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Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building

Tags: #business #management #leadership #teams #culture #scaling #human resources #growth

Authors: Claire Hughes Johnson

Overview

In “Scaling People,” I share my hard-won lessons on how to build and lead high-impact teams and organizations. This book is aimed at company builders who are passionate about creating a lasting legacy and who share a people-oriented approach to their work. Whether you’re a founder just starting out, an experienced leader navigating new challenges, or a manager looking to develop your skills, this book offers practical guidance and frameworks that will help you scale your impact.

I believe that great management is about much more than just hitting targets. It’s about creating an environment where people can thrive and do their best work, where they feel trusted and supported, and where they are inspired to achieve ambitious goals. In this book, I outline four core frameworks that I believe are essential for building a thriving company: foundations and planning, hiring, team development, and performance management.

These frameworks are not meant to be prescriptive or one-size-fits-all. They’re more like a set of tools that you can adapt to your own context. But I do believe that they offer a strong foundation for building a company where people are the center, and where everyone feels like they have a stake in the company’s success. This book is not a theoretical treatise on management but a practical guide, based on my experience leading and scaling teams at high-growth companies like Google and Stripe. I share real-world stories, examples, and templates that you can use to implement these frameworks in your own company. I also address some of the common challenges that come up when scaling people, such as how to manage remote and distributed teams, how to cultivate a diverse and inclusive workplace, and how to navigate the tricky waters of managing high and low performers.

Book Outline

1. Essential Operating Principles

This chapter introduces the importance of operating principles or mental models that guide decision-making in management. The four core principles presented focus on building trust: cultivating self-awareness to foster mutual awareness, being direct with communication even when it feels risky, understanding the difference between management and leadership, and relying on a strong operating system.

Key concept: Company-wide frameworks are indicators of your company’s priorities. Think of them as the set of actions or processes that everyone must perform or follow in concert and in the same way.

2. Core Framework 1: Foundations and Planning for Goals and Resources

This chapter covers the foundational elements of company building: mission, long-term goals, principles (values), and team charters. Think of these as the structural support beams of a house: You need these in place before you build the walls and install the plumbing.

Key concept: Founding documents detail the plans for the entire enterprise, including the company’s long-term goals and principles and your company philosophy: why and how you exist and operate.

3. Core Framework 2: A Comprehensive Hiring Approach

This chapter addresses the importance of hiring, arguing that a company’s talent is its destiny. The hiring process, particularly for leadership roles, requires a balance of speed and quality, and careful consideration of not only candidates’ skills and experience, but also their potential, work style, and cultural fit. The chapter also highlights the need to build strong internal mobility processes, emphasizing the importance of retaining top performers and promoting from within.

Key concept: There’s a Pablo Picasso quote we like to repeat at Stripe: “When art critics get together, they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When painters get together, they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.”

4. Core Framework 3: Intentional Team Development

This chapter explores strategies for building high-performing teams. It covers topics like setting up new teams, effective communication and decision-making, running meetings and offsites, and managing distributed teams. The chapter emphasizes the importance of mutual self-awareness, psychological safety, and fostering a sense of shared purpose and commitment within teams.

Key concept: In his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni lays out the five primary challenges a team might face: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results.

5. Core Framework 4: Feedback and Performance Mechanisms

This chapter focuses on feedback and performance management, covering topics such as coaching, giving hard feedback, creating a culture of informal feedback, and formal performance reviews. The chapter emphasizes the importance of providing timely and constructive feedback, managing high and low performers effectively, and establishing clear and transparent performance mechanisms.

Key concept: In performance management, timing is everything. Ideally, it takes no more than three months to reach a resolution for any given performance issue.

6. Conclusion

The final chapter focuses on personal growth and management strategies for individuals. It offers advice on managing time and energy, fostering relationships, navigating career paths, and prioritizing personal well-being. The chapter encourages readers to actively manage their careers, seek out opportunities for growth, and prioritize building meaningful relationships.

Key concept: “The first level [of your career] is hard skills, the second level is soft skills, and the third level is the most challenging level: how you show up emotionally, how you keep being a champion and make everything possible.

