Staffing Resiliency in a Company of Unicorns

Photo by Andrea Tummons on Unsplash

I’ve spent a long chunk of my career in a company that never quite transitioned out of start-up mode. In some ways, this was a blessing: the corporate tropes never really set in, we maintained reasonable agility, there was always room to grow the business in a direction of your choosing, and the culture was generally excellent. But after a couple decades in this mode, it became time to grow up, several times over, and in many respects, the company never really did.

From my observations, this was despite efforts the company made to be mature. They brought in more HR, recruitment, business development, and IT. On top of the personnel came process and protocol, though often only ever the mandated minimums — sometimes blissful, other times much to our chagrin. There became handbooks, trainings, document tracking, formal policies, fancy intranet, and so forth; these things largely existed without directly adding a ton of value, though still they were important to have. What was essentially the CEO with a handful of managers beneath them turned into multiple departments, divorcing the revenue centers from the cost centers in a dangerous divide. The engineering department became tiered, there was the C-suite, a director of engineering beneath them, upper managers beneath that, each with multiple middle managers, each having multiple projects assigned to them, some of which had lower managers.

Despite the noble effort, in my humble opinion, the above effort (apart from compliance-based necessities) were largely for naught. The company structured themselves like this in an effort, presumably, to accommodate further growth. The growth came, and for a while at least, things seemed to make sense, but soon the cracks began to show. See, for all the structure that was put in place, the company still ran like a start-up: the chain of command seemed rarely leveraged or respected, the word “strategy” was thrown around but remained to be seen in any serious interpretation of the term, and there were mountains of unicorn shit everywhere.

My admittedly anemic analysis of the situation is simple — our company was successful despite the best efforts of management to prescribe “the way things should be” because our success was propped tall upon the shoulders of unicorns. When our company was under 100 employees, nearly all of them were ready and willing to dig in on any aspect of our business — be it IT work, sales, management, technical leadership, business development, legal, you name it, we were willing to rise to the occasion. Of course as real experts signed on from these specialties, our unicorns were able to double down on engineering and as a result bring in even more business, soon the company grew, leading to the situation above.

You’re forgiven if you’re asking yourself “how’s having an employee who can do nearly anything asked of them a bad thing?” At first, it doesn’t seem dangerous, but when the reason for your company’s success is almost entirely due to unicorns and salesmanship, your company is running on rainbows and glitter. Once the weather changes to windy and dry, the rainbows are gone and the glitter drifts away. Let’s examine why this is.

Common Traits of a Unicorn

• Willing to work on only the problems they find interesting
• Able to accomplish significantly more than their peers
• Flight risk if compensation dips, the work gets boring, or they are not given the respect or stature they feel is due
• Wears many hats and can effectively pinch hit for multiple parts of the organization
• Leans more toward live to work than work to live, finds meaning and fulfillment in their career
• Demonstrates ongoing professional growth

Where an average engineer might “write code proficiently” and be an expert in UI design, the unicorn may be a coder, researcher, software architect, security analyst, and reverse engineer. The unicorn might have experience drafting policy for engineers, informed opinions on where the market is heading, the ability to absolutely rock a customer meeting, a history of bringing in new work, excellent proposal writing skills, and the gumption to manage a small office.

When a company employs 40–50 people, unicorns are practically a necessity for survival. As the company grows to 250–300 people, the role of the unicorn becomes more controversial. The reason for this is because unicorns are difficult to find, retain, and reward. So, the following happens:

The unicorn works 50+ hour weeks and is inexorably the target of significant attention, possibly even a role model.

• The work-life balance for everyone on the team is pressured by this standard
• The unicorn may become frustrated when others are not available when needed outside of standard hours

The unicorn wears several different hats, and has usually been doing so for multiple years.

