The team over at SEOmoz recently doubled in size from 60+ employees to 120+ employees in the last year. Rand Fishkin, co-founder of SEOmoz, shares how certain aspects of human nature can get in the way of successfully scaling your startup team:

• Form tribes to build identity and camaraderie
• Invent a common enemy upon which we can heap blame and against which we can fight
• Minimize the positives and focus on the negatives
• Resist change at all costs
• Act emotionally, yet believe our decisions to be driven solely by logic
• Lose empathy as our numbers grow
• Create rules and process to prevent against repeats of singular abuses
• Irrationally romanticize the past

He offers the following advice to other founders who are on the cusp of scaling their startups:

• "Be mindful that your nature and that of those around you makes these irrationalities and biases the default way of thinking."

• "Don’t let it stop you from doing what’s right, what fits with your values, and what moves the needle for the organization – use the knowledge of these elements to compensate mentally, emotionally, and with process."

• "Remind those around you that you’re all suffering from the same human condition, but that awareness and active resistance can win the day."

"Process is an ugly word at a tiny startup, but it’s a beautiful, life-changing, progress-enabling word as you grow (so long as it’s done for the right reasons)." ~ Rand Fishkin

This post was originally featured on FounderCode.com

Source: Scaling Teams and the Fight Against Human Nature