One thing I didn’t understand during my job hunt was how much organizational size and maturity matter for a person’s fit on their new team. Which is funny, considering how much I care about organizational theory and what different organization structures mean about scalability. But, as I geared up to hire backfill for my team, I realized how much I would be setting someone up to fail if they weren’t a good fit in these ways. Someone might be exactly the right personality to fit onto the team, but if the type of change available to them doesn’t suit their proclivities, they’ll feel unsupported and/or stymied in having an impact. There are two vectors here I think are worth talking about, and a few different “levels” within each.

Rule of Threes

There is a pattern in organizational theory (I haven’t found one good catch-all for different things here about how things change at different scales. I might write up more at some point), but in short, your organizational approach changes dramatically each time your size shifts by x3, with the in between being wishy-washy.