Essential Questions

1. How does the concept of ‘building trust’ connect to Johnson’s four essential operating principles?

This question explores Johnson’s core argument that building trust is the foundation of effective leadership. Each of the four operating principles she outlines—self-awareness, direct communication, distinguishing between management and leadership, and relying on a strong operating system—are intertwined with building trust at individual, team, and company levels. By cultivating these principles, leaders can create an environment where employees feel valued, supported, and empowered to do their best work, ultimately leading to greater impact and success for the company.

2. How do a company’s founding documents inform the development and implementation of its operating system?

This question investigates the relationship between a company’s operating system and its founding documents. Johnson argues that founding documents, including the mission, long-term goals, and operating principles, serve as the structural foundation for a company’s operating system. The operating system, encompassing planning processes, resource allocation, communication structures, and cadence, is built upon and guided by the values and aspirations outlined in the founding documents. Establishing these foundational elements early on ensures consistency, alignment, and a clear sense of purpose as the company grows.

3. How does Johnson advocate for balancing speed and quality in the hiring process?

Johnson argues that the most effective hiring processes balance speed and quality. While acknowledging the need for rapid hiring in high-growth environments, she emphasizes that compromising on candidate quality can have long-term negative consequences for the company’s culture and performance. To achieve this balance, she advocates for a rigorous, data-driven approach to hiring, involving the entire company in the process, and promoting from within whenever possible. This strategy ensures that new hires are not only skilled and experienced but also align with the company’s values and are set up for success.

4. How does Johnson approach managing high performers?

Johnson suggests that managing high performers requires a nuanced approach that goes beyond simply giving them more work or responsibility. It’s about understanding their motivations, strengths, and development needs, and creating opportunities for them to grow and contribute in ways that are both challenging and fulfilling. She emphasizes the importance of recognizing and rewarding high performers, while also ensuring that they are positively impacting the entire team and organization, not just their own work. This involves coaching them on how to delegate effectively, develop others, and contribute to a collaborative and supportive team environment.

5. How does Johnson advocate for building a strong culture of feedback within a company?

This question explores Johnson’s belief that a strong culture of feedback is essential for building high-performing teams and fostering individual growth. She highlights the importance of not only formal feedback mechanisms like performance reviews but also creating an environment where informal feedback is given and received openly and regularly. Johnson encourages managers to be proactive in giving feedback, even when it’s difficult, and to create a culture where employees feel comfortable sharing their own feedback, both positive and negative.

Key Takeaways

1. Prioritize using the 80/20 Rule

Johnson, drawing from her experience at Google and Stripe, highlights the 80/20 rule as a valuable principle for prioritizing work and maximizing impact. It emphasizes focusing on the 20% of efforts that drive 80% of the results, a principle that resonates with agile methodologies and lean product development in the tech industry. By identifying and prioritizing the most impactful tasks, teams can achieve greater efficiency and deliver value more quickly.

Practical Application:

A product manager leading a team developing a new AI-powered feature could use the 80/20 rule to prioritize tasks. They might realize that 80% of the user value could be achieved by focusing on 20% of the planned functionality, allowing for faster iteration and validation of core features.

2. Embrace Hypothesis-Based Coaching

This approach encourages managers to proactively identify potential areas for improvement and to test their assumptions through open communication and collaboration. Rather than waiting for problems to become entrenched, managers can address them early on, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and development. It’s particularly relevant for AI product development, where rapid iteration and experimentation are key to success.

Practical Application:

An AI engineer leading a team working on a complex machine learning model could use hypothesis-based coaching to address performance issues. They might observe that a team member struggles with data preprocessing, hypothesize that the issue stems from a lack of understanding of specific data cleaning techniques, and then test this hypothesis by providing targeted training and mentorship.

3. Establish Clear Team Operating Systems

Johnson emphasizes the importance of establishing clear operating systems within teams to create a shared understanding of goals, responsibilities, and working practices. This includes defining meeting norms, clarifying decision-making processes, and regularly reviewing progress against established metrics. By doing so, teams can avoid ambiguity, reduce friction, and operate more effectively, particularly when working on complex projects common in AI development.

