Operations leaders tend to reach for the same levers when the business demands more output: add headcount, redraw the org chart, install a new system. The levers are visible, defensible in a budget review, and easy to measure. They also fail with impressive regularity, because the thing being scaled is not capacity. It is behavior. Lisa W. Brown, a global supply chain and operations executive who has led teams across five continents at companies including Coca-Cola and Constellation Brands, argues that the sequence most companies follow is backwards. Culture first, then structure, then people. Reverse that order and what gets scaled is dysfunction with a bigger payroll attached. “High-performing teams don’t just execute strategy,” Brown says. “They are the strategy.” That is not a motivational line. In a function where margin lives inside execution quality, the distinction between a team that delivers a plan and a team that shapes one is the difference between an operations group that absorbs cost and one that generates advantage.
Culture Comes Before The Org Chart
The usual approach treats culture as something that follows structure, a tone that settles over a team once reporting lines are set. Brown inverts it. “You can’t scale performance if you don’t first scale culture,” she says. At Constellation Brands, that meant defining explicit principles around agility, collaboration, and ownership before touching the boxes and lines. The point of articulating those values was not to produce a poster. It was to give the organization a shared basis for judgment in situations no process document anticipates, which in global operations is most situations.
What separates this from the standard values exercise is where the principles were installed. Brown’s team embedded them into every operating rhythm, from sales and operations planning (S&OP) through to performance reviews. That matters more than it sounds. S&OP is where competing forecasts and constrained supply get reconciled, often under pressure, and it is the meeting where a stated commitment to collaboration either holds or quietly collapses. Performance reviews are where the organization tells people what it rewards. Put values into those two places and they become operating constraints. Leave them out and they remain decoration. The evidence showed up in the leadership bench: 40 percent of leadership roles were filled by internal promotions. A company developing its own leaders at that rate is not buying capability on the open market at a premium. It is compounding what it already has.
Restructure With Intent, Not With Headcount
The reflex when a global operation strains is to hire. Brown treats that reflex as a category error. “Scaling teams isn’t about adding headcount,” she says. “It’s about aligning the right people with the right roles.” The distinction becomes concrete during a transformation, when the temptation to simply move people between boxes is strongest and the cost of doing so is highest. During a recent post-divestiture transformation, Brown’s approach was deliberate on this point. “We didn’t just reshuffle; we restructured with intent.”
Intent meant matching capability to strategic need rather than to availability, and investing in reskilling where the gap between the two was widest. That second half is where most restructures fall short. Companies will readily fund a reorganization and then expect existing staff to grow into redesigned roles through sheer willpower, which is how a well-designed structure produces a demoralized workforce. Brown’s version treated capability building as part of the restructure, not an afterthought to it. Retention improved by 25 percent and delivery improved across global markets. The retention number deserves particular attention from anyone who has priced the replacement of an experienced operations manager with working knowledge of a specific market, a specific supplier base, and a specific set of regulatory conditions. Institutional knowledge in supply chain is slow to rebuild and expensive to lose, and a restructure that drives it out the door has not saved money. It has deferred a larger bill.
Leadership Is A Multiplier, Not A Title
Inclusion arrives in most operations organizations as a reporting obligation, a set of numbers assembled for a corporate scorecard. Brown treats it as a performance input. “A high-performing team is one where everyone’s voice is heard and every leader is developed,” she says. The operational logic is straightforward. Global operations run on judgment exercised far from headquarters, often at speed, usually without time to escalate. A team where only the senior voices carry weight is a team that routes every non-standard decision upward, and that bottleneck shows up directly in cycle time and recovery speed when something breaks.
Brown has championed programs to elevate underrepresented talent, and her read on the outcome is commercial rather than reputational. Those inclusive teams are “not only diverse, but outperform benchmarks on innovation and engagement.” Engagement and innovation are not soft adjacencies in an operations function. They are the mechanisms by which a team finds the process improvement nobody asked for and flags the supply risk before it becomes a shortage. “Leadership is not a title, it is a multiplier,” Brown says, and the multiplier framing is the useful part. A title distributes authority to one person. Developed leadership capability distributed across a team multiplies the number of points at which good decisions can be made without permission. For a function spanning continents and time zones, that is not a cultural preference. It is architecture.
Brown’s closing argument cuts against the instinct that has governed operations management for decades. “Scaling high performing global teams isn’t about control, it’s about connection,” she says. “When you build culture, align strategy, and empower your people, you don’t just grow teams. You grow impact.”
Follow Lisa W. Brown on LinkedIn for more insights on global supply chain leadership, operations transformation, and building high-performing international teams.
