How to scale people

Scaling is magical because you take the same amount of inputs and get greater outputs. This sounds great when it comes to code — one line of code can hit hundreds of people, thousands and millions — and nothing (or minimal) changes to the code. But how can you do the same with people.

During the growth phase of the company, I often get, “yah but can (s)he scale?” What they mean is the following:

Can (s)he continue to drive successful results as the organization gets bigger?

So that when you add another person to that team, the amount of quality output will be greater than what was before. This is the scale of people.

Traditionally with people, “experience” gives the organization the ability to shortcut time and scale. But oftentimes this is not feasible given timing as well the technology is usually created by younger talent with a desire of rapid iteration and innovation as the guiding principle. So, how does an organization shortcut time? The answer is simple, but not easy. You must 1) Identify people who can scale and 2) help them scale. Easier said than done.

Identify people who can scale

We have seen this before: the candidate looked good on paper, and even interviewed well, but is completely unwilling to adapt or learn. As with most things in life, it comes down to to willingness, and many things will snap into place. For an organization to scale its people, it first needs to identify talent that has the potential to scale?

Communication

The ability to communicate is fundamental to teaching and scaling yourself. Whether the person has a team or not, they will be using other people to get the better results than what they did before. Before they might have been an individual contributor, but now they have more work and working longer hours won’t be the answer. So, the person is assigned more resources to borrow or a team to use. In order for them to get better results, they need to effectively delegate or influence them. If they can communicate, it’s a good sign they have potential to scale.

Rarely does scale have to do with can they do the work. It becomes — can they teach the work?

Empathy

Empathy means being able to fully relate and emotionally and perspective-wise get into the fox-hole with the person. This does not mean internalizing and taking on the emotion, but it does take a willingness to try and understand the other’s perspective. (Here is a short video by Brene Brown on this).

Core to being inspiring and motivating without understanding where they are to take them where they are meant and could be. Ultimately for people who end up scaling, it was because they were able to motivate and inspire those who they are leading. Empathy is the driver of all of this.

Coachability

“Let the wise listen and add to their learning, and let the discerning get guidance” — Proverbs 1:5, The Bible

A wise person responds to feedback and changes; however, idiots just don’t listen. Oftentimes, with many skills, we get better with practice. Managing and leading is not any different. However, if a person practices the wrong thing over and over that person will never get better. Imagine if the person had a phenomenal manager who coached them on their behavior and actions, if the person listened then there is a very slim chance they would not get better. At the core of being coachable is the willingness to change and be changed.

Lean into ambiguity and make a clear path

One executive started out as an individual contributor, then moved to lead a team and eventually became an executive of a division within the company. One of his special talents was that he would be able to not only be okay with ambiguity , but would try to help bring clarity. He was concise on assessing the issues but at the same time had a path to move forward. The most important thing is the ability to bring clarity of the current situation — if you just like ambiguity you become the king of queen of drama. Running and growing a business has enough ambiguity in it of itself.

Manager (3x)

There is such thing as over-hiring, when we hired executives who managed orgs that were 10x the size of our company in terms of people. We found these executives to not have the ability to operate without all the (people) infrastructure as well as could not get as detailed with the product teams to help them out.

Whereas, we have also had people who managed smaller orgs or was an individual contributor and had issues with micro-managing or not being able to manage at all.

What is right for your org is personal and sometimes relative. We found if someone had managed an org 3x the size of what you were currently asking them to manage is something that has worked. But oftentimes when the org is scaling we can’t wait for best and have to settle for good enough.

Bonus Note: If you have to choose — it is better to under-hire and help them scale up than have them scale down.

Help them to scale

Once you have identified people who can scale, how can the organization help?

Coaches

While these people often behave as office therapists, it enables someone from the outside counsel the executive. Oftentimes business or work problems has less to do with strategy and much more with the people executing the strategy. Have you ever heard a leader say, “If we were all robots this would not be a problem”?

Good leadership involves some hard work in being vulnerable and authentic, and oftentimes, it’s hard to find the safe space within the organization to explore what is preventing that without fear of being judged. The coach can often help people with potential to scale by giving them operational experience as well as a safe space. While many executive coaches have an HR background, there are many coaches who have actually ran Marketing, was a CEO or in some function that the executive is in.

We all know what having a good coach can do in developing an athlete’s sport’s skills, now imagine if a good coach was applied to help develop a leader’s skills. Who knows what kinds of potential the leader can reach, and in turn the organization.

Giving people opportunity

Grooming talent can be one of the most rewarding and satisfying thing you can do for your organization. Getting outside talent is great but this cannot be the way an organization grows. It is not sustainable to constantly hire from the outside once the org hits a point where it needs someone to grow. Also, promoting from within strengthens the organization as people can feel motivated and inspired that the org is growing and they can see themselves as a part of the future. And, more importantly you have culturally trained them to be inline with your values so they can “think like your org” and ultimately “behave like the org”. Ultimately when you get alignment in mindset and behavior from people it is the only way to scale.

Culture

The only way an organization can scale through its people is through its culture.

As an organization gets bigger not only do job positions get specialized, but also organizing the people to do these specialized roles becomes more complex. Now you need to hire connectors (aka project managers) and empower them to connect, so people can focus on what they are specialized in. This means you need to build a foundation of trust.

Like likes like.

Hire people with similar values and then reinforce it with a culture of actions that reinforce (rewards/punishment, hiring/firing, rituals, and communication).

Actions will always speak louder than words as culture is caught, not taught.

Culture ensures that people will be doing what you want them to do when you are not there. Culture enables you to be everywhere in thought and deed.

Strengthen HR support

HR can help an organization scale if brought in at the right moments and correctly. They help build the people infrastructure so that the organization can be ran more effectively. Examples of this include onboarding (better onboarding = shorter ramp up time on org and business) , HR support (who does the employee go to if they have an issue), and compensation (how does the org know how to pay — imagine if the system was adhoc, eventually the org would be wasting time and a lot of frustrating pay decisions)

If you think of an organization like your product, you will know that the better quality your acquisition is, the better impact on the product or org. Attracting the right talent can have the largest impact to your business and org.

Once in the door, retention and engagement will be the highest impact to your business. HR can not only build the measuring and reporting tools but they can also build the infrastructure so if a person can scale in the org, their potential will not be overlooked and there is a spot for them to continue to help make the org successful.