I read this a few weeks ago, and it’s been going through my mind a lot:
Netflix Reference Guide on our Freedom and Culture
One of the points in this document has to do with what happens when companies grow and react to their new size… poorly.
Small companies and teams start creative. They are scrappy, fighting to survive, and willing to go all in, every single time, to make it another day. They are going up against bigger and more established competition, and their only chance is to be better. Each challenge is a chance for every member of the team to wrack their brains to figure out the best way to succeed.
Fossilize
Companies and teams that do this well reap the reward for success – more resources to spend on more stuff. The problem is that more resources means more people, and it is insanely difficult to grow a small, intimate, high performing team into a large, intimate, high performing team. So when it gets rough, teams often react in the same way – fossilizing the thought processes, methods, systems, policies, and procedures that earned them success in the past.
This works for a while. Because, check it, the way the team operated in the recent past was GOOD. It worked well. And for a while the pain decreases, success increases, things seem pretty solid.
Sure, sometimes one team has more problems than before.
Or sometimes we don’t seem to be making quite as much profit as we used to.
Or sometimes we make those fiddly little mistakes that aren’t make or break, but indicate that we aren’t 100% on top of our game.
Little stuff. Building up. Because, what made the company great in the past wasn’t a book of “DO THIS WHEN THAT HAPPENS”, but the ability to react in the right way when THAT HAPPENS. The organization has fossilized.
Polish
Then something dramatic happens. Like a disruptive force in your market, like free Google Analytics. Or an enormous amount of good, cheap (in U.S. dollars) help from India. Or, say, the worst economic recession since the 1920′s. And that’s when the fossilization of your team really makes itself known. Because while you weren’t looking, your team forgot how to be really good at responding to a new challenge with the best thinking. Instead, they got really good at following and refining your methods, systems, policies, and procedures. When a challenge arises, instead of solving the challenge your team gets to work polishing the fossil.
“What process should we change so that this one time event never happens again?”
“This mistake happened because that person didn’t know the system, we need a better rollout procedure.”
“My customer wouldn’t have hung up on me if we had a piece of CRM software, let’s buy one.”
“Our team members would make better decisions if we had a better performance review system, let’s install and mandate one.”
There’s nothing wrong with those thoughts, and they sometimes indicate the right line of thinking. But if you are fielding problem after problem, like the ones above, and answering those by looking inside, inward, and internally, time after time, you are polishing your fossil, not solving your customer’s problems. Keep polishing and all that will remain of your team or business will be that immaculate fossil. Hopefully you’ll find a museum interested in displaying it.
