At Growth By Design, we believe intentional choices lead to impactful growth, whether you're shaping a thriving organization or a meaningful life. Here, we provide the practical information, tools, and frameworks to get you there. Today's post confronts the real cause of slowed innovation and missed deadlines: leaders who are risk averse.

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Let’s Get Real About Speed

If you’re a start up or company seeking rapid scale, you want your team to move fast, to innovate, to outpace the competition. But if your projects are always stuck in “almost ready” mode, it’s time for a hard truth: the bottleneck isn’t your team – it’s your leadership.

Many leaders say they embrace failure as a path to success – you may be one of them. Maybe you’ve even got “fail fast” painted on the office walls and you reiterate this core value at every all-hands meeting. But is there a persistent tension between your timelines and your team’s ability to deliver? This is the “fail fast” fallacy that plagues so many organizations today. You want speed and perfection, but you can’t have both at once. In today’s business climate, getting to market fast is essential. If your team is stuck polishing instead of launching minimum viable products (MVP), the root cause is leadership’s risk aversion.

Perfectionism is a Leadership Problem

Creating a perfect, polished product is great if you have the luxury of time and revenue. But if you’re working to gain market share rapidly, perfection quickly becomes the enemy of good and your competitors gain customers while you gain compounding deadlines.

Let’s be clear: when teams are sprinting to create a product on a compressed timeline, bugs and rough edges are inevitable. If you demand speed but never carve out time for post-launch polish, you’ll burn out your best people. Remember, you hired the best. Their desire to develop something of quality is a sign they care to do their job well and do right by your customers.  

If you’re constantly pushing for MVP without honoring the desire of your best people to polish and iterate, you need to expect increasing pushback – inflated development estimates, missed deadlines, and fast-growing cross-functional friction and blame. This isn’t sabotage; it’s a rational response to a culture that punishes mistakes and rewards only flawless delivery at unreasonable paces.

Fear Kills Innovation Regardless of Company Maturity

Regardless of if you work at a start up that is strapped for time and resources, or a well-established company that is just trying to stay at the cutting edge – the real enemy of innovation is not laziness or lack of resources, it is fear. Chronic delays are almost always rooted in fear – of judgment, of causing problems, of being reprimanded or even fired. As a leader, your job is to confront that fear, not reinforce it.

Think about it: When performance review season rolls around, what are you measuring? Projects delivered on time? Mistakes made? Your team is smart – they know what’s really valued. If they fear that errors will cost them their reputation or job, don’t expect boldness or innovation. Safety is a prerequisite for courage. If your people don’t feel safe, they won’t take risks, and your “fail fast” mantra becomes empty. 

One of the most important things you can do to combat the tension of perfection and speed is to redefine what you consider success. Success isn’t about what went perfectly. It’s about what you learned. Ask your team: What did you try? What failed? What will you do differently next time? That’s how you build a culture of growth.

Building Blocks for a Growth Culture

To effectively lead for speed and growth, you must: 

• Teach your team to fail solving interesting problems. Every failure is a lesson in exploration that makes your next innovation easier and success more probable.
• Balance MVP and polish. Ship fast, but schedule time for your team to refine and improve. Don’t treat the MVP as the finish line, and ensure the team has whitespace to polish and explore iterations. Not only does this increase ownership, but it creates better products.
• Empower different work styles. Let your “imperfect progress” folks lead the charge, while your polishers elevate the product in the next phase.
• Make mistakes safe. Praise exploration and ensure adequate time for assessing causality when things go wrong. Treat mistakes as data, not disasters.
• Plan for quirks. Want speed? Expect bugs and rough edges. Give your team time to fix them post-launch. Remember, this is their work on the line – and when you hire good people, they want to do a good job. 
• Reframe fast shipping. Shipping quickly isn’t about rushing because of some deadline set by leadership. It’s about having the courage to deliver value before it’s perfect. 

So friends, are you ready to stop blaming your team and start leading for the results you want? Change your approach, and watch your team’s speed – and satisfaction – accelerate.

Onward and upward!
Katie