My husband’s family is very large and growing thanks to the great matriarch of the family: Grandma Justina. One of Justina’s daughters is Aunt Lê, who used to send “Happy Birthday” to everyone in the family WhatsApp group: Justina’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Auntie Lê officially became the “Happy Birthday Auntie”, with the right to a growing list of relatives printed out and stuck to the fridge.

However, last month, Auntie Lê forgot to say happy birthday to Auntie Kika’s granddaughter, which led to discord to the point where Auntie Kika refused to participate in the family’s online café for three days. The absence led the group of aunts to get together and, after a frank conversation, identify the reason for the upset”. This led to Aunt Lê declaring that she could no longer cope with the task of congratulating everyone in the family, and what had started out as a non-committal affair became a delicate obligation. The group recognized that as much as Aunt Lê had led such an essential and affective operation for the family’s Zap group, it would be unfair to demand such responsibility with the increase in family members.

As a result, the group implemented a new process within this operation so that the initial movement would remain, but in a way that reduced possible failures: each aunt would be responsible for initiating the “congratulations” for their children and grandchildren.

This is a true story that illustrates a phenomenon in life: the pain of growth. As a family, team or company grows, the need arises to review old formats and processes that were efficient for a long time but no longer work today.

Bringing it down to corporate reality, the pain of growth is a common stage for companies that, like Scooto, are in a process of constant growth. Scooto has grown by more than 500% in the last year. 20 Scooteiras in January 2021 became 125 in December. And of course, it would be very unlikely that we would be able to maintain the same modus operandi.

“Growing pains indicate that the company has grown beyond the supported infrastructure and needs to develop systems, processes and new structures to support the new size.” This is what the article entitled Growing pains: a framework for your company’s stage of growth points out (find out more).

HR departments are facing their own challenges in the face of this phenomenon. The speed of talent acquisition requires a large-scale recruitment strategy. All this without letting the quality of the hires down. In addition, the accelerated growth of the company demands special attention to aligning the culture.

The way to overcome this painful but necessary phase of growth is through awareness and understanding of the company’s stage. It’s about really understanding what stage the company is in and, from there, taking the necessary actions to ensure that no one is left without congratulations.

Gabriela Ioshimoto, CPO at Scooto