It is incredibly difficult to be a people manager at a scale-up. Big companies have established cultures, leveling systems, training programs, a mature middle-management layer, and mature teams doing recruiting, learning & development, and human resources.
Scale-ups have none of this. When I was Head of Marketing at Codecademy I often felt like if I don’t personally move the needle on the projects that drive revenue needle every single day, nothing will ever get done. With that type of pressure, it's easy for people-management best practices to feel important but not urgent and deprioritize them.
But there is a handful of management best practices that cut deep and are worth prioritizing.
#1 Rather than Building a Team that Complements You, Build a Team that Gives you Leverage
I’ve often read advice like “find people who complement your own skills,” which I took to mean “different than you” or that “round-out your weaknesses.” For example, I’m a good writer but not great at visual design, so I thought hiring a designer would compliment my skills.
But after building out five marketing teams as a 5-time head of marketing, I’ve learned that the goal isn’t about rounding–out a complete roster of skills, the goal is actually to build a roster of talents that maximizes my own leverage.
At one startup I hired a Content Marketing Lead. I wanted a strategic thinker who can help with our thought leadership content, so I had candidates complete a marketing-strategy assignment, which Robert excelled at.
Once he was hired, personal issues would crop up every week. It seemed like he was missing a half-day of work regularly. I asked him to create a social media distribution plan for our pipeline of blog posts and found that while he was interested in creating the strategy, the posts themselves were bland, rather than incisive.
I had recently taken the Culture Index personality test, in which I scored high on both “Type A” as well as a trait called “conscientiousness.” Conscientiousness is described as wanting to play by the rules, wanting to get things right, finishing what you start, being detail-oriented, and having a good memory.
My personality profile report said, “this person is attempting to modify an inherent high sense of detail perhaps in order to delegate work or to become more flexible.”
I spoke with my executive coach. Her perspective was that for someone like me who is both Type A and this need for high quality, perhaps I needed someone in this role who would score as-high or higher-than-me on “conscientiousness.” Because Robert wasn’t great at quality and follow-through, she argued, I’d never be able to delegate to him without losing sleep or constantly holding back my frustration.
I chatted with our Culture Index coach as well. His argument was that I’d always be expending energy to modify my own high-quality bar to accommodate Robert’s style. That energy expenditure would cost me and would never be worth it. So although Robert brought talents to the table that complemented mine, these would always be trumped by the fundamentally incongruous expectations around quality and follow-through. Robert and I parted ways soon after.
#2: To Hire the Right People, Don’t Focus on Experience, Focus on Talent and Attitude
In Good to Great, Jim Collins talked about getting the right people onto the team as one of the key ingredients that separated good companies from great ones.
I used to evaluate candidates on 3 dimensions: Talent, Experience, and Skills. Early in my career, I focused too much on finding people who had done the work before. There were two issues with this approach:
First, it requires a different attitude to work for a startup.
Adding people adds complexity, increases the need for collaboration, which inherently reduces speed. So to out-maneuver the competition, the best startups build leaner teams that are incredibly bought-in, will outwork the competition, and be highly adaptable. Much has been written about how Elon Musk used this exact formula at both Tesla and SpaceX.
Second, you’re doing things that have never been done before, so talent matters more than experience. You want people who jerry-rig tools to do things they were never meant to do.
At one startup, our data showed we had a very long sales cycle and had decided a key lever for our business would be marketing automation.
I had just purchased Marketo, which I had never used before. I was so focused on my own Marketo inadequacy that when hiring for our first email marketer, I heavily weighted Marketo experience.
I ended up hiring someone who had that experience, but who didn’t have a talent for marketing ops. She was great at building marketing automation, but within months we were pushing Marketo to do things it hadn’t been designed to do, at which point this hire was out of her depth.
Looking back, I should have been open to candidates with a talent for figuring out new tools and systems, even if they had no direct experience with Marketo.
So I added a fourth attribute, and now I evaluate candidates on 4 dimensions in descending order of importance:
Talent
Attitude
Experience
Skills
#3: When It’s Not a Good Fit, Get the Wrong People Off the Bus
The inverse of hiring the right people is recognizing that sometimes, a particular person is just not a good fit. You must be ruthless in cutting those folks from the team. I’ve learned this the hard way. I once stuck with hire a lot longer than I should have, telling myself I’d coach them up, or that the next project would better play to their strengths or the next time I’d better define the project outcomes.
It never worked.
I would lose sleep: a week had passed and a project wasn’t where it should be. I would prep hard for 1-on-s, writing-out feedback beforehand so I could deliver it as constructively as possible.
The results didn’t change. I lost two months of sleep, and the business lost two months that could have been spent on hiring a replacement instead of fixing the unfixable.
