Upscaling 5 - The Agility pitfall

Upscaling and agility. A delicate relationship. As a #startup the organisation was extremely agile, it is what made it successful. Now the organisation is upscaling. Is it going to lose its magic trait? As the push for infrastructure, processes and policies increases, is the organisation going to lose its agility?

When there is a team of 20 with a great idea, it gets executed. When there is a team of 80 with a great idea, it gets endlessly talked about. It creates the need to put in place processes, structures, accountabilities, policies, decision making hierarchies. How to structure for growth without falling into the bureaucracy trap?

Keeping agile is essential, that’s why it is important to create an #organizationculture around creativity and #innovation, facilitated by strong leaders. I personally believe in the #distributedleadership model (primarily but not exclusively for knowledge-based companies), where organisations thrive without traditional hierarchical structures, instead they emphasis collaboration, shared knowledge and individual ownership and autonomy. The key is trust.

With a scale up, you have little time to grow a culture of trust organically over time, but you can implement a strong Learning & Development program that emphasizes on distributed-leadership skills that will in return generate a culture of trust.