A mistake I made leading at a scale-up

It was as if a light bulb had turned on over my head, like in cartoons.

I was discussing some performance issues in our application with the team, and I had laid out what I thought were the things we could do on our own and what we would probably need to lean on our platform support team to help out with.

I then roughly described how I thought things could play out depending on whether the platform team prioritized our concerns or not, and how that might impact what we did next.

The senior product manager looked me in the eye and said, “Remind the platform team that this project is part of a company priority and they need to be on board if we all want it to be successful. I need your help to push on this.”

I realized at that moment that I was thinking about the situation all wrong. I was optimizing for equilibrium, trying to plot a course around the obstacles, when what I should have been doing was thinking about how to remove the obstacles.

I was practicing good management, but not good leadership.

Of course, thinking about the problem differently still doesn’t guarantee that you can convince other people or teams to “get on the boat,” to help you in the ways that you need them to, but it does help you to visualize the optimal course and communicate more persuasively.

In a small startup, everyone is swinging for the fences all the time, and it can feel like nothing is a sure thing; team priorities are changing by the week if not by the day, new data or customer feedback can pivot entire initiatives in a split second, and literally every conversation is a negotiation.

When the atmosphere is one of constant change, it’s easier to assume that you can cajole other teams to help, because you know that they’re in the same general fog that you are with regard to priority.

Startups are fighting for survival, there is no time for process and predictability, but once the organization has succeeded in finding a product/market fit and gains enough traction to become a “scale-up,” things naturally settle.

When you come into an organization where it feels like things are “figured out,” it can be easy to lean on the established process, to defer to the “powers that be,” and to miss the opportunity to get what you really want.

The truth is that no company, no matter their size, has everything figured out. The one thing that separates a small and immature company from a large and established company is how willing they are to adapt and to change.

Great leaders push their teams, departments, divisions, or entire companies closer to greatness. Part of the job is coloring between the lines, adhering to process where it helps your team to feel safe and motivated toward achievable goals. Another part of the job is poking at the lines to make sure they all belong there.

Are you doing enough poking at the lines?

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