commercial, operations, country leads) rewriting the story in their own language until no one is sure what the brand actually stands for.
Leadership decisions moving faster than internal updates, so people hear about changes through customers or social media first.
New hires in new markets experiencing a completely different narrative and culture to HQ, weakening your growth-stage brand.
The thread through all of this: you have a scaling organisation, but not yet a scalable internal communication strategy.
Framework 1: The Message Spine
You need a simple, repeatable “spine” that every team can use to frame communication – from all-hands decks to sales pitches and support replies.
Use this 5-part Message Spine and insist every key communication references it:
Purpose
One sentence: why your organisation exists in the world, beyond making money.
This should not change as you scale, and should be the anchor for internal and external messaging.
Strategic priorities (12–24 months)
3–5 company-wide priorities explained in plain language.
Every team update should link to at least one of these, or you question whether the work matters.
Value narrative (B2B and B2C)
For B2B: which problem you solve, for which type of customer, with what measurable impact.
For B2C: what changes in a customer’s life or identity when they use your product, framed in human language, not features.
Proof points
3–7 examples: key customers, case studies, data points or stories that make the value narrative feel real.
Behavioural expectations
The 4–6 behaviours you expect people to show in everyday decisions (e.g. “ship small and often”, “assume good intent”) linked clearly to your purpose.
Make the spine visible in:
Leadership ALL-hands templates.
New country or product launch packs.
Sales, CS and people-team documentation.
If you cannot map a communication back to the spine, either the message is off – or the work is.
Framework 2: The 3-layer communication system
In growth-stage brands, people tend to drown in noise. The solution is a deliberate three-layer system that defines what is communicated, by whom and where.
Layer 1: Core broadcasts (company-wide)
Purpose: alignment and direction.
Owner: CEO and executive team, supported by internal comms or people team.
Channels: monthly or quarterly all-hands, CEO notes, strategy memos, and a single “source-of-truth” hub (e.g. Notion, SharePoint, or intranet).
Content: strategy, performance, major changes, values, and high-level priorities.
Guardrails:
Fixed rhythm (e.g. monthly), even in crises.
Same structure every time (metrics, priorities, people stories, Q&A) so people know what to expect.
Layer 2: Cross-functional streams
Purpose: execution and collaboration around shared goals.
Owner: cross-functional leaders (e.g. “Revenue leadership”, “Product and Operations”).
Channels: structured forums – fortnightly squads, OKR syncs, roadmap reviews, deal or incident reviews, plus dedicated spaces in collaboration tools.
Content: how teams coordinate to deliver the company priorities – roadmaps, trade-offs, risks.
Guardrails:
Clear agenda and decision-making practice for each forum.
Shared documentation standards: decisions recorded, owners named, deadlines visible.
Layer 3: Local teams and markets
Purpose: adaptation and feedback.
Owner: country leaders, functional managers, team leads.
Channels: weekly stand-ups, retros, local office updates, market-specific channels.
Content: local execution, customer insights, operational issues, local culture-building.
Guardrails:
Local leaders translate the Message Spine into their market’s reality (e.g. regulations, customer behaviour, labour market norms) without changing the core story.
Local feedback is actively gathered and fed upwards into cross-functional and leadership layers.
If you’re scaling fast, your first practical step is often to name these three layers, decide what belongs where, and kill overlapping meetings and channels.
Framework 3: The Source-of-Truth Map
As you grow, “where do I find X?” becomes a daily frustration. A growth-stage brand cannot afford that friction.
Create a simple Source-of-Truth Map:
One channel for each purpose:
Announcements (one-way, company-wide).
Collaboration (back-and-forth between teams).
Documentation (long-term reference).
Clear rules, for example:
Announcements: only leadership and internal comms can post; everyone else reacts and asks questions in a dedicated thread.
Collaboration: project or squad-specific channels, time-bounded, with owners.
Documentation: only “finished” or agreed content lives here – not drafts or experiments.
Onboarding checklist: every new joiner gets a 10–15 minute walkthrough of how you communicate, with links and examples, not just a list of tools.
Your internal communication strategy should treat tools as infrastructure that supports clarity and focus, not as a solution in itself.
Aligning leadership, B2B and B2C messages
For scale-ups serving both business and consumer audiences, misalignment between internal, B2B and B2C narratives is a major risk.
Use one brand story, with three “lenses”
Take your Message Spine and view it through three lenses:
Internal lens: what this means for how we work, decide and behave.
B2B lens: what this means for how our customers operate, decide and create value.
B2C lens: what this means for how people feel, act or identify in their daily lives.
Leadership should see – in one simple doc or slide – how those three lenses line up. This becomes your alignment tool for future campaigns, product changes and investor communication.
Practical alignment rituals
Quarterly narrative review: CEO, marketing, product, sales and people leaders review the narrative: what’s changed in the market, in our strategy, in our customer reality? Are our internal and external messages still coherent ?
Launch “triage” meeting: before any major launch, one short meeting to confirm: what exactly are we saying internally, to customers and to partners – and does it all ladder back to the same message spine ?
This is where your experience coordinating cross-functional teams becomes essential: you are the person who notices when sales, product and brand are using three different words for the same idea – and forces a shared language.
Making communication scalable (not just louder)
Scalable communication is less about sending more messages and more about designing a system that holds as you double in size.
For scaling organisations, prioritise:
Designing for reuse: templates for all-hands, team updates, roadmap reviews, customer announcements, and incident communication, all aligned with the Message Spine.
Training managers as communicators: simple toolkits and “manager notes” that accompany major announcements, so managers can explain, contextualise and listen in their teams.
Feedback loops: monthly pulse questions specifically about communication clarity, noise and trust; route results straight into leadership discussions.
Documentation discipline: decisions are written down where people expect to find them, with brief context and clear owners.
How to start right now
If you’re in a growth-stage brand and you recognise the chaos, a realistic 30-day plan might look like this:
Week 1: Draft your Message Spine and test it with a small cross-functional group.
Week 2: Define your three communication layers and cancel or repurpose overlapping forums.
Week 3: Build your Source-of-Truth Map and update onboarding materials.
Week 4: Run a narrative alignment session with leadership to align internal, B2B and B2C messaging.
From there, your role is to keep the system alive: update the spine as strategy shifts, uphold the rules of your communication layers, and coach leaders to communicate in ways that scale trust as fast as you scale headcount.
To make this easier to apply, I’ve created a downloadable slide template based on these frameworks that you can adapt for your own organisation.
