Your company doesn’t lack talent. It lacks clarity – an article by Ivan Reusse for Le Monde Économique
29.06.2026
A few months ago, I met the Managing Director of an industrial SME in the Lausanne region. Eighty employees, a healthy order book, and a team he described as “skilled and committed”. Yet he was exhausted. Decisions dragged on. Meetings multiplied without leading anywhere. Some of his managers were stepping on each other’s toes because responsibilities had never been clearly defined. Others waited for his approval on decisions they could — and should — have made themselves.
His immediate diagnosis? “I need to recruit better people.”
My diagnosis, after spending a few hours inside the organisation? That wasn’t the problem.
Talent alone isn’t enough when the environment lacks clarity.
This is a reality I encounter increasingly often in SMEs across French-speaking Switzerland: people are capable. Often highly capable. But they operate in an environment where no one knows exactly who is responsible for what, where accountability begins and ends, or when an issue should be escalated to senior management.
This lack of clarity is rarely the result of poor management. It is the natural consequence of growth. A company of fifteen people can rely on intuition, proximity and shared common sense. Once it reaches fifty, then one hundred employees, those informal mechanisms no longer work. Roles that were never formally defined become grey areas. Decisions that once happened around a kitchen table now require structure.
The problem is that most business leaders invest heavily in developing people’s skills — through training, coaching and recruitment — without ever addressing the organisational framework within which those skills are expected to deliver results. They sharpen the tools without clarifying the job at hand.