创企扩张中，新老员工交替如何避免矛盾？
Molly Graham是个有故事的人。她的谷歌团队在9个月内由25人骤增到了125人；在她就职Facebook的4年多内，Facebook从拥有500名员工，8000万用户发展到了5500名员工以及过11亿的用户（Molly Graham的职责就是创立企业文化、补偿制度以及绩效系统来帮助公司发展壮大）。现在，作为效能工具创企Quip的COO，她一面在为团队的发展打实基础，一面忙着迎合那些准备全速发展的客户导向型初创企业的需求（包括Instacart和New Relic）。
如果说有那么一件事Graham有十足把握的话，那就是任何公司发展都伴随着一系列十分特别的问题。有些问题很有趣，比如要把每个人的大办公桌换成小一点儿的好给新来的员工腾地儿；又比如说搬进了一个连现有团队都容纳不下的办公室。然而，其中有些问题却如同烫手的山芋一般，非常严重。
“如果你曾见过一个精明能干的员工上一年工作得风生水起，而这一年却只能挣扎徘徊，你就知道我说的是什么意思了。”Graham说道，“一个团队如果每六个月就增加一倍或两倍人数，就会产生方向不明、职能混乱、压力倍增的特殊情绪。如果你不主动地解决这个问题，那你最终就会陷入麻烦之中。”
在这篇文章中，Graham向我们解释了为什么要壮大公司和团队，用她的话来说，那可是比登天还难；此外，作为一个早期员工或者创企的创立者，你能够做些什么来让这一过程变得简单一些。她以亲身经验告诉我们公司快速发展到底是什么感觉（很少有人会谈这个），公司成长中最艰难的时期是什么时候以及，最关键的，你该怎样预测前所未有的挑战，防止它危害到你们公司的发展势头以及长期的成功。
风暴中心
Graham说：“我认为让人们开口谈论在一个急剧扩张的公司工作是什么感觉，这一点是非常重要的，因为它能帮助人们认识到他们经历的一切是多么稀松平常；对于一个企业领导者来说，了解到这一点感受也能对你的团队产生帮助。”在她就职Facebook期间，她见过许多人与这种情绪做挣扎；而现在，她会对其团队的员工畅谈这一种情绪。“我把它叫做 ‘放弃你的乐高’座谈会。”Graham说。
她的解释
“对于企业扩张我有一个绝佳的比喻，扩张就像用乐高积木搭一个超大、超复杂的塔，”她说，“起初大家都很兴奋，参与扩建团队是一件很荣幸的事，能在一个飞速发展的公司工作也真的很酷炫。这时候的乐高积木太多了！你想搭个什么都可以。在你开始扩张的初期，每个人都攥着很多可供选择的乐高，他们可能同时做着10份工作，也都在为建造一个伟大的公司贡献一己之力。”
创业初期，你有太多的选择，因而就很容易兴奋过头。要做的工作太多了——乐高也太多了。你不确定自己是否能把这些都包揽下来。很快，你决定向外寻求帮助。然后你就开始招人。这时候，不论是在个人还是团队层面，有趣的事情发生了：人们变得异常紧张。
“当你扩招员工时，你的心理变化会像过山车一样，‘慢着，那个新来的要取代我的工作了？万一他们做得不对怎么办？万一他们比我还要强怎么办？我现在该做什么？’”Graham说，“还有一些较强烈的情绪，即使可预测也会让人紧张不安。”为了让你扩张后的团队保持高效运转，你必须帮助每个人穿过这段过山车。如果没能做到这一点，你可能就会陷入真正的混乱中。
如果你想要自身成长跟上公司成长的速度，你需要每几个月更换工作任务。
这就是为什么她的谈话是关于乐高的。当有新人进来接手你的部分工作时，你的内心感受和一个孩子必须和别人分享乐高玩具时是一样的。这些新人能否正确地建造这个乐高塔？会不会把重要的积木以及建造的乐趣全部夺走？会不会完全接管你正在建造的塔导致你一个积木都不剩？对于这些问题我们都会产生自然的焦虑和不安全感。但是在一个开疆拓土的公司里，转让职责——转让你开始建造的乐高塔的一部分，是建造一个更大、更好的公司的唯一路径。
“扩张中，几乎所有的事情都是与直觉相悖的，”Graham说，“其中最重要的一个例子就是：对扩张中团队产生的情绪做回应通常不是什么好主意。每个人的第一直觉都是把新人夺去的乐高抢回来，把部分塔的建造职责赢回来或者对建造塔的方式进行微观处理。但实际上，应对扩张（也是在一个急速发展的公司里不断成功的秘诀之一）最好的办法就是忽视直觉，去搭建一个更大、更好的乐高塔。当你抬头四周寻找时，你很有可能会发现在你身旁就有一堆全新的乐高积木。”
还有这样一个反直觉的方面：人员增加并不意味着之前在的人就没什么事可做了，而是意味着整个公司的业务更多了。如果之前有一个人负责所有的市场营销工作，然后你雇了一个人掌管内容营销的渠道，这并不意味着之前那个人的工作职责就减少了。它不是意味着前一个人现在能把剩余的工作做得更好，就是意味着她能接管新的职责了。
