To Grow Faster, Hit Pause

To me, the OP has a huge gap, so huge what it left out is more important than all it put in.

What it left out has a name; in the academic fields of organizational behavior and public administration, the left out part is called goal subordination.

The definition is an employee, often a middle manager, behaving according to what they see as their own narrow interests even if that behavior is fairly obviously against the interests of the company. So, such an employee subordinates, that is, gives lower priority to, the goals of the company than to their own personal goals.

So, a common part of goal subordination is to fight with people inside the company down the hall instead of competing with people outside the company.

So, essentially the company is in some version of internal war, civil war. Then cliques form; people become loyal to the cliques; and the cliques fight each other.

E.g., the OP mentioned who gets invited to meetings. Well, commonly that is based more on cliques and goal subordination than on what was mentioned in the OP.

One of the techniques of internal clique war is gossip, sometimes called yentas. So, there can be lots of whispering. When a clique wants to attack a person, the gossip can get that person accused, tried, convicted, and punished all without the person knowing anything about it. About all the punished person knows is that they are not invited to meetings; they are not on distribution lists; they don't get e-mail; any e-mail they write is ignored; routine communications are avoided; they are avoided in the offices; they are treated as if they are well known to be helpless idiots, etc. It was all done by gossip from cliques at war.

Beyond gossip, another technique for a clique to attack a person is for the clique to have a team that, one person at a time, drops by the person's office to talk. The talk is never very substantive. The person is reluctant to be rude and throw the people out, but, net, due to the team of the clique, there's no way the person can get any work done in their office. One approach for the person is to look serious and busy and just to say, right away, "I can't stop now."

Another consequence is, an employee with some really good ideas and work can, then, be seen by everyone else as a threat and, then, attacked, by gossip, sabotage, etc. by everyone else. The old advice that the nail that sticks up gets beaten down is part of this. So, people deliberately avoid doing their best work. E.g., maybe in an old piece work shop, the employee that is a high performer and exceeds their quota and gets an award one month has their tires slashed the next month. Much the same thing can happen without piece work.

E.g., maybe in some aspect of production and operations the company is wasting money. So some employee sees an opportunity to save the waste and help the company, say, works out some math (say, as in operations research), writes the corresponding software, runs the software and demonstrates some significant cost savings, writes a paper showing the work and the savings, distributes the paper, develops a dozen foils, and announces a talk to explain. Suddenly he can discover that lots of managers, especially his own, can call and say that the meeting can't be held because they have a conflict in their schedule. It can be the case that even the CEO can feel uncomfortable because this employee is starting to look essential and, maybe, by threatening to leave, hold up the company, be an exception to the compensation plan, etc.

Another one is, in the OP, a decision with low impact that can be reversed is to be made at low levels. Okay. Except, lots of employees have learned that any instance of anything that can be regarded as a mistake can be used by the cliques, gossip, internal wars, etc. to attack and destroy the person who made a fast decision. Maybe with two weeks more study, there was an alternative that would have cost $10 less: Presto, bingo, the person can be accused of wasting money. Even if the person chips in the $10 from their own billfold, the accusation still stands. So, lots of employees just will NOT make a fast decision. Instead, they want everything thoroughly studied, in a paper report big enough to be a door stop, and approved by a committee of a dozen people. More generally, such a person will do everything they can to avoid anything like responsibility or to do anything where they could be blamed or accused of a mistake. That's one of the main reasons companies grind to a halt and one of the main opportunities for startups until they start doing the same thing.

One of the issues is cheating going on. E.g., maybe some part of the operations needs copper tubing so has a big supply that gets used right along for lots of projects. Well, at times copper tubing is expensive. So, maybe the relevant manager has not implemented anything like inventory control over the copper tubing. Then that manager is running a personal cash and carry midnight copper tubing supply business. Anyone who starts to ask about anything at all related gets threatening scowls and, thus, learns just to f'get about copper tubing.

Or, some manager has two secretaries. One of them is busy all the time, and that's the stated reason for the need for the other secretary. This other secretary comes in late, leaves early, and takes long lunch hours on Tuesday and Thursday, is not around on Friday and Monday, and avoids any scheduled meetings on Wednesday because it ruins two weekends. She has a great figure, gorgeous hair, 6" high heels, short skirts, and spends most of her time at her desk reading romance novels or doing her nails. Been known to happen.

Sure, the OP has lots of nice stuff. Sure, with all that nice stuff, everyone working effectively and cooperatively, joining hands, singing Kumbaya, sounds good. But I suspect that the dysfunctional issues I've mention are, in reality, more important. And when a lot of stock compensation is on the line, the dysfunctional issues can become much more common; people can fight like mad dogs for a little more in stock options.

One response is that the CEO can surround himself with people of long time, unquestioned loyalty, and, then, there is a palace guard that is really running the place.

Finally the CEO may just divide the work into departments, divisions, etc., for each of those have some accurate enough quantitative measures of performance, insist that the managers accomplish their performance goals, and otherwise largely ignore the small stuff. If some manager has a secretary doing her nails but otherwise is doing great on his performance numbers, then great -- the CEO takes the results of the good performance to the bank or the BoD and otherwise relaxes. Ugly situation, but so is a lot of clique internal war, dysfunctional goal subordination, etc.

Let's see: This OP was from First Round Capital. No doubt they have some BoD seats. Then as BoD members, they need to pay attention to goal subordination as here. For the singing Kumbaya stuff in the OP, f'get about that.

Very surprised to see First Round resort to guilt/shame when readers opt-out of their full-screen email signup modal

Honestly, even if I wanted to sign up for this list, just seeing that button would change my mind. And I assume many people in their target audience would feel similarly.

Since this is on the site, I assume it "performs better" than alternative designs. But this is probably just looking at one metric: how many people sign up.

It overlooks the fact that a higher percentage of people who don't sign up now think less of First Round.