Why more process isn’t always the answer for scaling businesses
I’ve been thinking about a pattern I keep seeing in the founder-led scale-ups I’ve worked with over the years.
It goes like this. Founders hire a “professional manager” to bring structure as their companies grow past a certain size – usually somewhere between 20 and 50 people. The manager arrives with all the right credentials. They talk about governance frameworks and reporting cadences and accountability matrices (I am aware that I talk about those things a lot too – bear with me).
Six months in, they’ve got more process. More status updates. More syncs. More meetings. More meetings about the meetings. More meetings to debrief about the meetings.
And mysteriously, less actual real progress is happening.
Meanwhile the people who were actually making things work – the ones with judgement, who could hold complexity, who protected the team from nonsense – now look “less senior” because they’re not playing the performance game.
That’s not a bug in the system the manager installed. That’s the system working exactly as it was designed to.
This article is about the trap of premature professionalisation in scaling businesses, why it’s responsible for more stalls than most founders realise and what the alternative looks like.
Managerialism: the ideology that eats scale-ups
A lot of scale-ups don’t fail because they lack talent or strategy.
They fail because they get trapped inside a governing ideology that makes everything look under control while making the business progressively less able to learn, adapt, or even tell the truth about itself. That ideology has a name: managerialism.
It’s the belief that performance comes primarily from measurement, oversight, targets, and professionalised control over other people. It treats businesses as if they’re best improved by tightening the grip – clearer KPIs, sharper accountability, more reporting, more standardisation.
Squinted at from a distance, managerialism sounds reasonable. Of course we should measure things. Of course people should be accountable. Of course we need process as we scale.
The problem is what happens when you run that logic all the way through in a scaling business where the work is interdependent, uncertain, and constantly changing.
Under the complexity of real scale-up conditions, managerialism produces a predictable pattern of failure.
Work becomes legible, not viable. The system optimises for what can be seen and counted, not for what actually matters. The metrics are impressive. The business isn’t moving.
Judgement gets displaced by compliance. People learn that staying safe means following process, not solving the real problem – even when they know what the real problem is and how to solve it. The risk of deviating from the playbook becomes personal and visible, while the cost of following the playbook into a bad outcome is diffuse and shared.
Deep learning is replaced by performance theatre. Dashboards and RAG statuses multiply while the underlying work that creates value stays stuck. Leadership meetings become displays of control rather than conversations about the actual problems.
This is the root of more failure in scaling businesses than people talk about. When a system is governed primarily by managerialism, it becomes excellent at appearing coherent and increasingly incapable of being coherent.
How it happens (and why it looks like the right hire)
Here’s how founders walk into this. At about 25 or 30 people, the informal way of running the business has started to fail. Coordination is fraying. Quality is slipping. The founder is exhausted. Investors or advisors are whispering about the need to “mature” – maybe to bring in a “proper” operations person. The language is telling. “Mature”, “proper”, “professional”. None of which are bad things on their own. All of which become poisonous when they slip into being euphemisms for “install a controlling management layer”.
The founder interviews some candidates. The best-sounding ones bring polished slide decks about governance frameworks. They’ve run matrixed organisations at scale. They use the vocabulary of operational excellence fluently. They feel like grown-ups. The founder, tired and hoping someone will take the operational mess off their plate, hires them.
And then the professionalisation begins.
More process. Tighter controls. New KPIs. New reporting lines. New meetings.
Within six months, the business has acquired the appearance of being better run. Diligent observers might even say it looks more professional. But the people doing the actual work of creating value are quietly becoming disengaged, because the new system doesn’t reward their judgment, their nuance or their ability to hold complexity. It rewards their ability to fit inside a box.
The tragedy: what gets lost
The tragedy of managerialism isn’t just that it fails the potential the founder built into the business.
It’s that it systematically fails to recognise the leaders who were actually doing the work of coherence. Those are the ones who were redesigning rhythms, holding the messy conversations, protecting the team from nonsense and keeping judgement alive in the middle of the business. In the new system, they look like poor performers – because the system can’t see what they actually do.
