Too many management books rest on a vague idea that has been stretched to breaking point. You can tell from the depth of the margins just how hard an author has had to work to draw the thesis out. Their covers are bright and zingy. Their titles either contain action-packed words like “strive” and “ignite” or give birth to some ghastly new portmanteau like “stressilience” or “charismility”. They are determined to take lessons for bosses from anywhere but an actual business: termites, hunter-gatherers, Novak Djokovic, salad dressing. The unspoken rule of most management titles, it seems, is to avoid the actual practice of management.
What a relief, then, to read a book that breaks the mould. It lands with an intimidating thud. It looks and feels like a textbook. It is full of exercises and templates. And it is unapologetically practical in its focus. “Scaling People” is written by Claire Hughes Johnson, a tech-industry veteran who spent more than a decade at Google before joining Stripe, a digital-payments unicorn, as its chief operating officer in 2014. By the time she left that role in 2021, the firm had gone from 160 employees to over 7,000. In a world of coders, creators and visionaries, her work was to make things work.
Much of the book is a manual for creating what Ms Hughes Johnson calls an operating system—the set of documents, metrics and processes that produces a consistent framework for making decisions and improving performance. There is a section on planning, with advice on setting good goals and deciding on the cadence of meetings and reviews that sets the right drumbeat for a company. There is another on hiring people, from building a recruitment pipeline to the interview process and the task of bringing new employees on board. There are chapters on improving team performance and on giving feedback.
“Scaling People” is a product of Silicon Valley. It grapples with the problems of very fast growth; its context is one of founders, developers and product teams. For incumbents in highly regulated industries or employees in public-sector bureaucracies, the problems of scaling up may seem very remote. Stripe’s early decision to run a programming competition called “Capture the Flag”, for instance, helped build its reputation as a place for talented developers to go to. Established firms need to work less hard to create awareness among potential candidates but may have a tougher time building a name for innovation.
But the insights on which such practices are founded—in this instance, getting candidates to do actual work as part of an application process and filling a hiring pipeline rather than waiting for jobs to open up—are transferable. And most of the book is devoted to problems that bedevil all industries and companies.
Among other things, Ms Hughes Johnson gives tips on how to run an effective meeting; these include having a round of “check-ins” at the start (getting everyone to say what they want from the meeting, for instance) so that people are focused and so that the quietest members of the group participate early. She offers advice on how to do performance reviews, which decisions you can and should delegate to other people, and how to save high-performing employees from burnout. It is all refreshingly pragmatic.
Behind the tactics lies a clear philosophy, which is to make the implicit explicit. That means being clear about how specific decisions are going to get taken: is this a consensual process or an autocratic one? It means writing things down: by articulating Stripe’s culture, the startup can be clear to prospective joiners what the company’s norms are. It means saying things that other people are not saying, especially if those things are causing dysfunction.
It also means being aware of your own behaviour and preferences. Ms Hughes Johnson has long kept a “Working with Claire” document that spells out to new members of her team what they can expect: how she likes to take decisions, how quickly she will respond to messages, what she wants from them in a one-to-one meeting.
Her advice will not suit everyone. There will be too much emphasis on process for some corporate cultures. But there is something thought-provoking for every boss. Your bedside table may groan with books on what Mr Djokovic can teach you about leadership or the lessons to be learned from mayonnaise. This book is trying to do something far more original and useful: turn you into a better manager.■
Read more from Bartleby, our columnist on management and work:
The upside of workplace jargon (Jun 15th)
Why employee loyalty can be overrated (Jun 8th)
How to beat desk rage (Jun 1st)
Also: How the Bartleby column got its name
Source: Business - economist.com