When someone isn’t a great fit at a big company, there can be opportunities for internal transfers. But at a scale-up, where every day counts, every seat on the bus is precious, and everyone is a player-coach stretched thin if a hire’s not a fit, it’s unlikely to be salvaged, and the best path is to cut your losses fast.
#4 Choose the Right North Star Metric for Each Person
Far less has been written about this, so I’ll spend more time here. I find that startups spend a lot of time trying to hire the right people, and not nearly enough on how to create an environment to get the best out of people. The key of a high-velocity, a high-growth organization is choosing the right things to measure: you want to identify metrics that meet the following criteria:
Measure leading indicators rather than lagging ones (ex: revenue closed per month is a lagging indicator. Instead consider the qualified opportunity pipeline created each month)
Choose metrics that can be tracked weekly (ex: if you run 2-week sprints, but want to measure story points shipped, you could report on the trailing 4 week average for story point shipped per week)
Choose metrics that can be benchmarked against one another (ex: let’s say you’re tracking MQLs per week in a cohort view. Last week’s lead-cohort hasn’t had as much time to mature as a lead-cohort from last month. So comparing them doesn’t tell you much. Instead, we can use something like “Day 14 MQLs” which is the number of MQLs a lead-cohort has produced when it’s 14 days mature - you can then use this metric to compare apples-to-apples across any lead-cohort that’s at least 14 days old).
In the organizations I manage, I try to make sure there’s a single, clearly defined north star metric for every single pod, and ideally every single person.
The first step here is to model the key levers that drive the business. In an eCommerce business that might be CAC, LTV, and COGS. In a SaaS business that might be cost per MQL, MQL to Qualified Opportunity Conversion Rate, Close Rate, and Retention Rate.
The second step is to build the organization so that one pod maps to each lever. These are your north star metrics. These might be your OKRs.
The next step is to identify leading indicators for every one of these key levers. For example, if we’re trying to bring down our cost per MQL, the leading indicator might be the number of landing page experiments shipped per week. But we want leading indicators to be something we can monitor weekly.
Here’s a real example: I have a sales coach in our sales organization. The department’s north star metric is simple: more revenue. But revenue is a lagging indicator. The leading indicator for a coach might be the quality of calls the team is having. So we created a call scorecard and started using Gong to track call scorecards. We now look at the average # of scorecards completed, and the percentage of scorecards receiving a passing score. Because this is subjective, we also created trackers in Gong which allow us to measure the percentage of calls that contain certain keywords. There is a tracker that listens for discovery questions, and one that listens for specific talk tracks. This helps us understand if the team is moving in the direction of covering the right benefits in their calls.
#5 Create Data Transparency and a Leaderboard For Your Tribe
In Atomic Habits, author James Clear argues “we have a strong desire to fit in and belong to the tribe” so “we tend to adopt habits that are praised and approved of by our culture.”
As a leader within the organization, you have the ability to shape the culture quite directly. Once you have your north star metrics established, your pods organized around them, and your individuals mapped to specific leading indicators, start reporting the results in a transparent way.
Create a transparent culture where everyone sees how their peers are performing against those metrics, and then praise and reward those who achieve their metrics and are therefore most “accepted” by the tribe.
Think about a sales team: there’s always a leaderboard. The same thing can be done for other departments and functions, but we shy away from it.
Note: when implementing this type of approach, avoid ranking employees and avoid negative reinforcement. Just putting everyone’s names side-by-side with a metric up on a screen for all to see will be enough to drive the acceptance-seeking behavior we’re looking for. What I like about this approach is that it makes acceptance not about how likable you are but about driving results.
#6: Create An Asynchronous Window into Your Team’s Work
According to HBS Professor Kevin Sharer, “we’ve got to have some way to monitor the progress along the way without me getting in your way.” Too many check-in meetings can lead to micro-managing, so instead, we want to create a less-formal channel where your team feels comfortable asking questions, and ideally where you can view the in-progress work-product asynchronously. I have a strong sense of urgency, so it’s important for me to know that we’re making progress. I like to use Asana for this: I ask my team to link-to-in-progress work within Asana so that I can take a peak without interrupting them. They know they can add questions or comments in Asana, and I can process all of these in batches once or twice a day.
#7: Play to Their Strengths
In Good to Great, Jim Collins refers to this as “getting the right people on the bus, and then putting them in the right seats.” In the Effective Executive, Drucker tells us we should always build on a team member’s strengths rather than on their weaknesses. And in “First, Break All the Rules,” the authors go further still, saying that the best way to create 10X employees is to give each person ample opportunities to do the thing they do best. To play favorites.