I’ve been thinking a bit 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 the a number of people – usually 20 to 50.
That manager arrives with all the creds. 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 about the meetings. More meetings to debrief about the meetings.
But 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.
And that’s not a bug in the system. It’s the system that manager designed working exactly as designed.
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 whilst making it progressively less able to learn, adapt or even tell the truth.
Yes my friends, that ideology is managerialism.
It’s the belief that performance comes primarily from measurement, oversight, targets and professionalised control over others. It treats businesses as if they’re best improved by tightening grip: clearer KPIs, sharper accountability, more reporting, more standardisation.
If you squint hard enough it sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?
But under the complexity of the real world in scaling businesses – where the work is interdependent and uncertain – managerialism creates a predictable pattern of failure.
Work becomes legible, not viable. By that I mean the system optimises what can be seen and counted, not what actually matters.
Judgement gets displaced by compliance. People learn that staying safe means following process, not solving the real problem even if that’s what they know should really happen.
Deep learning is replaced by performance theatre. Dashboards and RAG statuses multiply, whilst the underlying work that creates value stays stuck.
This is the root of more failure in scaling businesses than people seem to talk about.
When a system is governed primarily by managerialism, it becomes excellent at appearing coherent and increasingly incapable of being coherent.
The tragedy of managerialism isn’t just that it fails the potential those founders embued in their businesses.
It’s that it systematically fails to recognise the leaders who are actually doing the work of coherence.
Those are the ones redesigning rhythms, simplifying handovers, clarifying responsibility and reducing friction. They’re building capability instead of policing compliance.
In other words it punishes the very leadership it claims to want.
I see this pattern a lot with the founders I work with. They’re stuck because they hire managerialism dressed up as expertise. Being a big 4 consultant doesn’t necessarily make you a great fit for being a scale-up operator.
So what’s the alternative?
It’s not chaos. It’s not the flat, leaderless organisations I would have advocated for a decade ago.
It’s a different governing logic that recognises coherence comes from:
Clarity of purpose and responsibility (not proliferation of KPIs)
Distributed judgement (not centralised control)
Rhythm that creates space for thinking (not reporting that consumes it)
Leaders who can hold ambiguity (not managers who need everything measurable)
It means asking yourself whether we’re building real capability or are we enabling the merry dance of performancemanagement theatre?
Because the organisations that scale well aren’t the ones with the most sophisticated dashboards.
They’re the ones where people can still tell the truth.
They’re the ones where someone can say “this isn’t working” without triggering a blame cascade.
They’re the ones where the system is designed to be coherent, not just to look coherent.
“So Simon, how do I spot this?” I hear you ask. Here a few questions to think about to see if this is going on in your scale-up:
When you look at your leadership team, who gets promoted? Are they the people who make things work or the people who make things look like they’re working?
How much of your team’s time is spent doing the work versus reporting on the work?
What’s the ratio of managing the work vs doing the work?
And if you’re really honest with yourself, are you building the organisation you say you really want or a managerialist machine that’s just better disguised?
