Stop Setting Your Team Up to Fail

When your team of smart, talented people start missing milestones and shipping bad products, who's to blame?

As a stressed out founder, in a desperate sprint to hit your growth targets or close a round of funding, it's easier to blame others. You're doing your job...they just need to do theirs!

But let's face it. It's your fault.

I get it. I've been there and I've made all of the mistakes.

Hiring too many people too quickly. Dropping new tech priorities onto an overstuffed roadmap. Letting sales close on deals for products we hadn't built yet.

And then we wonder why our team is failing.

When you force your key people into impossible situations, and then they stumble, you rationalize it as a talent issue. You convince yourself you need to fire them. Because the alternative, that you're the cause of the chaos, feels untenable.

Before you blow up your org chart, look at the chaos you are creating.

👉 Stop scaling blindly

Avoid the temptation to ignore proper recruiting and training because you are desperate for capacity today. You are throwing new hires into the deep end, and then wondering why your veteran operators are exhausted from cleaning up the mess and fixing the rookie mistakes.

Set realistic hiring goals. If you want to hire faster, invest in the team that can make that happen while maintaining your disciplined process.

👉 Do fewer things better

Take the time to assess the true capacity of your teams. What's a reasonable sales goal for each sales person? How many product development hours do you really have in your engineering team? How many product development hours are on your roadmap?

Every feature request can't be priority 1, or the increasing churn from unhappy customers will slowly kill your startup and turn off future investors.

Force the hard trade-offs.

👉 Chaos is not the price of survival

The stress of failure looms large when things aren't going as planned. Avoid the trap of trying to force momentum rather than taking a step back to identify the underlying problems.

Don't set up your team to fail.

Take accountability for the mess.

Take charge of your startup's destiny.