The term “growing pains” is now used almost reflexively in the startup context. Sounds like something you have to endure as things move forward. But it’s not the company that feels the pain, but the people who work there. This guest article shows three ways to help teams grow healthily.
When we talk about “growing pains,” on the corporate side we usually mean things like declining efficiency, more coordination, new complexity. Suddenly everything takes longer, productivity drops, priorities become blurred.
For the people who work there, it feels much more concrete: excessive demands, overload, frustration. Decisions take forever, are made by five people at the same time – or by no one. Responsibilities become unclear and orientation is lost.
If you want to scale cleanly, you have to deal with the people in your company just as consistently, structuredly and analytically as you do with your financial plan. What is treated as a “soft topic” in many guides is actually a tough condition for success or failure: Are the right people in the right roles at the right time?
Dealing with this honestly is uncomfortable. You are significantly less loyal to an Excel sheet than to the very first people in the team – because they neither went through the third night of your first due diligence with you nor celebrated the first big customer deal with you.
And that’s exactly why it’s difficult: the people who supported everything in the founding phase and are often more than just colleagues for a long time are not automatically the right fit for the roles that arise.
To make the problem more tangible, it helps to give it a name. Two phenomena describe this early scaling trap particularly well: Heritage Hires and Ghost Positions.
Heritage Hires: Loyalty as a brake on growth
The effect is well known and is repeated thousands of times: A young company starts with a founding team and a few employees. With the first growth spurt, employees become team leads, later “head of” – and suddenly the company has a finance director who recently graduated from university and has never managed more than two people at the same time. The term for this is “Heritage Hire”.
The example is striking, but not taken out of thin air. Because it’s often not the case that the cast wasn’t right from the start – it’s that the role has changed significantly as it grows.
Someone who, as a CFO, got along very well with a GmbH structure in the early stages can suddenly be faced with a completely different reality: international expansion, multiple subsidiaries, different currencies, perhaps another M&A case that needs to be integrated. This is not just more of the same, but a fundamentally different role with different requirements.
There are understandable reasons why people often stick with obviously incorrect line-ups for a very long time. Especially in the initial phase, close bonds are formed – but above all trust. You know how the other person works, how they think, how they make decisions. And that is precisely why there is a great temptation to give these positive factors more weight than the uncomfortable reality: that the requirements of the role no longer match what the person can currently achieve – and that at a certain point this gap can no longer be meaningfully made up.
In the long term, it harms the company if founders shy away from conflict in this situation – and doubly so. On the one hand, for the person themselves: Anyone who is permanently stuck in a role that is overwhelming has neither a good working experience nor a meaningful framework in which to develop further. On the other hand, for the company: the role does not provide the output it needs. Decisions are left undone, projects do not progress, responsibility evaporates.
The organization often reacts to this quite pragmatically: it looks for ways around the problems in order to remain operational. Things are done yourself or in other departments, decisions are sought from other people – until the overwhelmed role is effectively bypassed. This slowly creates what can be called a “ghost position”.
Ghost Positions: Shadow structures to avoid pain
The perfidious thing about ghost positions is that they are not visible from the start. The shadow structures around the overwhelmed colleagues only slowly emerge, often even involuntarily supported by management: New experts are hired because problems become visible in a certain part of the company. In the short term the problem seems to be solved, but in reality the ghost effect is increasing. In the end, management is left with higher wage costs and experts who are dissatisfied because, in addition to their job, they have to manage what they perceive to be an incompetent superior.
These effects are so common that they become a real scaling trap for many actually successful startups. There are ways to retain loyal employees without having to sacrifice growth. In my everyday consulting work, three things have emerged that almost all successfully scaling startups have in common.
- Don’t be afraid to hire people who have more experience than your team
At the very first real growth spurt, it is no longer enough to let roles “grow with you”. Founders need to start clearly describing their existing roles: What output should this role deliver in the next six to twelve months? How can we measure whether this is successful? And what kind of experience does that realistically require?
The crucial step is then an honest comparison: Does the current cast still match what the role now requires?
Sometimes that means creating a new role, including changes to the organizational chart – and specifically bringing in someone with more experience. Sometimes it also means taking a title back from an existing team member because that title now hides a completely different job than it did a year ago.
The attempt to simply supplement a lack of experience with expert positions without management responsibility usually falls short. Additional expertise in the team only helps if the role is clear and stable. If it isn’t, the excessive demands remain – and the actual problem remains unsolved.
- Don’t automatically promote – enable real development
Many heritage hires and ghost positions arise from a simple reflex: development is equated with promotion. And promotion often automatically means more titles – and, above all, more management responsibility. The problem: Not everyone is a good boss. And not every role needs one.
Especially in growing startups, many people end up in leadership positions even though their strengths actually lie elsewhere – in specialist, project or staff roles. Roles in which they would often have significantly more impact.
The alternative is less spectacular, but much more sensible: rethink further development. More responsibility, bigger issues, more influence – without necessarily a jump in title or leadership.
This requires clarity and communication. Employees must understand that a career does not automatically mean “leading larger teams”, but rather “contributing more”. And founders must actively create ways in which exactly this is possible.
Realistic development paths prevent people from being pushed into roles that overwhelm them professionally or personally – and at the same time ensure that potential is used where it really has an impact.
- Radically clarify responsibility – otherwise the organization will do it for you
Ghost positions do not arise because no one wants to decide – but because it is unclear who should.
In the early phases, a lot of things work by shouting. Everyone knows roughly who is working on what. With growth, this changes. Suddenly, issues get stuck between roles, decisions are left undone or are made twice.
The solution initially sounds like unnecessary administrative effort: clearly defining roles and responsibilities and – that’s the trick – implementing them. That sounds banal, but it is surprisingly rarely cleaned. Instead, gray areas arise in which the organization itself dissolves: decisions go to the loudest, fastest or most available.
If you want to scale healthily, you have to take active countermeasures here. Clear responsibilities not only ensure better decisions, but also relieve the team. Because suddenly it’s clear again where you stand – and what you can rely on.
About the author
Marion Nöldgen is the founder of Clearimpact and advises companies on leadership and organizational development in growth and transformation phases. Previously, she spent ten years building, successfully scaling and internationalizing innovative companies in the energy and technology sectors. She works at the interface of strategy and implementation and supports companies in creating clarity in increasing complexity.
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