The moment your team becomes bureaucratic isn't when you hit 20 people. It's when your best people start second-guessing themselves.

Early on, everyone moves fast because results depend on it. Customer screams are oxygen. Decisions happen in chat threads, not committee meetings. Success means solving real problems, not managing perceptions.

Then something breaks.

Suddenly, the room gets quieter when someone asks, "What if we tried...?". A+ presentations matter more than A+ results. People stop asking, "What does the customer need?" and start asking, "What would leadership think?"

Here's the real shift: Fear of being wrong became stronger than the drive to be right.

In high-performing teams, solving customer problems gets you respect and responsibility. In bureaucratic teams, people get rewarded for reading the room.

The second that dynamic flips, the shift has already happened. You're just not feeling the consequences yet.

Because here's what actually kills teams: Your best ideas start dying in someone's head instead of in the market. The people who used to say, "What if we tried this?" start saying, "That's not how we do things." Customer pain used to go straight to the product. Now it detours through six layers of stakeholder sign-off.

You lose the one thing that made your team powerful: the courage to test ideas fast.

The brutal truth? That "reckless" energy everyone's now afraid of? It's your only real competitive advantage. When your people optimize for market truth, you win. When they optimize for internal comfort, you're just burning the budget with a better process.

This happens everywhere. One day your department is solving customer problems. The next day it's optimizing for management comfort.

You don't lose your innovation when you scale. You lose it when someone has a brilliant idea and their first instinct is to check if it's allowed.

When did you first notice your team asking for permission instead of forgiveness?