Coming soon: Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson
Preorder our next title, sharing time-tested tactics for management and company building from a Stripe and Google executive.
One of the most exciting interviews I did for High Growth Handbook was with Claire Hughes Johnson. Her “Working with Claire” guide has been one of the most quoted and used frameworks in my book. And no wonder—she is an exceptional operator, leader, and manager. I was excited to learn that Claire has taken her many years of operating excellence from Stripe and Google and distilled it into a new book, available for preorder now: Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building. In it, she shares her hard-earned insights on leadership, management, and scaling organizational processes.
Scaling People is a must-read, containing sections on everything from the basics (what’s the difference between leadership and management? How do you do resource planning and goal setting? How do you recruit, onboard, and lead great people?) to more complex topics (how do you deal with high and low performers? What is an optimal team structure? What are the keys to hypothesis-based coaching?). Each chapter comes with exercises and templates you can use to work through these areas yourself.
Scaling People is a key book to be added to the shelf of any people leader or manager. If you are an individual contributor, it can also offer insights into what managers and leaders at your company care about, as well as provide a path for you to think about how to eventually take on management and leadership of teams.
Happy reading,
Elad Gil
Entrepreneur, investor, and author of High Growth Handbook
Elad Gil is an entrepreneur, operating executive, and investor or adviser to private companies including Airbnb, Coinbase, Instacart, Pinterest, Square, Stripe, and Wish. He is cofounder and chairman at Color Genomics and the author of the Stripe Press book High Growth Handbook.
Read an excerpt from Scaling People
From Chapter 1: Essential Operating Principles
There are thousands of ways to run an organization and make decisions, so why do you do it the way you do? Maybe you strongly believe that management is a practice of leading by example, so you try to emulate the most important behaviors for your teams’ success, like preparing thoroughly for a customer meeting or leaving detailed comments in a design review. Maybe you believe that no decision should be made without data, so you require all of your teams to conduct experiments with measurable results before they make major decisions. Or maybe you’re a master delegator, so you spend most of your time matching the right talent with the right problems, then position yourself to unblock obstacles so that nothing stands in the way of them achieving great results.
Whether you know it or not, you’ve probably already formed many of your own management operating principles—the guidelines you use to make decisions and get work done. These principles act like a personal value system for how you manage your work and your teams. They’re guardrails for your management approach and decision-making. Knowing and understanding how they influence your work can make you a better manager, not least because you can articulate them and help others understand how you work. They’ll also guide the way you build and implement your company-wide core frameworks.
Before we dive into these frameworks in the coming chapters, I want to share my own principles. I’ve relied on many management strategies over the course of my career, many adapted from the work of admirable managers and leaders to whom I and many others owe a great debt. Over time, I’ve refined the backbone of how I lead into the following principles, and I believe they form the foundation of my success as a leader and a manager:
Build self-awareness to build mutual awareness.
Say the thing you think you cannot say.
Distinguish between management and leadership.
Come back to the operating system.