As organizations grow they start to trade agility for scale and repeatable process. It’s mostly a healthy trade off but there are many instances in the early hyper-growth stage where the standard operating procedures they teach you in B School fail miserably. Executives can reverse the trend but they have to be both attuned to those failures as they happen and willing to make fast and tough decisions. Both of these behaviors can be perceived as impatience and not letting things “play out”. I’ve yet to see a bad situation solved with just patience, though. The ability to make tough decisions and cut through red tape is what separates greats executives from good ones.

There are three tools I’ve seen work, from the mildest to most extreme.

Resetting KPIs helps since what gets measured gets improved. Many times merely asking for a number (e.g. SLA) to be presented transparently will drive some change. Then, you have to reset priorities (can’t do everything at the same time) and get a time commitment to hit a goal (i.e. I will reach 90% SLA within two weeks). Change will still take some time because large teams work on building momentum, so this isn’t a good tool for a new type of problem, a systematic problem, or one that needs immediate change (not all problems do).

Hiring and reorganizing is more extreme but should be used more often in mid stage organizations. When transitioning from early to growth stage it’s often easy to forget that you have more managers, a better organizational backbone, and the budget to solve some problems with hiring. So instead of doing the above, executives add more responsibilities to an existing team. It used to work early on but when growing fast it’s hard to even maintain your current responsibility and the existing team will likely not give this new area enough attention. Identifying a problem then hiring someone (often more than one) to manage it is often the right solution.

Doing it on your own. As a founder CEO I love getting my hands dirty and it’s often not the right decision. However, as organizations grow they rely more on momentum and complex processes than thinking from first principles. Two years into TrueAccord I once asked the staff why we gave team updates in the order that we did. Not many remembered it was the result of me randomly ordering Trello boards when we started. Random decisions become gospel due to momentum and it’s often up to the executives to tackle a hairy problem, make it their top priority for a short while, create the way to handle it and then hand it off. This way you’re not only solving some of the problem, you’re also setting your team up for success and are more likely to hire an expert to build on your early iteration (while constantly criticizing it. Try to not take it personally).

These tools are effective and mishandling pressing issues can kill your business just as it hits scale. Don’t fret too much about people complaining about misalignment and the definition of success changing. As Tuckman’s model for team dynamic shows us, it takes time for teams to realign around a change in prioritize or structure even in the best of situations. As long as you don’t do it too often the teams will figure out a way to work. Having a problem and not measuring it or setting a goal to solve it is worse. Cut through the noise when you have to.