Your team can't stay scrappy forever

There’s a version of growth that looks great from the outside.

Headcount is up and so is your revenue. You've earned new customers, you’re hiring into new teams, entering new markets and generally making things happen. But then, somewhere along the way, you notice something else. People are stretched and decisions are taking longer. Managers are spending more time solving problems that shouldn’t really need solving and good people are asking the same questions over and over because nobody is quite sure how things are supposed to work.

And the team that once felt incredibly nimble starts to feel…harder. This is one of the less talked-about parts of scaling.The work itself gets more complicated, but so does the work around the work.

Complexity has a cost

When a company is small, a lot of organisational knowledge is shared naturally. You overhear the conversation. You know why a decision was made and you know who to ask. You understand how things work because you were there when they were figured out. However, as the team grows, that starts to disappear.

Someone joins who wasn't in the original conversation. A new team gets created. A manager now has five direct reports instead of two and the leadership team is making decisions that need to be understood by 100 people rather than 20.

None of this is inherently a problem, but it does mean people need a little more clarity than they used to.

Otherwise, they start spending time working out the organisation instead of doing their jobs.

• Who owns this?

• Who makes the decision?

• Do I need approval?

• What's actually expected of me?

• Why are we hiring this role?

• What happens next?

  
  

Individually, these are small things but across a growing organisation, they add up.

This is where structure earns its keep

Structure isn't about making every part of a business predictable. It just can't. And it shouldn't.

It's about giving people enough clarity that they can get on with their work without constantly having to navigate ambiguity.

 → A good hiring process means a hiring manager doesn't have to reinvent recruitment every time they need someone.

 → A clear role and scorecard means candidates are being assessed against something meaningful rather than whoever makes the strongest impression in an interview.

 → A workforce plan means you're thinking about capability before the gap becomes urgent.

 → A straightforward onboarding process means a new starter can find their feet without needing five different people to explain the business to them.

 → Clear expectations give managers something to work from when they're leading teams for the first time.

None of these things are particularly exciting and that's partly the point.

Good infrastructure tends to be invisible when it's working well.

The aim isn't consistency for consistency's sake

There's also a danger in going too far. We've all seen processes that exist because someone decided there should be a process. Think of all the forms that nobody reads or the meetings that exist because they always have or the approval steps that slow down decisions without making them any better.

That isn't useful structure.

The test should always be: "Does this make it easier for people to do good work?" If it does, keep it. If it doesn't, question it. If something worked brilliantly when you were 30 people but is now getting in everyone's way at 150, change it. Your organisation isn't a finished product and neither is the way it operates.

Protect the things that shouldn't get lost

This is where we think structure gets particularly interesting because the point isn't simply to make a business more organised, it's to protect the things that made it good in the first place.

• Speed

• Autonomy

• Good judgement

• People taking ownership

• Teams being able to make decisions without waiting for permission

A growing company can lose those things surprisingly easily and not because someone decided to introduce bureaucracy, but because nobody introduced anything at all. Suddenly every decision needs more people involved because the organisation has become harder to navigate.

The irony is that a lack of structure can create more bureaucracy than structure does.

When nobody knows who owns something, everyone gets involved so when the hiring process isn't clear, more people get pulled into decisions. When managers don't know what they can decide themselves, everything finds its way back to the leadership team. When priorities aren't clear, teams create their own.

That's a lot of friction.

Start with the friction

You don't need to look at the whole organisation and decide it needs “more process”. You need to look at where people are struggling.

→ Where do decisions get stuck?

→ Where are managers repeatedly asking for help?

→ Where do new starters struggle to find their feet?

→ Where are hiring decisions inconsistent?

→ Where are teams duplicating work?

→Where does everyone seem to know that something isn't working, but nobody quite knows whose job it is to fix it?

Those are the clues.

•  Sometimes the answer is a process.

•  Sometimes it's a clearer role.

•  Sometimes it's better management support.

•  Sometimes it's a conversation that should have happened six months ago.

•  And sometimes the answer is to remove something altogether.

The point is to solve the actual problem rather than reach for a template because “that's what a growing company is supposed to have”.

Growth and organisation aren't separate things

We often talk about growth as though the People side of the business has to catch up afterwards.

You build the product, get the customers and grow the revenue. Then you'll sort out the organisation.

But the organisation is part of the growth. The way people work affects how quickly decisions get made.

The way managers operate affects how well teams perform and the way you hire affects how quickly capability comes into the business.

The clarity people have around their roles affects how much energy they can put into the work itself.

As complexity increases, those things matter more, not less. So the question isn't really: “Are we big enough to need structure?” it's“Is the way we're working still helping people perform?”

If the answer is yes, great. Keep going! If the answer is no, then don't wait until everyone is exhausted and the cracks are impossible to ignore. You probably don't need:

• A massive People function.

• A 47-page handbook.

• To become corporate.

You might just need to make a few things clearer because the best structure doesn't get in the way of growth. it gives your people a better chance of keeping up with it.

That's the work we do at Morrigan Talent: helping growing businesses work out what needs more clarity, what needs building and, just as importantly, what can stay wonderfully scrappy.

Because growth should make your organisation more capable, not just more complicated.