Get Your Organization to Work Better — and Why Fractional Support May Be Your Best First Step
If you’re leading HR or operations in a growing organization, your plate is overflowing. Compliance deadlines, benefits renewals, recruiting surges, performance challenges, and employee relations, the urgent demands never stop. You’re keeping the business running, and that alone is a full-time job.
But beneath the surface, you’re seeing the cracks:
Culture drift as the organization scales
Executive team misalignment slowing down critical decisions
Managers struggling without the skills to lead effectively
Cross-functional collaboration breaking down into silos
These aren't just people problems. They're organizational problems—and they require a different kind of solution: Organizational Development (OD).
What Is Organizational Development (OD)?
At its core, Organizational Development makes the whole system of your organization work better. Not just the people, but the culture, structures, leadership practices, and decision-making processes that tie everything together.
Here's the key distinction:
HR = People operations. Recruiting, benefits, compliance, employee relations, talent management. HR ensures you have the right people and the right processes to manage them.
OD = People + culture + systems, aligned to strategy. OD ensures those people have capable managers, clear career paths, a culture that supports performance, and systems that enable collaboration and execution.
Think of it this way: HR ensures you hire the right people. OD ensures your organization is designed for those people to succeed.
If HR is the engine oil that keeps the machine running smoothly, OD is the design and tuning of the engine itself. Without it, HR leaders end up firefighting constantly while bigger opportunities for culture transformation and performance improvement slip through the cracks.
The Challenge: Running vs. Redesigning
Here’s the tension most HR leaders face: you’re the steward of culture and a catalyst for strategy, yet the work of redesigning how an organization functions requires deep systems thinking, facilitation expertise, and transformation design that unfolds over time.
It’s not a question of skill or will; it’s about focus and bandwidth.
I experienced this firsthand when I moved from an Organization Development consulting role into an HR Business Partner role. In OD, my work centered on diagnosing organizational patterns, designing systems, and helping leaders fundamentally shift how the organization worked. As an HRBP, the pace was faster and the focus shifted—coaching managers through immediate challenges, navigating complex people issues, supporting talent decisions, keeping operations moving.
Both roles are strategic. But they operate on different time horizons: one builds the future, the other sustains the present. And asking one person to do both exceptionally well is rarely sustainable.
The good news? You don't have to choose between them.
Why OD Becomes Critical as You Grow
Growing companies hit predictable inflection points where the old ways of operating begin to break down:
50–150 employees: First-time managers are promoted without training. Culture starts to drift. Silos form. Decision-making becomes inconsistent.
150–500 employees: Leadership misalignment becomes visible. Bottlenecks slow growth. Communication gaps widen. What worked for 75 people fails at 300.
500–1,000 employees: Scaling culture becomes exponentially harder. Succession planning moves from "nice to have" to urgent. Retaining senior leaders becomes a competitive advantage.
Without OD support at these stages, organizations typically experience:
Leadership teams that talk past one another instead of deciding together
Decision fatigue where everything funnels to the CEO or COO
Burned-out managers who were never taught how to lead
Culture erosion that makes attracting and retaining top talent harder
With OD, these challenges become opportunities: teams align faster, leaders develop with intention, culture scales deliberately, and the organization builds the capacity to execute its strategy.
The Fractional Solution: OD Expertise Without the Full-Time Commitment
So what if you know you need OD, but you're not ready (or able) to hire a full-time person?
Fractional OD support gives you an embedded, part-time partner with deep OD expertise who works alongside your team—not over it—to extend your capacity and drive strategic initiatives forward.
Here's what that looks like in practice:
Expand your bandwidth. You stay focused on HR operations while critical OD initiatives move forward in parallel—not on your already-full plate.
Leverage proven playbooks. A fractional OD partner brings tested frameworks for leadership development, executive offsites, manager training, and culture transformation that you don't have to design from scratch.
Create lasting impact. Even a six-month engagement can leave systems, tools, and capabilities in place that your team carries forward long after the engagement ends.
Access senior expertise flexibly. You get the strategic thinking of a senior OD leader without the budget commitment of a full-time role.
This isn't about outsourcing your work—it's about partnering strategically so you can deliver both the day-to-day essentials your business depends on and the future-focused work your executives need.
Real Examples: Fractional OD in Action
Transforming Leadership at a Growing Non-Profit
A 200-person non-profit had been offering sporadic leadership training—a workshop here, a seminar there—but nothing consistent or connected to their organizational strategy. Leaders were developing in silos, expectations were unclear, and accountability was inconsistent.
As their fractional OD partner embedded within the People and Culture team, we started with discovery: understanding their culture, challenges, and strategic priorities. From there, we worked alongside the People and Culture team, CEO, and President to:
Define clear leadership expectations aligned to their mission and values
Build accountability mechanisms so leaders could be held to those standards
Conduct 360 assessments for senior leaders to establish baselines and development priorities
Design and deliver a custom leadership alignment summit followed by a six-month leadership development journey
This is fundamentally different from hiring an off-the-shelf leadership training company. We're not delivering generic content and walking away. We're an extended member of their team—understanding their culture deeply, building custom solutions that fit their reality, and staying engaged to ensure lasting transformation.
The result? The organization is shifting leadership behaviors for the long run and transforming leaders across all levels—not just checking a box with a one-off solution. As a bonus, executives and HR leaders are gaining org development skills like systems thinking as we work with them.
More Examples:
Leadership Development Journey: While your HR team handles daily operations, a fractional OD partner designs and delivers a six-month program that transforms your managers—building coaching skills, feedback capabilities, and confident decision-making.
Executive Offsite Facilitation: Instead of HR being stuck with logistics planning, a fractional OD partner facilitates your CEO and executive team through strategy alignment, role clarity, and decision-making protocols—while you participate as a strategic peer at the table.
Manager Competency Framework: OD builds a clear, behavior-based competency model tied directly to your performance management system, giving HR a strong foundation for promotions, reviews, development plans, and manager training that scales.
These aren't just projects—they're systems that compound as your organization grows.
When to Go Fractional vs. When to Hire
Not every organization is ready for a full-time OD role. Here's a practical guide:
Choose fractional OD support if:
You're under 500 employees and don't have the budget or consistent need for a full-time OD role
You need help with a major initiative: a leadership development journey, culture reset, or CEO offsite
You want senior expertise now without waiting months to hire and onboard
You need to demonstrate OD value before getting buy-in for a permanent role
It's time to hire dedicated OD talent when:
You're 500–1,000+ employees and leadership development has become a daily, ongoing need
You're investing heavily in leadership pipelines, succession planning, and culture scaling
You want OD embedded into performance reviews, promotions, and talent strategy
Your executive team sees OD as a strategic driver of business success, not a "nice to have"
Pro tip: Many companies start with fractional support to build systems and demonstrate measurable impact. Once the value of OD becomes clear—faster alignment, stronger leaders, better retention—it's much easier to secure executive buy-in for a permanent hire.
The Bottom Line
HR leaders and COOs can't (and shouldn't) carry the full weight of both running operations and redesigning how the organization works. One ensures your company runs. The other ensures it grows.
If you're stretched thin but know your organization needs more—better leaders, stronger alignment, healthier culture, systems that scale—OD may be the lever you've been missing.
Ready to Strengthen Your Organization?
At Regroup, we partner with HR leaders and COOs in small and mid-sized companies (generally 50-1500 employees) to provide fractional OD support that builds stronger leaders, more aligned teams, and healthier cultures.
Let's talk about how OD can help you get further, faster.
Book a free 30-minute consultation.
