Gene Grand: Building leadership teams in high-growth markets: Talent strategy for regulated industries

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The most expensive talent mistake Gene Grand has seen organizations make is not a bad hire. It is the assumption that a leadership model built for one environment will simply transfer to another. High-growth markets do not forgive that assumption. Regulated industries, in particular, tend to expose it quickly.

Building a leadership team capable of executing ambitious growth strategy while maintaining operational discipline and compliance is a different challenge from building one in a stable, well-mapped market. Gene has spent enough time in both to know that the differences are not cosmetic.

Where the pipeline problem starts

The global leadership development market is projected to grow from $98.7 billion in 2026 to $263.1 billion by 2036. That figure reflects something organisations have started to accept: leadership supply is increasingly the primary constraint on growth, not capital, not market access, not technology. In emerging markets especially, the gap between strategic ambition and available talent is where execution breaks down.

Part of what makes this difficult is that traditional leadership development was built for stability. Programmes designed around 12 to 18-month cycles, competency frameworks inherited from head office, and succession plans that assume a steady pipeline were simply not designed for the pace that high-growth regulated markets actually demand.

Gene has observed this in gaming and financial services contexts across multiple regions. The organisations that scale well are not necessarily those with the largest development budgets. They are the ones that have designed talent systems for the environment they are actually operating in.

“The organisations I’ve seen struggle with leadership in high-growth markets almost always made the same mistake. They imported their talent model rather than building one for where they were going.”

Compliance expertise is not enough on its own

In regulated industries, there is a recruitment instinct to prioritise compliance expertise above everything else. It is understandable. The cost of regulatory failure is high, and operators who have lived through licence challenges know exactly how catastrophic a weak compliance function can be. But compliance expertise alone does not make a leadership team.

What Gene looks for is the combination: leaders who understand the regulatory environment with genuine depth and who can also operate commercially in a market that is still forming. That profile is harder to find, and harder to develop, than either element in isolation.

DHR Global’s 2026 talent outlook notes that organisations need leaders who can make sound decisions with incomplete information and course-correct quickly, qualities that matter everywhere but become existential in markets where the regulatory and competitive landscape can shift within a quarter. In a regulated high-growth context, the leader who can only execute inside a well-defined framework is not the leader you need for the first three years.

Succession depth as operational risk

Succession planning is treated in many organisations as a governance exercise: something that gets reviewed annually, satisfies the board, and sits in a document nobody opens until a crisis. Gene’s experience is that this approach creates real operational risk, particularly in markets where key person dependency is high and talent pools are shallow.

Research from Oggi Talent indicates that leadership turnover and role complexity are rising across industries, and that short-term workforce decisions are creating a leadership pipeline crisis that compounds over time. For regulated operators in high-growth markets, that crisis is not abstract. Losing a regulatory affairs director or a country general manager to a competitor can set market entry timelines back by months.

The practical response is to treat succession depth as an ongoing operational metric rather than a periodic HR exercise. That means knowing, at any given time, who is twelve months from readiness for each critical role and what is being done to close the gap.

“Succession planning that only happens when a role is vacant is not succession planning. By the time you need it, you’ve already lost the time it takes to build it.”

Building pipelines, not just filling roles

The distinction between building a leadership pipeline and filling vacancies is one Gene returns to repeatedly when working through talent strategy with operators. Executive search that focuses only on open positions misses the structural work that determines whether an organisation can sustain its growth trajectory.

Culture Partners’ research shows that only 14% of CEOs report having the leadership talent they need to achieve their organisational goals, and that organisations with strong leadership development programmes are 2.3 times more likely to outperform their peers. In high-growth regulated markets, the gap between those two groups tends to become visible relatively quickly.

Building internal mobility pathways, aligning competency models to where the market is heading rather than where it currently is, and creating genuine development visibility for high-potential people are the structural elements that make the difference. They require deliberate investment and take time to produce results. That is precisely why organisations that start early sustain the advantage for longer.

Gene puts it plainly when assessing talent strategies across operators: the best ones make the next generation of leaders visible inside the organisation before anyone outside it has noticed them. That visibility creates internal momentum, reduces dependency on external search, and gives high-potential people genuine reasons to stay.