5 ways to master the art of scale
Companies today, particularly those in the fast-moving tech space, are highly dynamic. Change occurs when someone joins, leaves, moves or changes role, alongside a myriad of other reasons. Nothing stays static.
Yet many still rely on rigid and outdated job descriptions, holding on tightly to what they know, while they lose grip of what’s going on in reality and fail to scale as a result.
Scale complexity
It’s an all too familiar story. You start a company. Things are going well, so you take on your first hire. Then your second.
You begin to build out the team, and your line of direct reports grow while you become one or two steps removed from many of your employees.
One of your managers has a lot going on and too much on her plate. She comes to you and says she needs 2 new hires. You’ve got 10 managers reporting to you, so don’t have the time to properly assess it and can’t juggle everything that’s going on. You trust her judgement because she’s been dependable in the past, so you give the green light without completely understanding if it’s the right decision.
HR do up a static job description and the new eventual employee finds that his job in reality doesn’t quite match what he believes he was hired to do. He doesn’t feel engaged or content, keeps an eye on opportunities to leave and isn’t doing his best work.
Bandaid-solutions and reactionary hires patch the problem temporarily… until something breaks.
Spot fires start to appear, you lose good people, lose sight of people doing nothing at all, your team are pulling in different directions, you bleed money and can’t clearly determine why.
It’s unbelievably overwhelming.
From there, most companies decide to do time-consuming corporate planning activities or hefty restructures — which are also just solutions for that moment in time, and quickly lose relevance as your organization evolves.
So how can we design and build better organizations and healthier places to work?
1. Hire right
Typically we hire people based on an immediate or visible need in the business. For example, a key person has left and that role needs filled. Or you acquire a new contract and need a new skill within the company. It sounds logical, right?
Countless companies suffer from the reactionary hiring disease. You’ve seen it before. A new deal goes through that requires a backend developer for example. All your current backend developers are ‘busy’, and it seems that the only solution is to hire more. However, what if you could clearly see what each of those developers were working on, what tasks may be better suited to others in your team and shift their focus away from non-critical items?
You might just save one bad hire.
Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of Linkedin states in his podcast, Masters of Scale, that “…bad hires don’t just stick around, they tend to be fruitful and multiply.” Bad hires like to snowball and when you’re running fast, it can be hard to prevent it from happening.
One of the reasons for bad hires, is relying on stagnant job descriptions. Marissa Peretz, Founder of Silicon Beach Talent and former People Leader at Tesla Motors specializes in early stage, Series A, Series B and rapidly growing company hires. In her article named, The job description is obsolete, Peretz states “These written statements of the responsibilities, duties, required qualifications and reporting relationships of a position are ineffective.”
Not only does this negatively impact the company, but also the individual in the role. As the company moves, their work, tasks and objectives inevitably do too. The employee is still trying to work on what they believe they were hired for, while they miss critical items, get overloaded, don’t know what’s important, feel stressed and eventually lose their sparkle.
If your company is fluid, you need to design the work and your team to be too. Hire people based on function, be proactive in the hiring process and align your team to goals and customer needs.
2. Effectively align your people
Netflix are famous for calling themselves a ‘sports team’. Looking at that analogy, a sports team is carefully designed for every single game and every challenge that will come their way. The coach knows exactly what they want the outcome to be and the capabilities of each athlete. The team are aligned to the same goal and each know what part they play to make that happen.
Can most CEOs say the same about their employees? Do they have that same depth of knowledge that drives their team to be the winner of the next grand final?
Range hosted a mini conference on how to structure engineering teams for scale, with experts such as Grant Oladipo, Engineering Manager at Airbnb guiding the conversation. Dennard of Range, comments on one learning from the event, that
“Every team, regardless of size, should have a clear purpose or goal that is scoped to limit reliance on other teams. This focus allows each team to be autonomous in their ability to take action and create impact. The team’s identity is tied to this purpose, not just its function.”
It takes me back to Elon Musk’s view that, “Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.”
If your people are perfectly aligned, rather than pulling in opposing directions, you’re going to be operating at full force.
