It’s not often that I read a business book that actually gives a fresh perspective. I admit that I did kinda trash Andrew Chen’s The Cold Start Problem, which I finished a few weeks ago. But I was glad to have finally found an exception to the norm in Claire Hughes Johnson’s book, Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building. It’s a refreshing read on a topic that a lot of folks in the business realm aren’t very good at talking about: how to actually manage humans, and how to navigate the tricky balance between overbuilding infrastructure and underbuilding it when scaling a company.
Johnson, a Google alumna who now works for payment processing company Stripe, draws variously from personal examples, industry stories, and best (and worst) practices. The book covers everything ranging from hiring to firing, growth to change management, onboarding, offboarding, company culture, company infrastructure, and more.
Perhaps my biggest takeaway from the book was that Johnson suggests that managers lead with empathy, something I’ve been thinking about a lot this year– amid a particularly ugly collapse of our executive board of our neighborhood association, amid facing down a particularly stony and hideous city government while dealing with some neighborhood issues, and amid thinking about the climate of national politics, in which one side of the debate focuses their platform on rancor and negativity while the other seems to be building a momentum of positive vibes. Empathy doesn’t mean that one should be wishy-washy; rather, it means that good managers are self-aware, and self-awareness leads to a stronger ability to lead teams to great results.
The emphasis on empathy also gently reminds us to not be shitty to one another in the workplace, and she gives great examples of how managers can use a socratic approach to inspire, rather than simply marshal, managees to solve problems on their own. While self-awareness and empathy are core to the message of the book, Johnson also spends a lot of time talking about other principles, like direct, transparent, and sometimes (where appropriate) bold communication, as well as the importance of maintaining some core operating principles and procedures for how to get things done. By leading with this set of key values, Johnson wants to enable the reader to understand how to adapt to novel and challenging circumstances while still maintaining focus and structure.
I always love to hear from readers. Tell me a story about your best and/or worst manager, and what you learned from the experience? I have had some great managers (at Southwest Housing Solutions) and some truly awful ones (Exelon, for example). I’ve also had great managers at terrible companies– while they say that people leave managers, not jobs, sometimes even a great manager is unable to contend with a fundamentally dysfunctional workplace, especially if they lack sufficient power to effect change over the managee’s specific realm. The best managers I’ve had trusted me enough to go off and do things on my own without micromanaging, but also were understanding of times when I needed some flexibility or some additional direction.
My worst managers, though, were ones who were perpetually flustered and overworked, but unwilling to enlist help or be transparent about what was going on– translating to an explicit aura of mistrust and skepticism that often went both ways. Johnson talks about this with a lot of concrete examples.
In the last team I managed– of installers for a utility energy program- I once had a guy introduce me as “the best manager I ever had,” and this was high praise coming from a consummate professional. I can think of no higher reward from a team than having people genuinely appreciate what you’ve done for them. Johnson talks about this, too, in the book. I will never get hired for Google or Stripe, of course– but it’s nice to think that they do employ people who actually care about humans rather than just trying to make Line Go Up.
Check out Claire Hughes Johnson’s book Scaling People. For a complete list of book reviews on this blog, click here.