• Effort is required to even accurately capture the roles embraced by one person, many of which are partial and being performed in a fashion particular to that person’s idiom
• It is difficult to divide up the unicorn’s responsibilities and give them to other employees
• Should the unicorn leave the company, the impact is devastating, as multiple roles are simultaneously vacated, often with a significant loss of institutional knowledge
• Finding external hires to backfill vacated roles is reminiscent of placing Tetris pieces in that the stream of applicants come in different shapes and sizes and it is extraordinarily difficult to reproduce a fit that recreates a functional team

So how do we maximally leverage the unicorns of a company while ameliorating the fragility from relying on them, instead transitioning to a staffing model that builds resilience?

Unicorns love solving problems, and in my experience, giving them the correct problems and constraints utilizes the amazing team you already have as a core component of building the team you need for tomorrow. Here’s some ways you can accomplish that:

• Shift unicorns to solving the problem of how organizational problems could be solved without their direct intervention, including aspects of mentorship and growth.
• Provide leadership training, encourage open discussion of organizational strengths and weaknesses, institute 360 reviews for executives and allow for anonymous comment if you want to know what people really think.
• Build, and ideally have your unicorns champion an inclusive and psychologically safe culture.
• Promote from within, double down on efforts to cross-train between roles and to formally capture lessons learned along the way.
• Leverage some degree of industry standard processes; there’s definitely a tipping point here where you’re doing busy work to appease some sort of accreditation process, but somewhere before that is sweet harmony where there’s thoughtful and articulate order prescribed for your company.
• Prepare to do business a bit differently; the sweet spot for your small team of unicorns will likely differ significantly from what your unicorn led army will settle into — this is an opportunity to grow the business in new directions or consider pivoting on some fronts as folks try out new roles and talent is filled out differently.

Things to look out for and how to handle them:

• Increase junior level staffing, but not to the annoyance of the unicorns; adding a bunch of incompetent people to babysit is a surefire way to push top talent out the door.
• Build out support teams to keep your revenue centers focused on what they do best, but ensure you keep those support teams accountable to revenue centers.
• Keep unicorns off of pedestals, instead promote a healthy culture above all, and in that culture, establish leaders as a service role, not an authority role, so that unicorns are respected but not worshipped.
• Don’t retain assholes — counsel them and fire them if necessary what you tolerate now, will become expected and upheld by others indefinitely.
• Don’t reward overwork, instead, reward extreme ownership and accountability, while earnestly encouraging a positive work/life balance — the best way to do this is by example

If you are in a company going through something similar, I’d implore you to take this article as a datapoint to help guide your transition. Companies need to grow commensurate with their success, they need process and policy documented and iterated upon, there needs to be formality, new departments, and eventual restructuring. But, sometimes, there can be a compulsion to fetishize the growth process itself and not look at the objectives, which is getting the company and it’s people what it needs. Consider the following principals for leaders which I think guide a growth transition well, based upon things I’ve seen go wrong:

• Empower your people
• Embrace autonomy
• Don’t be afraid to take risks — don’t be afraid to bail out on a failed project, idea, or person
• People matter more than profits, no matter what, because if your people learn otherwise, the company will pay for it in loyalty indefinitely
• Pursue passion — a good company keeps their top talent talking and finds way to align work and values with things that talent is passionate about
• Be “pound-wise,” don’t hesitate to make an investment that increases efficiency enough to pay itself off in short order
• Honor agreements, or at least remain accountable for failures to do so
• Admit mistakes and explain mitigation plans to avoid their reptition
• Treat your role as though you are accountable to revenue centers, meaning you should present the value you are adding to the company, not just your plans, hopes, and ambitions — talent wants to see results that are equaled to the investment they’re making
• Compensate top talent with stakeholder arrangements, both financially (e.g. stocks and profit sharing, but moreover direct incentives correlated with bringing success) and in terms of decision-making authority within the company
• Invest in your people, help them develop professionally within the organization and in pursuit of organizational goals on company dime — treat their time as seriously as you treat your own, don’t expect employees to align with company objectives for “free” (don’t get me started on the modern notion of being salaried) on their own time

Ultimately, I’m nobody, just a guy who’s seen a lot of things, but, I hope if you’re in a position of influence at a company nearing the top of this rollercoaster ride, you can take something of value from this article, and prolong the time before the plunge, if not avoid it entirely. Feel free to comment with your own wisdom and experiences!