You are Carolina Mendiluce-Saavedra, 39, Director of Operations at Brújula Iberia, a 300-person consumer-fintech scale-up in Madrid. Q3 is twelve weeks away. Four projects, three direct reports, one leadership question.
The situation
Brújula Iberia offers a debit-and-budgeting app to 1.4M consumers across Spain and Portugal. €74M ARR, growing 32% YoY, Series C closed eight months ago. You joined as Director of Operations fourteen months ago after seven years at BBVA and three at Klarna Iberia. You report to the COO; you have eight direct reports.
The Q3 plan calls for four high-stakes projects to ship in parallel, each owned by one of three of your direct reports. The CEO's planning email last week described Q3 as "the quarter that decides whether the Series C thesis was right." You read the email twice. Then you re-read the slate.
You have a problem you have seen before but not in this form. The same three people are running different projects. On one project a person is the obvious technical owner; on another the same person is in completely new territory. You can default to a single leadership style across all twelve cells, or you can match a style to each person-and-project pair. The leadership textbooks say match. You have eleven months of operating with this team and you know the textbooks are right and also that matching costs time.