Any successful business will become a corporate one day.
For years, I’ve been wondering how businesses become so rigid, bureaucratic and political.
Early days at a startup hand you a lot of rope: there is so much to build and never enough people to build it, so no one is watching closely enough to stop you.
The company is constantly fighting for the survival and everything changes dynamically. There is simply no time to write things down as everyone is constantly busy with other responsibilities which matters more.
Initially, the company feels flat, with roles blurred and a shared goal.
As the organization becomes more successful and survives the first years of this armageddon then there is a time to start building a proper structure and hierarchy.
There are simply more people working and it becomes difficult to control. When you have group of up to 50-100 people you can still remember everyone’s name and responsibilities. Not everything, but you can have some idea what everyone does on a daily basis.
But already at this stage you, as an owner, simply cannot talk to each person on a weekly basis. It consumes a lot of time and majority of things being discussed are irrelevant.
Let’s face it – as a founder/owner/general manager your job is to make sure that everyone executes their task and the company is moving forward.
If you start spending your time listening to every detail on how things are going badly or trying to understand internal conflicts between people then you will end up spending days listening to these drama stories and not doing anything productive.
This is the moment where you start dividing people on groups (departments) and start hiring managers who will be able to make sure that this group of people is well handled.
Then these managers are reporting directly to the owner and filtering the information that is actually relevant.
A professional manager will never share that there is a conflict inside his team as this is not their boss’ problem, but the manager’s.
Now, it is also the time where things are becoming political.
People who are lower in the hierarchy usually want to grow internally and move up in this ladder. The thing is that this is not a convenient solution from the manager’s point of view as promoting someone inside their team means that there must be a replacement. It is really hard to replace a former employee as it requires time, hiring and training.
Once you know that your subordinate is exploring new opportunities, you can assume they will either leave the team or simply move to another company.
As a manager you usually do not understand what this person does. Manager’s job is to make sure that these people perform better each quarter instead of understanding every detail of their job.
Because manager has a limited understanding of the job then usually kindly asks the person to write down what they do or tries to build a proper standard operating procedure (SOP), so another person can learn how to perform the task faster.
This is the first step where company starts transforming from a start-up into a larger organization where people start building secrets and relationships which will make them grow internally.
I’m not here to say whether it is fair or not, but this is how the reality works.
Individual contributor tries to get higher in the ladder, but is being blocked by their manager who wants to do exactly the same, however the manager has the upper hand in such situation.
The pattern is always the same, and once you have lived through it once you will recognize it in every company you ever join after that.
At first you are an important player when the team is small, but later on you become a small cog surrounded by managers who joined later than you with completely different mentality and view on the business.
Ultimately, there is no way to escape this schema. No better system has been invented so far.
I have personally worked for a start-up where we wanted to keep things flat and tried everything to escape this bureaucratic approach.
As the company started growing all the steps above started happening which ultimately led to place where you ask a person for help and instead of hearing “let’s figure it out” you hear “this is not part of my scope – ask someone else”. This is the moment when you can be sure that you are already transforming into something different.