Working in small teams and calling that a start-up doesn’t make an agile and innovative organisation

People really do love buzzwords. For those of us focusing on the way we work concepts like agile, lean, and new-work are the Blockchain, AI, and Deep Learning of these working in tech. Along with the whole fuzz around start-ups being the epicentre of innovation, start-ups are now also glorified as leading the way to the future of work. Leading to a work where employees are encouraged to show high levels of productivity, diligence, and creativity – while giving them the agency and tools to determine how exactly the work is being done.

Eric Ries had a plan - start-ups just do not really seem to care

When Eric Ries developed the lean start-up methodology he realized that many start-ups lacked any form of project management – and sometimes standardized processes all together. A lot has happened since then. Lean start-up became popular and so became agile including SAFe, Kanban, Scrum, and the like. Along with the success of high-tech start-ups from Silicon Valley emerged the hubris of start-ups around the world – ignoring Ries advice to rely on tested project management tools.

Start-ups are frequently thought of as an embodiment of innovativeness and productivity. Well, that’s bollocks

When asking founders about their business, they will talk about some promising opportunity, impressive KPIs, and exponential growth. Maybe, they will also let you in on how much they work and how important it is to be driven, certainly though you will hear about how strongly they focus on getting s*** done, and that corporates suck at being innovative. But, how does this go along with the 90% of all start-ups and the 75% of all venture-backed start-ups that fail? At least for the latter it is apparently not a lack of funding, but rather staggeringly high burn rates and thus maybe a lack of leadership, management, and structure?

Micromanagement is not a viable substitute for structure and established processes

Many start-ups work with talented, yet inexperienced staff. Obviously, this seems like a viable strategy to increase headcount, while capping costs. Well at least that is what you would expect in theory. Problem is, young professionals need guidance, way more than senior staff. Some founders think guidance equals control and thus micromanagement. Guidance, or proper management fot that matter consists of more than just control. Guidance implies that a superior will provide the necessary advice and support his or her team needs to learn, take on responsibility and prosper. Guidance, in contrast to control embraces enablement and empowerment of a team much rather than control over a team. Micromanaging people will hamper young staff in their self-development and thus is likely to result in equally frustrated staff and superiors. Hence, hiring and micromanaging inexperienced staff does not help to build a productive and sustainable organisation. For that, structure and solid processes are as important as trust and enablement.

Structure can help to build an innovative and agile organisation

Instead of focussing on micromanagement founders might be well-advised to accept that stand-up meetings can have a positive effect on internal communication and that taking backlogs, sprints, and the like seriously can really push a team’s productivity. People working in start-ups need to learn that investing time and energy to develop an organisational structure and routines is not time wasted – but the backbone of any agile and innovative organisation, as well as key to a long-term organisational development