Fast growing organizations produce lots of bad news as teams & systems adapt. Decision makers find this emotionally overwhelming, and react instinctively by shooting the messenger. I personally find it very hard, and struggle to remind myself:"This is why you're here. To listen."
Reacting badly to increasing amounts of bad news will result in your colleagues hiding things from you. It doesn't matter if you screwed up, and its all your fault - forcing your colleagues to disconnect you from reality because you're hard to deal with simply makes it worse.
Rapid growth means your BEST case scenario is cyclic inadequacy: You work hard to level up, the business catches up and you're back to not being good enough. It's important to remember that staying ahead of a hypergrowth business ALL THE TIME is impossible for any normal human.
Rapid growth means your BEST case scenario is cyclic inadequacy: You work hard to level up, the business catches up and you're back to not being good enough. It's important to remember that staying ahead of a hypergrowth business ALL THE TIME is an unrealistic expectation.
All businesses have periods of hypergrowth; most growth follows s-curves after all, so the step up when it happens, can be deeply hurtful emotionally. Keep calm, relax, and remember: You wanted success - this is what it feels like.
Don't let that success and it's deeply unnatural side effects be the reason you burn out, or let your colleagues down. Stay calm and balanced and always push yourself to let first principles guide your reactions rather than instinct.
Our instincts have evolved to deal with family sized problems and small amounts of change at a time. Continuously dealing with step function changes in groups larger than 15 people is deeply unnatural for a human, like forcing a dog to walk on its hind legs all the time.
A simple example: Someone drops the ball on the release process and there's an outage. Instinct (fuelled by anger) says: "Correct them". And this works at family sizes & with limited side effects. But at larger scales, first principles say: "Lionize those who are doing it right."
Critiquing the work of someone who knows you well in a small team vs the same with someone who doesn't know you well in a large org produces very different results. The latter causes all sorts of unintended consequences that you will never hear about until things go v. v. wrong.
If you're the kind of person who sees your inadequacy reflected in every piece of bad news, then remember: Irrespective of whether your self-assessment is right or wrong, the solution is to keep calm and stay focused on levelling up.
Bad news is data. Treat it as such.
Bad news is data. Treat it as such.
