Mission-critical leadership development in hyperscale

Lanes & Planes is a Munich-based scaleup with over 250 employees that offers an end-to-end solution for business travel. The platform covers the entire business travel process, from booking and billing to analysis.

The Challenge

In recent years, Lanes & Planes has experienced massive growth - withthis rapid scaling came challenges familiar to many high-growth companies:

• Evolving Internal Leadership: Ensuring internally promoted experts could effectivelytransition into strategic system-builders.
• Integrating New Leaders: Accelerating the adaptation of external hires to the company's culture while maintaining the big picture strategy.
• Goal Alignment: Introducing new frameworks to ensure ambitious objectives remain perfectly aligned across teams in diverse locations and functions.

For Lanes & Planes, solving these challenges was critical. Sustaining growth while maintaining a productive, people-centered culture required leaders who could bridge operational realities with future ambition.

The Solution

Beside internal initiatives, Lanes & Planes rolled out leadership development together with Orange Elephant to equip leaders for this pivotal phase, step by step:

Rising Leaders program: building confidence in first-time managers

Introduced in 2023 for team leads, this 12-month journey included highly interactive sessions (80% role play and practice) focused on the day-to-day realities of leadership in a fast-growth environment. Buddy sessions between workshops created accountability, ensuring participants didn’t just learn concepts but actively applied them.

Experienced Leaders program: strengthening the head-of layer

Building on early success, Lanes & Planes launched a program in 2024 for experienced leaders at the head-of level. This program provided sparring opportunities around the complexities of scale, such as balancing close team involvement with strategic foresight. The sessions emphasized discussion and peer exchange to collectively evolve the unique Lanes & Planes leadership style.

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Credible trainers who have walked in their shoes

A critical success factor was the trainers themselves. Having led in scaleups, they knew firsthand the balancing act between structure and agility. They also collaborated directly with the CEO and VP People & Organization, ensuring the program content was deeply aligned with the realities of the company.

A lean and efficient approach to people development

Lanes & Planes wanted a highly effective program that would equip leaders without requiring a large operational involvement of the people team. By relying on Orange Elephant’s operations team, the program kept the people team lean and efficient.

Strengthening leadership systems and internal processes

In parallel with the training programs, Lanes & Planes also worked on reinforcing its internal leadership infrastructure. The company introduced acompany-wide competency model, performance reviews that included upward feedback for managers, launched internal assessments for potential leaders to define personalized development plans, and established regular Team Lead Lunches for sharing best practices. 

Additionally, onboarding for new leaders was expanded through Lanes &Planes-specific tech-enabled learning paths, ensuring that new managers could quickly align with the company’s leadership culture and expectations.

Impact

The programs proved to be effective on quantitatively and in qualitative feedback that leaders gave over the past years:

• >90% of training participants recommend the program to a colleague
• 9 out of 10 of participants reported the training was highly relevant to their daily leadership challenges.

Qualitative impact:

• Leaders highly valued practicing handling difficult conversations (e.g., salary discussions, vacation requests, promotion denials) in a safe environment before facing them.
• The buddy system created real accountability, as one participant put it: “It wasn’t justme saying I’d done it, someone checked in and gave me feedback on whether I actually followed through.”
• The organization noticed that the leadership teams began to speak a common language around leadership behaviors, strengthening cohesion and cultural alignment during hyperscale.

Takeaway

Lanes & Planes is proving that investing in leadership development is key to scaling without losing cultural DNA. Leaders are now better equipped to balance speed with structure, ensuring the organization can sustain momentum without compromising culture. For a business in hyperscale, this investment is not a nice-to-have, it is mission-critical.

Company Profile

Lanes & Planes is a leading provider of digital solutions for business travel and expense management. The Munich-based company offers an end-to-end-platform that digitally maps the entire process from travel bookingto invoicing and analysis.

With Lanes & Planes, companies reduce their travel costs by up to 30%, automate processes, and ensure convenient and safe business trips for their employees. 

Over 1,400 companies from all sectors, including Enpal, Personio and the edding Group, already use Lanes & Planes for their business travel management. The company is backed by leading global investors, including Battery Ventures and DN Capital.