This is exactly what we seek to do for Functionally’s [a work design and people alignment platform] customers by aligning a company’s talent to the big goals of the organization and have them all humming towards shared, high impact outcomes.
3. Modularize your work to be done
People tend to hold to their job title and the original job description they applied against as the bounds of their work. You don’t really know what they love, what they’re best at and there are a bunch of gray-area, mission-critical tasks that nobody in your team feels real ownership of.
This is one of the fundamental features of what we do at Functionally. We break it all down, looking at every task that needs to be done and every objective that needs to be achieved: who’s spending time on it, who would like to, who owns it and who has capacity to take it on for example.
It’s simple, but we’ve seen it work time and time again. Mapping out a malleable blueprint of your business and tracking role coverage across functions, means less overlap, holes, blind spots and ineffectiveness, according to Dr Marcus Tan, CEO of Sequoia-backed HealthEngine. He says “A tool like Functionally allows organisations to ensure efficiency and performance are more easily managed for its most important resource — its people!”
It would be impossible to put a puzzle together without having all the pieces in front of you. Having a clear view of everything in your organization that needs doing is the first step in effectively allocating, distributing and executing on that work.
4. Know what you don’t know
When your company scales, it’s easy to lose sight of the detail. Gaps appear, fires need to be put out and mission-critical tasks don’t get the love they should. You can only see what’s in front of you or reported to you.
In a post by the Forbes Human Resources Council, they write “… a company’s staff is its greatest asset, and managers should know as much as possible about each person and how they contribute to the overall success of the business.”
There is a great excerpt from a discussion between Reid Hoffman with John Elkann, the heir and chair of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, on the Masters of Scale podcast:
“So how does information filter through an organization? That depends on the organization’s size. Startups have it easy. The whole founding team sits in one room together. They’re all talking together. They’re all having dinner together and so forth. Then you get big enough to create a common infrastructure where newcomers can search for information from one big data dump that’s passing for a company archive — maybe it’s a general Slack channel or a shared Microsoft OneDrive. Then as you get to the next level of scale, you have to start pushing information. So you actually have to start holding team meetings and broadcasting your decisions from the top and getting intentional about what you broadcast.
Then you have to go beyond the team meetings, and create a dedicated channel of communication for each team. You’re broadcasting information to select groups of people. In addition to that, you’re gleaning selected information from them. You’re trying to form a heat map for the company. And you’re constantly asking yourself: What are the burning questions? What haven’t I asked? In short, information doesn’t naturally flow to the majority of people, including the people at the top. The bigger the organization gets, the more vigilantly you have to know how and where the information flows, and whether you’ve been left out of the loop.”
So how can you get better visibility of what’s going on? What questions to ask? We approach this at Functionally by showing a gaps analysis and giving managers real-time vision of their team so they can have them deploying energy on high value opportunities.
5. Adapt at speed
“…growth isn’t just about speed and momentum — it’s about creating a foundation strong enough to support the company to come.”
- Robert Glazer, Three Keys to Sustainable Company Growth
Leaders have to be ready to pivot at all times. Whether because of a new competitor, new opportunities, market shifts, a PR nightmare, personnel changes or simply just a ‘fuck up’ — you have to be adaptable.
It’s an old and tired phrase, but while companies are adopting agile methodologies and modular workstations, is their organisation structured to move as quickly as they need to? Do they have the solid base to work from or does the organization look more like a block of swiss cheese on fire?
What is often missing is up-to-date data at your fingertips, that helps you to make informed decisions at speed and scale. This allows you to design your work better, take on the right people and drive teams towards the right goals.
Scaling a company is extraordinarily complex — when to do it, how to do it. As you grow, your goals, structure and people will change too. To scale successfully, it’s imperative to hire right, align your people, map out your organisation, have true visibility and build a framework that is adaptable to the countless challenges and opportunities you will face.
About Functionally
Functionally is a SaaS platform, that is designed to help CEOs master the art of scale. It helps you to achieve true visibility, alignment and effective organizational design.
Functionally is officially launching at SaaStr Annual 2019 in San Jose, California from the 5th-7th Feb. Please drop by and see us at booth 130 near the food and beverage section if you’d like to check out a demo or chat to our team.
