Don't Pay Extra Management taxes!

Taxes. Yes, let's discuss them, albeit in a different context. Yes they are boring and we hate filing them. Before you quit reading, Let me say this is not a post about how to save your taxes, file them or anything related to your personal money affairs. In the past few years I have had the experience of looking at organizations as they grow from small scrappy players to beome larger more entrenched entities. The perennial question is to maintain the same hustle and innovation rate as you grow as a startup. In relation, as startups grow, the following trends emerge:

• The idea of a unified company mission which the employees truly beleive in, dimishes. Simple goal resembling mission statements become complex and difficult to grasp english sentences which no one believes in, partly because no one understands them in their totality or sometimes it is too vague to even chase as a goal.
• As a by-product of point 1, the incidence of individual people/leaders looking to push their own inidvidual visions increases, which sometimes directly and mostly tangentially(at best) tie in to the firm's complex mission statment. This is born either out of a hurry to show performance or a incomplete understanding of the market and the company's vision (not that anyone makes it easier for them!)
• As another by-product of point 1, to make sure that everyone sticks to the central mission, tons of strategy formulation, strategy reformulation, review, discussion, open houses, and other sessions start becoming all too common place.
• Lots of industry experts populate the ranks. Mid-managment leaders from larger firms come in to fill the leadership gaps. This is mostly thought to bring in stability as the firm moves to become a more organised player.

All this creates the concept of something I like to call extra management tax. The extra management tax comes in the form of:

• Time allocated by employees all over to develop, measure and improve performance on a wide range of KPIs. Everyone gets pulled in.
• Time spent by mid to senior employees to get a sense of the company vision and build large documents in support of said vision.
• Resources spent to maintain the load of different architectures, reports etc. that get built to run and measure the different visions and the central vision.

Why am I calling it a tax, aren't taxes useful? Doesn't the government build infrastructure as they collect taxes? yes it does but at one point this becomes too high that either evasion of the tax starts or the resources (both human and otherwise) go under duress to pay these taxes. Duress in the case of employees is borne out in the form of all too soon exits or in the case of capital resources, capabilities crumbling as failure occurs and there are not enough people or enough time to solve for all the issues for the long term(you did notice that i said 'extra' in the title and the last paragraph?). Well I have also noticed some all too avoidable practices to keep these taxes in check, as such they are listed below:

• Don't create a layer of middle/lower management whose key task is to mostly take stock and report back. Add people who add skills to the team. Communication flow across the chain of command needs to be quick, simple and correct.
• Don't create a plethora of reports on each KPI that no one really reads. Create central dashboards for metrics of key interest and everyone runs to improve them. Equip teams to meausre wht they need to support said central mission.
• Don't go for quick fixes in the short term that sit outside of current infrastructures to satisfy a thousand dreams. A pipeline with a hundred fixes will burst one day.
• Don't hold daily standups/reciews/discussions/open floor sessions/and what have you which are a obsession in larger organizations. Makes it informal and less intimadating, if someone needs help, let them walk in anytime, if you need a quick update, walk up when necessary (not to satisfy a work OCD though!). Track progress difgitally using tools (e.g. Jira). If you check in too much as a leader, then you either hired wrong or you are a certainity freak (tip: don't work in start-ups)
• Don't chase every shiny object on the horizon. The answer to success at scale also is simple as it was when you were small, Focus :). Don't spread the same guys thin and lock them into an evil cycle of all the other taxes getting added and compounding.
• If you are a smallish company (<500), keep larger discussions and reviews way more informal and less grand events. If your team prepares PPTs for each review, think hard. Could a excel have solved this or a mail?

Which other activity have you notced that creeps up as a startup grows and is just a tax of it's scale and mostly unncessarily so?