Practical Application:

When planning a sprint for an AI development team, the team lead should clearly articulate the sprint goals, assign ownership for each task or story point, and establish meeting norms to ensure efficient collaboration and decision-making. This ensures everyone understands their responsibilities and contributes to a shared understanding of success.

Suggested Deep Dive

Chapter: Core Framework 3: Intentional Team Development

As AI development increasingly relies on cross-functional collaboration, understanding how to build high-performing teams is crucial. This chapter offers valuable insights into team dynamics, communication, and addressing common challenges, particularly relevant for engineers working in complex AI projects.

Memorable Quotes

Who is this book for?. 28

“These are people,” I thought as I snapped those photos and sent them off, “and we can’t even track about 15 of them.” My job was to scale the operation, which involved technology, of course, but also the people—these people!—who were building it. I firmly believed that doing so should not come at the cost of knowing the humans behind the product and fostering their careers—their personal scaling—alongside Google’s. Almost 20 years later, I believe that even more strongly. That’s why I wrote this book.

Founding documents. 71

Having strong founding documents that share why you exist and what you seek to achieve ensures that the operating systems you put in place share a common purpose, flow from your objectives, and are guided by a clear company ethos from top to bottom, from leadership to individuals.

When to articulate your operating structures. 85

Don’t send players onto the field with lots of equipment and no rules. People will get hurt!

Core Framework 2: A Comprehensive Hiring Approach. 167

Seek a hiring approach that balances the need to hire quickly with the need to hire the most successful person for the role rather than the most expedient one. The scariest thing you can say to an operations leader is “I want quality and speed.”

Managing through uncertainty. 350

When a team is experiencing uncertainty, it’s rare that a manager isn’t feeling it too. Some managers make the mistake of exposing too much of their own worry, which can be destabilizing for their teams. But the more common mistake I see managers making is not acknowledging the challenges head-on with their teams or pretending they’ve got a plan all figured out. This only serves to erode trust just when the team needs their manager most.

Comparative Analysis

While “Scaling People” shares common ground with other management books like “Radical Candor” by Kim Scott and “Working Backwards” by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr in emphasizing the importance of feedback, clear communication, and strong operating systems, it stands out in its focus on personal growth and self-awareness as foundational elements of effective management. Johnson’s approach is more nuanced than the “hire fast, fire fast” mentality often prevalent in Silicon Valley, advocating for a more deliberate and thoughtful approach to building and leading teams. Unlike some books that primarily focus on established companies, Johnson’s insights are particularly relevant for high-growth startups and scale-ups, addressing the unique challenges and opportunities these environments present.

Reflection

Johnson’s “Scaling People” offers a refreshing perspective on management, particularly relevant in today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape. Her emphasis on building trust, fostering psychological safety, and empowering employees resonates with the human-centric approach increasingly vital for managing teams, especially those working on complex AI systems. While the book is geared toward high-growth companies, its principles are broadly applicable. However, the book’s focus on rapid growth may not translate easily to more established organizations with slower growth trajectories and different cultural norms. Additionally, while Johnson advocates for a data-driven approach, the book could have benefited from more specific examples of how data analytics can be used to optimize people processes, a particularly relevant topic for AI product engineers. Overall, “Scaling People” is a valuable resource for leaders and managers at all levels, offering practical advice and insightful perspectives on the art and science of building and leading high-impact teams.

Flashcards

What are management operating principles?

These are the guidelines you use to make decisions and get work done. They act like a personal value system for how you manage your work and your team.

What are the four elements of founding documents?

Mission, long-term goals, principles (values), and team charters.

What are some keystones of an operating system?

Annual plan, quarterly goals, and regular communications.

What is a zero target?

A measure for which the desired outcome is no incidence of the issue occurring.

What does DISC stand for?

Dominance, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness

What is Amazon’s Bar Raiser program?

An exclusive group of interviewers who are considered good stewards of Amazon’s standards and culture. One Bar Raiser is included on every interview panel.

What are Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team?

Absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results.

What is a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP)?

A signed, standalone document that outlines clear performance expectations for a person, identifying areas in need of development and setting deadlines to measure success.