The Journey: 17 The Land Grab

One of the quiet games happening inside every growing company is the "land grab."

Leaders fight to take over more teams.

More revenue.

More influence.

More control.

It’s rarely framed this way, of course, but if you’ve been in the room, you know.

And if I’m being honest, I once played that game too.

When I was a VP of Customer Success at one company, the organization was reaching a pivotal growth stage. Support, Services, and Customer Marketing were growing but they lived in different parts of the business without unified leadership.

I believed (and genuinely still believe) there would have been major benefits to bringing those teams together.

Stronger customer experience.

Tighter internal collaboration.

Better workflow alignment.

So I started planting seeds with my peers, lobbying, positioning, making the business case.

But if I'm being brutally honest with myself now... it wasn't just about the customer.

It was also about my ego.

I wanted to oversee more.

I wanted more responsibility.

I wanted the influence that came with it.

And imagine how humbled I was when it didn't happen.

Truthfully, I already had my hands full overseeing Customer Success and Account Management.

Had I been given even more responsibility at that moment, it might have compromised the outcomes I was already responsible for.

It taught me an important leadership lesson that I carry to this day:

Experience doesn't give you the right to dictate structure. Every company is different, and leadership alignment must be tailored to the business's current reality, not your past successes.

Take Customer Marketing, for example. I've seen this function sit in different teams:

In Marketing.

In Customer Success.

In Product.

In all three cases, it worked because it served the objectives of that company at that time.

And I’m not alone.

I’ve seen CROs, CMOs, CPOs, CTOs, all smart, capable leaders, behave the same way: lobbying for land without asking the bigger questions first.

So if you’re at a growth stage where teams are expanding and organizational structure is evolving, here’s what I recommend:

So here are 5 things you should consider when deciding team alignment:

Start with the team's primary objective.

What outcome is the team responsible for? Roll them into the function that can best drive that outcome.

Assess operational dependencies.

Who does the team work with the most? Aligning them with their most frequent collaborators reduces friction.

Prioritize the customer experience.

Org structure should make the customer's journey smoother, not just make a leader’s resume look better.

Match leadership expertise to mission.

Teams deserve leaders who understand and can elevate their work not just leaders seeking more territory.

Stay flexible and reassess over time.

Today's best structure might not be tomorrow’s. Be willing to evolve as the business grows and changes.

Leadership isn't about owning the most land.

It's about cultivating the land you're entrusted with.

The best leaders aren’t the ones who grab the most ground.

They’re the ones who grow the most from what they've been given.

The lesson I learned, the hard way, is that true leadership is less about how much you oversee…

and more about how well you serve.