You know those engineers who, in the name of preferring ‘best practices,’ copy things automatically? You can probably spot that going on in your teams and avoid people implementing the same infrastructure and processes that work for a Fortune 100 company but would cripple your startup. Great. How about when you’re doing the equivalent as a leader?

Fake It Till You Break It

Often, executives describe their choices to me in a way that’s hand-wavy at best. There’s this inherent belief that if you do what everyone’s doing, you’re fine. We can see it everywhere and at every level of a startup’s existence. This, unfortunately, is just fancy cargo-culting.

Consider new startup founders’ almost automatic search to hire a VPE (or someone who’s effectively that) as one of their first handful of employees. What is the rush to distance founders from the actual work and introduce managerial overhead that fast? Asking that, I’ve literally heard back, “That’s just how it’s done, isn’t it?”

You see that in how they set goals, what they promise their investors regarding growth targets, the speed at which they hire employees (which often is entirely disconnected from how the business itself is progressing), and more. Even more simplistically, it manifests in processes that are just playing pretend-startup: Stand-ups devoid of value, retrospectives that are plainly performative, and OKRs that have nothing to do with strategy.

Still, you can keep boasting about your “progress” and expensive swag on LinkedIn for a few good months before reality eventually catches up with your runway. You’re “doing what everyone’s doing,” right? However, sometimes, faking it till you make it can lead you astray.

Intentional Decisions

Again, the purpose of this article is not to drive you to Not-Invented-Here territory. There’s a lot of value in using tried-and-tested practices over inventing all the wheels in your company. However, the issue is how easily we allow ourselves to trust that whatever others are doing makes sense in our case without the needed due diligence.

To address the issue, all it takes is diligently applying a bit of critical thinking. When considering hiring a person, ask yourself how you would know whether it has improved your situation, what are the risks and disadvantages, and what your alternatives are. When someone asks for help with their process not working well or not being able to reach a certain KPI or objective, I make sure that they understand why it matters in the first place.

Understanding the thinking behind even ‘trivial’ decisions means that:

• You’ll be able to tell whether that decision is relevant for you.
• You can assess, as it is happening, whether it is harder than you expected and course correct.
• You won’t be building a ‘generic’ company that looks like any other on LinkedIn.
• You will spot when it does make sense to do things your own way.
• You’ll be in control and mindful, actually taking the lead as a leader.
  

I don’t think you’ve got a lot of different options here. I get liking Autopilot in your Tesla, but in your life?