What are the biggest challenges in growing and scaling a team? What were your biggest obstacles and how did you overcome them?

Change Management: As you grow the team, you will have to restructure and assign new responsibilities to individuals. This can be tough when you are going from a do-it-all mindset to functional expertise. While making such a change, it could feel like you are taking away the responsibilities from individuals. It is important that you are able to articulate the reasons and define a growth path for all roles as you make the change. Additionally, change management requires communication with stakeholders. If change is not communicated, stakeholders and the team will either start executing based on the older model or the team will get frustrated because they are getting asked about workstreams they are no longer responsible for.

Communicating priorities and responsibilities: As the team grows, it is important to align the team on priorities. It is growing to be harder and harder to oversee individual projects and workstreams. If everyone on the team knows the priorities, goals, and DACIs well, things can get streamlined across projects.

Internal Promotions vs External talent: As you grow the team, you want to reward the employees who have worked hard, who understand the culture, and who have the relationships. However, it is equally important to bring external talent to learn and uplevel the work. As you grow the team, you will need people managers, and promoting internally vs. hiring externally will be a sensitive decision

The hardest part in growth and scale is the balance between process, oversight and autonomy. A 5 person team is well aligned, you know what everyone is working on, and easily collaborate on projects. A 20 person team, not as easy. The first step once you get past a team of 7 is to start thinking about team structure and leadership structure. The team I get to serve has 6 pillars: messaging & positioning, partner marketing, customer marketing, product evangelism, market intelligence, activation and launch.

Each of these pillars has a leader. In some cases it's a team of one. Other functions have more. But this approach lets me look at all of our goals and objectives and attack them accordingly. It also creates a structure that can scale and grow easily. As we continue to grow industry marketing and regional marketing could be pillars that might get added. Structure, leadership at each level is the key to growing and scaling. 

The biggest challenge for me is scaling my management style as the team has grown. It’s not easy! I want to be a manager who’s responsive to the needs of my direct reports, wherever they are on their career journey. More-tenured people need a sounding board, and reassurance in their plans, whereas less-tenured people might crave more instruction.

I love balancing that and helping them set the groundwork for the next stage of their careers. For managers that also means that the bigger your team gets, the less you‘re able to dive into the details. You need to build a team that’s strong enough to handle those details so you can focus more on strategy and less on execution. But that takes a whole lot of trust: They have to believe in your plan, and you have to believe in their capabilities.