A few of them hang on for a while, frustrated, explaining repeatedly why the dashboard isn’t telling the truth. Most eventually leave.
The business loses the people it most needed to retain, acquires the people best at performing inside managerialist systems, and finishes up with an operating layer that feels rigorous but produces slower, worse decisions than the informal chaos it replaced.
I’ve walked into businesses at exactly this point. The founder is confused: the new system is working, on paper, but the business has stalled. The answer is almost always the same. The professionalisation went too far, too fast, and the wrong direction.
The alternative: structure that serves competence, not replaces it
I don’t want to be misread here. Scale-ups absolutely need structure as they grow.
A business at 50 people with no operating cadence, no goals framework and no role clarity is going to collapse under its own weight just as surely as one strangled by managerialism. The question isn’t whether to install structure. The question is what kind, at what pace, in service of what.
Here’s the principle I try to hold to whenever I’m doing this work as a fractional COO or advising a founder who’s about to hire one.
The structure should serve the competence already in the business, not replace it.
Every process you install should be asked the same question: does this make the people with judgement more effective, or does it constrain them in favour of the people without? If the answer is the second, the process is wrong.
Five principles follow from that.
1. Install the lightest version that works. A weekly leadership meeting is a form of cadence. A goals framework the leadership team uses to align priorities is a valuable practice. A monthly review of the five key metrics is a helpful rhythm. These things are load-bearing but light. Layered matrix reporting, detailed accountability grids and formal RAG dashboards are all heavier and usually premature at 15 people.
2. Name and protect the people with judgement. Before you install any new process, identify the people in the business whose judgement the business most relies on. Make sure the new structure amplifies them, not constrains them. If it would make them look less effective, it’s the wrong structure.
3. Reward coherence, not compliance. The highest-value behaviour in a scaling business is the ability to hold complexity and act coherently inside it. That’s different from following process. Build recognition for coherence explicitly into how you evaluate leaders, because managerialism will quietly erode it if you don’t.
4. Hire operators who are allergic to process theatre. When the time does come to hire a senior operations or COO role, interview specifically for somebody who has visibly pushed back against unnecessary process in their past roles. Ask them for a story about a time they removed something rather than added something. If they can’t give you one, don’t hire them.
5. Run your operating cadence through a lens of “is this helping anyone make decisions?”. Every meeting, every dashboard, every report should pass that test. If nobody is making a decision differently because of it, kill it.
“Simon has an outstanding skill set and extensive experience in technology, business operations and management. He is easy to work with and can effectively draw on his skills and experience to help solve problems with calm authority and creativity. I highly recommend Simon to anyone looking for efficient, energetic and effective support.”
Neil Benson, serial biotech founder at Xenologiq, Quantlmed & Sevenless Therapeutics
What I do differently in a scale-up engagement
When I come into a scaling business as a fractional COO or consultant COO, the first few weeks are almost always spent resisting the pull toward managerialism. There’s usually a founder who thinks they need more structure, a leadership team that wants more clarity, and a vocal investor or advisor who wants more reporting. All of these forces are legitimate. All of them point toward putting more weight on the business.
My job is to introduce the minimum amount of new structure that actually helps people make decisions, protect the people with judgement from the process theatre that would have followed and build an operating layer that scales without ever becoming the point.
Founders, leadership and a business operating system (BOS) – in that order – are the three levers. The BOS is the third one, not the first one, and when founders skip straight to the BOS without first attending to their own development and the quality of the leadership team, the structure they install usually becomes managerialism by stealth.
Next step. If you’re about to hire a head of operations, a COO, or a chief of staff, the best thing you can do this week is pressure-test how they think about process before you ask them to design any of it. The second-best thing you can do is get a second pair of eyes from somebody who has watched managerialism erode a scaling business from the inside and can help you avoid it. That’s a conversation I’m always happy to have.
