When Growth Changes the Questions
What Business Leaders Can Learn from the WNBA
To be completely transparent, I don’t really follow the WNBA.
Like a lot of people, I know it’s there. Every once in a while, I’ll catch a score on ESPN, see a highlight on social media, or hear someone mention a player that’s having a breakout season. Beyond that, it’s not something I’ve spent much time thinking about.
Over the last few months, though, I’ve found myself noticing the league more and more. It’s become difficult to read the sports or general news without seeing something about the WNBA. Every few days there seems to be another “sensational” story.
A hard foul. Suspensions. Game day demonstrations. Player and coach divisions. Another debate over officiating. Questions surrounding player safety. Congressional attention. Players speaking out about online harassment. A commissioner facing criticism from fans, players, and media alike. Not to mention, ongoing talks about expansion while all this is going on. Every few days, another controversy seems to dominate the conversation.
At first glance, it feels like a league spinning out of control, and a brand losing its narrative. How could one organization be dealing with this many seemingly unrelated challenges at exactly the same time?
The more I researched, the more I found myself asking a different question. Were all of these really separate stories, or were they all symptoms of something larger? That question had very little to do with basketball, and everything to do with how organizations evolve.
What I see is an organization experiencing something many businesses eventually encounter. Growth. But not the steady, manageable growth. The kind that arrives almost overnight. The kind that can turn a brand upside down in very short order.
THIRTY YEARS IN THE MAKING
Let’s take a step back to help lay the groundwork for the current challenges.
This season marks the WNBA's 30th anniversary. That's an important detail because it provides context that many of today's headlines ignore.
When the league launched in 1997, success wasn't measured in billion-dollar media rights or franchise valuations. The challenge was far more fundamental. The league simply needed to prove that a professional women's basketball league could survive.
For much of its history, the conversation centered on legitimacy. Would people watch? Would corporate sponsors invest? Could attendance grow? Would television networks continue carrying games?
Initially, expansion was cautious, and resources were limited. Financial expectations were modest. Like many young organizations, the WNBA spent decades earning credibility one season at a time. And slowly, almost quietly, credibility was building from 1997 to 2023.
Then, around 2024-2025, that's where things became interesting. What had been years of steady progress suddenly became rapid acceleration.
New ownership groups entered the league. Corporate partnerships expanded. Investment in facilities improved. Attendance trends strengthened, and television audiences grew. Sponsors that once viewed the league as an emerging property began treating it as a meaningful national platform.
While a big win for the league, that flood of capital and culture came a sharp, unexpected edge. The cozy, community-driven ecosystem of the WNBA was suddenly thrust into the relentless meat grinder of modern sports entertainment, where nuance is traded for clicks and clicks are traded for revenue. It seems that over the last year, the league discovered that becoming a part of the national conversation meant losing control of it.
Overnight, tactical basketball analysis was drowned out by toxic online fandoms, culture-war talking points, and hyper-polarized media narratives that the league's legacy infrastructure simply wasn't built to contain. The brand hadn't just scaled up; it had fractured into a battleground of intense public scrutiny, leaving the WNBA to face its most difficult challenge yet: figuring out how to survive the very spotlight it had spent three decades trying to attract.
Today, the league is enjoying historic viewership and sold-out arenas, but it is struggling to protect its athletes from the dark side of that fame. Critics argue the front office was happy to ride the wave of new attention but failed to prepare for the inevitable cultural backlash that came with it.
Some might say the joy of the game is being suffocated by the noise. Players who spent years working to gain media coverage are now finding themselves forced to answer heavy political and cultural questions during routine post-game interviews, leading to exhaustion and defensive media sessions.
WHEN THE BASELINE CHANGES
The rapid acceleration of the last few years created a problem the WNBA had never really been forced to solve before. For most of its history, the league was trying to attract more attention. Suddenly, it had more attention than many of the systems surrounding it appeared prepared to manage. And honestly, that distinction matters.
