We’re continuing Part 1 of Growth Isn’t One Sided: The Trouble With Scale. Last week we explored why treating imperfect data as perfect kills growth. This week: why the tools we use to create alignment often create rigidity instead—and how that stalls the innovation companies need to keep growing.

One Takeaway: Teams need to work toward the same goals to grow your company. But the systems you use to create focus can accidentally create inflexibility. This can kill innovation and teamwork.

A Challenge Every Company Faces

How do you get everyone moving in the same direction without creating systems so rigid they prevent problem-solving? You need everyone focused, but not constrained.

Here’s what usually happens: Your company grows fast. Different teams work on different priorities. Without clear goals, chaos follows. You get duplicate work, missed opportunities, and conflicting projects.

To fix this, leadership creates a goal-setting system. Now everyone has clear objectives. You track metrics. Teams know what they’re responsible for and what success looks like. Problem solved, right?

Not quite.

When Problems Fall Between the Cracks

Meet Bill. He works in customer success and notices something troubling. Customers in the Northeast consistently struggle with a specific step during onboarding. The data shows higher cancellation rates. Bill can trace it directly to one feature that affects certain account settings.

Here’s the problem: The fix needs changes from three teams—product, engineering, and regional operations. But none of these teams have “Northeast onboarding optimization” in their current goals.

Product focuses on new features.

Engineering measures system performance.

Operations tracks response times and cost per customer.

Bill found a real problem affecting real customers at a real cost to revenue. But solving it would require three teams to spend time on work that doesn’t help their assigned metrics. In fact, it might hurt them by taking resources away from their goals.

So what happens? Nothing. The problem continues. Customers struggle. Revenue disappears. Not because anyone is bad at their job, but because the alignment system created barriers that prevent teams from solving problems together.

How to Stay Aligned Without Getting Stuck

The solution isn’t throwing out structure. It’s designing systems that create focus while keeping flexibility. Here are four approaches that can work depending on your situation:

Reserve time for cross-team problems: Build “exploration time” into team schedules. Set aside 10-15% of time for problems that fall between departments. This gives teams permission to work on important issues outside their formal goals.

Create shared success metrics: Instead of only departmental metrics, add shared outcomes that require collaboration. “Customer success rate in new regions” becomes shared between product, engineering, and ops. Now solving Bill’s problem helps everyone’s performance.

Rotate problem ownership: Assign temporary “problem owners” from different departments. This quarter, someone from finance owns a customer experience problem. Next quarter, someone from product owns an operational challenge. This prevents silos and builds understanding.

Use flexible goal setting: Set shared objectives but let teams define their own contributions. An objective might be: “Improve customer experience in new markets.” Each team then defines how they’ll contribute. This gives autonomy while maintaining alignment.

Goal-Setting Can Become a Trap

OKRs, KPIs, and other frameworks can be powerful alignment tools. Massively successful companies like Google and IBM have proven they work. But they become harmful when misused.

The problem happens when these systems shift from providing focus to enforcing rigid rules. Instead of asking “How can we achieve our objectives?” teams ask “What’s the minimum to hit our numbers?” Innovation gets replaced by checkbox thinking.

Warning signs your system has become too rigid:

Teams ignore important problems because they’re “not in our OKRs”
People say “That’s not my job” when they encounter customer issues
Cross-team collaboration decreases as departmental focus increases
Innovation projects get killed because they don’t fit measurement frameworks

Knowledge Work Is Different

Peter Drucker made an important distinction. He separated manual work from knowledge work. As Drucker explained: “Knowledge work is not defined by quantity. Knowledge work is defined by its results.”1

This means knowledge workers need systems that provide direction without dictating every step. They need alignment around outcomes, not rigid adherence to predetermined activities. Knowledge workers like Bill need freedom to identify and solve unexpected problems.

The Bottom Line

Your company needs alignment. Teams need clear priorities, shared understanding of success, and coordinated effort. But alignment doesn’t require rigidity.

The most effective organizations create focus while keeping flexibility to solve unexpected problems and go after unforeseen opportunities. Your core metrics matter, but they shouldn’t be the only metrics that matter.

Your alignment system should encourage innovation and cross-team problem-solving, not just departmental optimization. The goal is to build systems that help teams work together while staying responsive to real-world challenges that don’t fit organizational charts.

Now that we understand the alignment challenge, the next question becomes: What types of work require different approaches entirely? Not all business functions should be managed the same way...

This is Chapter 2 of Growth Isn’t One Sided, a mini-book I’m sharing weekly on how to grow your business without breaking it. [Read the Introduction: How Lyft and Uber Taught Me to Think Differently] | Subscribe for weekly insights!

Subscribe now

1

Drucker, Peter F. 2006. The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done. New York, NY: HarperCollins. p. 7

Economics For...

Your Teams Need Alignment, not Rigidity