Scaling People

“I actually one of my favorite books, the reason why I just flipped up here is on my shelf, um Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson. She wrote this like awesome book and it's been republished by Stripe Press.”

“there's a part of the book I think it's toward the end of the third chapter which is about hiring and that's a really long chapter turns out I had a lot to say about hiring”

“and actually that's what a lot of my book is about is like when should you start to think about this thing that you might need right and it's sooner than you think”

“but for the the sort of structures and operating processes that I talk about in the book I I really I do have this analogy which I think you picked up on to like building a house right”

“and so there's as I said there's like a chapter about that but I think some of the simplest versions of it is how do we evaluate talent what kind of talent are we looking for”

“I do think authentic leaders tend to have their own right Lenny you probably have a few that you you maybe have not articulated them all out loud but I do have mine and they're in the book”

“and I tell a story in the book about a manager I worked with where transparency was a a very important value to him and the thing is you usually have a story behind that value”

“and then you're starting to document okay if these are my three top values and here's why uh and then I think what you want to look for are what are my what I would call my work style Tendencies”

“I wonder if it's the fact that these two teams both seem to have the exact same project uh I talk in the book about a meeting I was in where it was like very clear that we had two teams in conflict”

“I mean one of my favorite I've interviewed a lot of people for the book different leaders and managers from lots of different fields but one of them was Reid Hoffman”

“I share examples in the book of like this might be the template you fill out if you're a team and you're reporting on how it's going versus your strategy and your goal and then there's also sort of getting into metrics and dashboards”

“yeah actually it's exactly you know and I mentioned in my book gokul's Spade framework but which you can look up he has like a coda on it but actually it's the same thing that I said about meetings which is making it very explicit that there is a decision to be made”

“in the book I talk about this framework that Bezos uses type 1 type 2 decisions like is it high impact is it irreversible is it not like really evaluate what kind of decision is this how hard is it”

“I I love and I like scaling people so these are two books that the reason why I recommend them to people is because they have solid Playbook answers to like 80 90% of kind of everyday leadership scaling people questions”

“And then I would be remiss if I did not mention Claire Hughes Johnson's book Scaling People. Even though it only just came out, I've recommended it a lot. There's actually some stuff in here where I'm sharing some some techniques that we've used at Stripe, so you might enjoy that.”

“Okay, well actually you will find some recommended interview questions for me in this book. One I really like actually um it is it sounds like a softball and then it's not is I often ask people, especially for leadership hiring, which leader that they've worked with they admire most and why.”

“and then the other book that I was going to say but I'm glad you mentioned Claire is Claire's book scaling people which is coming out I had a very small hand in ghost writing for her a little bit in the first draft”

“and this week she's releasing an incredible book called scaling people which in my opinion should be and likely will be on every Founder's bookshelf”

“so you wrote this book it's called scaling people it's coming out this week I actually read a preview copy and it's incredible everyone listening to this should buy it”

“there's a story you share at the end of the book I think it's an acknowledgments about how people went and took like John Collison out for dinner and were just like picking his brain on how did you scale stripe”

“you talked about how often times people do it too late and I'm curious why it's so important to think about the stuff that you wrote about in this book so early in your company's life cycle”

“because they're you know they're going to read your book which gives them so much advice on all the things you can do yeah if you're like after if you have to pick a couple things”

“but there's this area I wanted to get to before we dive into some of the into the weeds around that which is I found it really interesting that you started your book with this idea of personal operating principles”

“and and what's cool is you're sharing all these Amazing Stories and tactics in the book you actually have like templates to do each of these things for yourself which so like a lot of this is pointers to like if you actually want to do this go check out the book”

“and that is how I maintain a sense of stability perfect segue to the next kind of broad area I want to spend time on which is this house metaphor and the three components of it that you talked about and this is kind of like the core of the book”

“and I know your book has actual examples a lot of this stuff so yeah again pointer to that okay so that's the founding documents”

“Claire I know you have to run anyone listening you gotta buy this book like I've said at the beginning if you like my newsletter it's exactly my newsletter but as a book about operations”

“More recently, what I've been sending out for my managers is Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson. I think that just came out within the last year actually, but it's just got an incredible amount of really useful tactical things, templates, all sorts of things that you can put into practice.”

“Your book, which I highly recommend to folks, it's incredibly tactical, Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building. Tons of templates. Tons of frameworks. Lots of specifics that you can apply immediately.”

“I stole a phrase from Claire Hugh Johnson, who uh you've had on your podcast, but wrote a book called Scaling People.”