Organizations that spend years operating in an environment of scarcity often develop habits around that reality. Resources are allocated cautiously. Growth is incremental, and decisions are made based on what has historically been possible. When demand suddenly accelerates, leadership has to recognize that the baseline itself may have changed. What looks like an unusual spike can quickly become the new operating environment.
The WNBA appears to have experienced some version of that transition. The league had spent decades building an audience, but the speed and intensity of the new attention introduced expectations that extended well beyond filling arenas or improving television ratings. More viewers meant more scrutiny. More sponsors meant more stakeholders. More cultural relevance meant the league was no longer simply managing a sports property. It was managing a much larger public conversation around it, and that attention also became concentrated.
Like many organizations experiencing sudden growth, the WNBA benefited enormously from a highly visible catalyst that brought millions of new eyes to the league. There is nothing unusual about that. Businesses routinely grow around a breakout product, a high-profile client, a charismatic founder, or a new market opportunity.
The challenge comes when the catalyst and the organization begin to look like the same thing.
Long-term growth requires taking the attention generated by one moment, product, or personality and spreading that value across the broader enterprise. New audiences have to discover other teams, other players, other stories, and ultimately the league itself. Otherwise, what appears to be organizational growth may remain disproportionately dependent on the asset that initially created the attention.
At the same time, the cultural environment surrounding the league changed just as dramatically as the business environment. A larger audience didn't simply bring more basketball fans. It brought social media algorithms, political narratives, online harassment, increasingly polarized commentary, and audiences that were often engaging with the controversy surrounding the league as much as the sport itself. That created a much different leadership challenge.
Organizations can control their advertising. They can control their official statements, and typically control much of what appears on their own channels. What they cannot control nearly as easily is the conversation that forms around them once a brand becomes culturally significant. And the larger that conversation becomes, the more difficult it is to manage through cautious corporate responses alone.
That's where governance, communications, player relationships, brand stewardship, and leadership all begin to overlap. A delayed response to a controversy is no longer simply a public-relations decision. It can affect employees, partners, fans, sponsors, and ultimately trust in the organization itself. The distribution of the product adds another layer.
For years, simply getting more WNBA games onto national platforms represented progress. More media partners meant greater reach and more opportunities for fans to find the league. But scale changes that equation too.
A fragmented media environment may make financial sense from a rights perspective while still creating friction for a new or casual audience trying to follow the product consistently. That's not unique to the WNBA; virtually every professional sports league is navigating the same tension between maximizing media value and making the customer experience as simple as possible.
The difference is that established leagues already have generations of habitual viewers willing to hunt for a game. But a rapidly expanding audience may not.
Taken individually, none of these challenges is particularly remarkable. Organizations wrestle with operating capacity, concentrated demand, cultural change, communications, and distribution all the time. What makes the WNBA interesting is that they appear to have arrived almost simultaneously.
The league spent decades trying to create relevance. Well, that relevance arrived with an intensity that began placing pressure on multiple parts of the organization at once. And that is where the story starts looking much less like basketball and much more like business.
WHAT GROWTH EXPOSES
When a business scales at an unnatural, exponential rate, the influx of revenue and attention acts as an accelerant. It doesn't necessarily create new problems, rather, it can magnify existing structural flaws that were manageable when the business was small, but have the potential to become catastrophic under high pressure.
I think we can all agree that expansion creates excitement, but it also stretches infrastructure.
In this case, growing television audiences increased revenue opportunities, but they also magnified every officiating decision and every operational misstep. Greater visibility creates new sponsorship opportunities while simultaneously increasing expectations from players, fans, media partners, and owners. And really, that’s part of the excitement.
Ironically, success, almost by definition, creates additional complexity. And the more I thought about it, the less these headlines looked like isolated events. They looked remarkably familiar.
I've watched this happen in companies for most of my career; a business lands a major client, a manufacturer acquires another facility, a healthcare organization expands into new markets, a regional bank doubles through acquisition, or a technology company receives a large investment and suddenly has to scale.
