Congrats! You’ve worked so hard to get your team running, only to find out you’ve embedded mediocrity as a cultural tenet. When we don’t get enough external criticism, it’s easy to lose sight of the slow deterioration in a team’s robustness. Let’s help you learn from a bunch of real-world examples I’ve seen over the past 18 months.

Stick With Outdated Approaches

You are naturally more prone to commit this mistake if you’re leading an organization that’s been around for a while, but not necessarily. An example of the former is when a company maintains a huge manual QA organization that even the VPs admit doesn’t have the right ROI, yet they continue because they don’t want to “rock the boat.” Fast forward a couple of years, and the boat drowned. However, you can see this happen in young startups when the founders mimic things they did in previous companies and don’t “refresh” their approaches.

I am not saying you should be novel in your leadership approaches. Admittedly, you’re likely going to be better off investing your efforts and creativity in the product and not becoming a leadership thought leader. Nevertheless, this is the operating system of your organization, and when your beliefs about how to do things are outdated, you’ll be laying the wrong foundation from day one. Upgrade your operating system.

Multiple Single Points of Failure

When you’re moving fast, it can be very hard to consider your “bus factor.” Inevitably, there will be areas that aren’t known by many people at particular periods, and that’s to be expected. Yet that doesn’t mean you should embrace the creation of a chain; the breakage in any of its links would result in major disruption.

It’s bad enough when this happens because you have a small team and thus any particular engineer will be missed, but I see teams that align work along functional parts in a way that maximizes the creation of SPOFs. There’s no denying teams can be more productive in the short term when each one is working on their own projects disconnected from others. However, if you don’t have them regularly mix up their work, you’ll end up with a team that must be rigid: no one can leave safely.

Needless Tech Complexity

Another surefire solution to make your team brittle is to opt for the rapid adoption of tech approaches and solutions before they’re needed. When you do that, not only do you end up looking like a child trying on their parents’ clothes, but you’re also inviting complexity issues prematurely.

I routinely see teams that have an order of magnitude more micro services than engineers. I’m sorry, but that’s an exaggeration. Especially so for early-stage startups that do not gain real benefits from this fragmentation of the code as they will probably have to throw out half of the stuff anyway before reaching any real product-market fit and are making all the maintenance in the meantime drastically more expensive.

Creating Robust Org Structures

The problem with this one is that the rigidity in your organization’s structures or conventions comes at the cost of aligning the organization with real business needs. For example, you might have spun up a few nano-teams expecting them to be long-lived and grow with time, only to realize that’s no longer how one creates profitable engineering organizations. What are you to do?

If you don’t address the misalignment head-on, the organization will become more and more accustomed to this awkward way of doing things, which will make the inevitable reckoning harder. Headcount is not a sign of progress for a manager. Bending over backwards to divide responsibilities and work across several small teams that aren’t really needed has an overhead that outweighs the benefit of retaining a pretend manager.

Hiring for Short-Term Value

Hiring is never easy. And the time you’re spending interviewing people is time you’re not investing into working on the product. That’s why many tech leaders, when pressed for time, start lowering their bar and bringing in people they know aren’t a good fit. That’s how you might end up creating teams that comprise a mix of part-timers, hourly contractors, and people who lack the right experience.

While that might allow you to reach a particular milestone sooner, it comes at the cost of allowing fundamental parts of your product to be based on subpar work, which will make it harder to bring in A-players later on. After all, most people are looking to join really good teams or create them. Why go into a sick team in the hopes of “fixing” it if you’ve got plenty of other options? Thus, a negative feedback loop is created, where the company has the wrong people because it was hard to hire the right ones, yet now it has gotten even harder to bring them on.

Managing for Short-Term Value

If you want to create an extremely brittle team, micro-manage it and stay on top of everything as much as you can. You’ll see productivity go up right away, as you’ll be able to squeeze out performance, unblock people, and avoid many mistakes. Make sure all communication goes through you, that you measure people based on their inputs, like when they head home, and you’re there for every minuscule decision.

And enjoy that while it lasts. You can keep all those plates spinning only for so long, especially as your team grows, the system becomes more complex, and you realize that you’ve got real responsibilities beyond being a kindergarten teacher (like hiring the right people). If you want to try something else, opt for robust teams that are empowered, have clear business objectives, and have the right talent to work toward those achievements.

Neglect for Short-Term Value

Very rarely do people plainly admit to neglecting their teams and not investing in them. That doesn’t mean you’re not actually doing that, though. For example, a CTO managing more than 100 people told me a couple of years ago that he does not have the budget or the time to coach his people and train them. He thought that the only option they had was to keep rushing forward, working harder in a futile attempt to maintain old momentum that was already fading away.

I later read that that organization ended up being completely pulverized. Imagine how much better off that organization—and the entire startup—would be had they realized that moving fast and breaking things isn’t always the right algorithm for choosing how teams are being managed. They were, in fact, committing several of the other mistakes covered in this article and probably continued doing this till it was too late. Short-term gains can have long-term consequences.