There are three basic phases of growth: startup, scale-up and grown-up. While each presents unique obstacles and challenges, the scale-up phase can be particularly difficult for many leaders. In this phase, your job is to prove you can build something, get customers to buy it and make a profit on those sales.
This proofing process helps to both refine your initial proposition and take risk off the table. The small team simply pulls together to get done what needs to get done. If the startup phase is about proving things out, the scale-up phase is about making things repeatable at scale. Social systems get complicated when you add more people, so processes need to be standardized and rules established. This growth is achieved through the identification of efficiencies in established systems and processes.
Growth is slower during the grown-up phase, and making big changes to a mature organization becomes increasingly difficult, largely because stability and predictability are key components of the company. This phase is full of trade-offs, and a delicate balance must be struck. While the development of the necessary processes and structures to ensure scaled growth can be difficult, it is often the social-systems aspect of this phase that proves most difficult for leaders.
When leading a company through the scale-up phase, your job is to impose restrictions. You can no longer have half a dozen different platforms for communication. Culture and norms must become standardized throughout the company. You cannot scale effectively without rules in place, but imposing rules on a company that has previously thrived on the freedom of the startup phase is a major threat to the status quo of the existing culture.
As a result, there is almost always pushback and resentful feelings from company veterans. This resentment is usually accompanied by a mismatch of skills from one phase to the next. The people who were a good match for the company when it was a startup are often not the best people to be working for the company when it begins scaling up.