Everyone celebrates the growth. But then the organization begins experiencing friction points; communication slows, decision making becomes more difficult, and processes that worked perfectly six months earlier suddenly begin breaking down. Unfortunately, the roll starts where customers notice inconsistencies, and employees feel the strain.
Leadership meetings become increasingly focused on solving problems that didn't seem to exist before. And from the outside, it appears growth caused the problems. But I’m not convinced that's what actually happened. I say that because one of the biggest lessons I've learned over the years is that growth rarely creates organizational weaknesses … it just exposes them.
Think about a company with twenty employees. Everyone knows everyone, and a lot of times, problems get solved in the hallway. Decisions happen pretty quickly because everyone understands the context. Documentation is minimal because it doesn't need to be. Then the company grows to two hundred employees.
Suddenly those same informal processes become liabilities. Communication becomes inconsistent, and accountability becomes harder to maintain. Leaders begin discovering that people are operating from different assumptions. The organization didn't suddenly become dysfunctional. The organization simply outgrew the systems that helped make it successful in the first place. And that's a very different diagnosis.
I've found myself thinking about the same thing as organizations rush to embrace artificial intelligence.
Let’s be honest. Beyond the fact that many organizations are simply struggling with how to implement it, there's a common belief that AI is creating disruption inside organizations. I see it through a different lens. Contrary to much of the narrative, I don't think AI is creating inconsistent processes or conflicting definitions across departments.
Those issues were already there, and AI is simply exposing them faster than organizations can ignore them.
From a more personal perspective, I’ve seen these challenges play out enough times over my career that I wanted to think through them before I ever launched my own firm. I spent about six months working through the unsexy parts of the business and marketing plan. The result was a 400-page document that covered the usual suspects; budgets, revenue projections, operating models, staffing, but also mapped out different growth scenarios and what each could mean for the business and the brand.
The questions went well beyond, Can we build awareness and find clients? What happens if we scale faster than expected? What does governance look like then? Can the culture and mission remain intact as the business grows? Does the operating model still support the organization we’re becoming, rather than the one we started with? Can we continue investing in the brand at the right level as revenue changes?
Those aren’t just marketing questions. They’re leadership questions. It’s a lot of work, and much of it may never be needed exactly as imagined, but thinking through those scenarios makes it far less likely that growth catches you completely flat-footed. And I don’t think that exercise is only for a startup. Established organizations should probably be asking many of the same questions as part of their regular planning process.
THE OTHER SIDE OF GROWTH
Ultimately, the chaos surrounding the WNBA illustrates why hyper-growth can be a double-edged sword for any organization. Attention is a powerful commodity, but when a brand successfully captures it, the influx of visibility can stress-test parts of the organization that were built for a very different environment. For the WNBA, the challenge now may be less about generating attention than determining how the organization evolves to support the scale, expectations, and complexity that come with it. In many ways, the league is confronting the very pressures created by the success it spent decades working to achieve.
That's ultimately what continued to pique my interest with what’s going on in the WNBA conversation. It’s not because I suddenly became a fan, or one fantastical headline stood out above another. It was the collection of headlines that illustrated a familiar pattern. Organizations spend years working toward growth, and then growth finally arrives.
What many leaders discover is that success introduces an entirely new set of responsibilities. Systems that once supported the organization need to evolve. Leadership approaches have to mature. Decision-making becomes more disciplined. Governance becomes more important. Communication becomes more intentional. That's true whether you're leading a professional sports league, a healthcare system, a manufacturer, a financial institution, or a technology company.
Perhaps that's the broader lesson hidden beneath all of those recent WNBA headlines. The stories themselves may be about basketball, but isn’t the pattern really about business?
If you think about it, every CEO wants growth, and boards celebrate the growth. I think the organizations that sustain it understand something many others don't: Growth isn't the finish line … it's the moment the next phase of leadership begins.
Growth changes the questions leaders need to ask about the business, the brand, and the role marketing plays in both. If you're asking different questions today than you were a year ago …
Perspective by Clint Allen | President & Founder, CLINTONSCOTT
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