“人们会想，‘噢新人来了！这下我的工作能轻松一点了。’ 但这种好事几乎从没发生过，”Graham说，“员工增加是寻找新工作（或者你旧工作的升级版）的好机会。但这要求个人能慷慨地把之前工作的一部分交付出去：课题、项目、产品、编码——这些他们可能从零开始打造出来的成果。交付工作意味着你要把你在意的一些东西交给别人并信任别人。”
对于工作能力超强的员工来说，几乎每时每刻都在交付工作。Graham强调说，那些能在快速发展的公司里获得成功的人，都能很快地适应团队扩建带来的混乱以及不确定性。他们熟练于定期更新自己的工作职责，对于短期内团队人数倍增等带来的大范围不安情绪，他们也能完美消化并接受。
在Quip，Graham的工作任务每三个月就会更换一次。但这并不意味着她头衔的改变，只是她的工作范围频繁变化而已。举例来说，她已经从一开始的销售人员（也是市场营销人员）地转变成了销售及市场营销副总裁。“每三个月，我都会经历一段不舒服、不安心的时期，我会担心自己做错了选择，或者把业务带到了错误的层面上，但这种感觉继而逐渐消失，我也会找到新的工作职责所在。” Graham说。
一周之前，某个人可能告诉你说讨厌自己手中的乐高想要摆脱它们。但一旦你招聘了新的员工，他们突然又想紧紧攥住自己手中的乐高了。
Graham曾有机会训练自己应该如何经历这些改变。在Facebook的时候，他们每周要招聘20-60名新员工，因此Graham变得习惯于每3-6个月就将自己的职责交接给别人，这甚至都成了她工作的一部分。
她想给管理者的建议是什么呢？“老实说，你能做的最好的事情就是将员工正经历的感觉平常化，”她建议道，“作为一个领导者你要首先跨过这道坎并主动对员工说，‘嘿，在公司发展的过程中你一定会经历这些情绪，这是非常普遍的，大家都会产生这种情绪，我也经历过这种情绪，没必要太害怕。’”
除此以外，更要帮助他们理解这种感觉，以免他们反应过度。
“在一对一面谈或开团队会议时，要注意以下几种问题：‘我们为什么要雇这个人?’ 或‘真的有必要派人去做那个工作吗?’ 或 ‘Suzie 要接手这个课题吗?’ 不管是个人还是集体，提出这种问题时，你都要跟你的团队谈心，告诉他们放弃手中的乐高积木。”
想要帮助员工从工作转换的焦虑中走出来，一个巧妙的办法就是告诉他们下一份工作的实际情况以及面临的机遇大小。
当人们太过专注于之前的工作时，他们往往会迷失自己，看不到这些情绪的背后到底有什么在等待着他们。
“如果你想从Facebook只有25名员工时起步并最终掌管一个大部门的话，你就要学会善于放弃手中的乐高，”Graham说。
公司扩展的各个阶段
Graham说在她领导的团队中，在她指导过的人员中以及与Quip合作的创企中，她曾多次看见这种乐高模式。乐高模式看上去是个相当普遍。
“在Quip，我们见过许多初创企业，从50名员工发展到300-500名员工。这些创企无不在探索交流、组织以及增强企业透明度的新途径。在这种时刻，他们开始寻找新工具，部分原因是公司的各个环节正一步步走向分裂。对于正在发展壮大的团队来说，这是让人非常难受的阶段。因为在这个阶段，团队开始经历一系列发展的挑战，而且你也会逐渐看到，如果在壮大的过程中没有主动地处理好这些挑战，将给你的企业带来巨大问题。”
Graham说对于大部分公司来说，真正的混乱产生于公司规模达到30-750人。当度过这样一个里程碑后，发展带来的情绪就更多是团队导向型而不是公司导向型了，就像： “哇，现在工程开发发展好快啊！”而不是“Facebook现在发展好快啊！”。
30-50名员工
“当一个桌子再也容纳不了公司的员工时，所有事情就开始变得艰难了，”Graham说道，“过去员工们之间沟通起来很简单，但人员一多，你就会发现大家突然纷纷抱怨不知道各个部门在做些什么；不知道你为什么会做某个决定；他们甚至互相都不认识。我见过许多公司在这个阶段挣扎求生。”
当员工数达到30-50人时，你的团队开始从一个大家庭转变为公司，所有的事情也就跟着变艰难了。
当公司规模不足30人时，大家互相认识，能和任意一个人随时建立交谈。你甚至都不需要费心交流，因为大家椅子一转就能互相对话；此时工作的重心也很明确，因为所有人无时无刻不在谈论这个重心。
“当一切因公司扩大开始发生转变时，CEO体会最深，”Graham说，“作为一个领导者，你开始被问到一些从前绝不需要回答的难题。有个CEO告诉我，曾经有人问他们公司的职业前景如何，他们傻了眼：‘我怎么知道！我们要做的事情那么多！你干吗要问这个？’ 还有人问，‘XXX怎么做？’，听到这种问题，你只想说，‘你怎么会不知道怎么做！’但问这些问题并不是他们的过错。一切都变了。你们现在是一个公司——而不是一个团队了，你们要开始表现得像一个公司。”
这时候，最好的办法就是开始试着把东西写下来，尤其是从前不需要正式记录的东西，比如工作任务、价值、哲学思想等等。
“是的，当你的团队只有25人时，工作重心复杂多样，把所有东西都记下来似乎是蠢事一桩，但绝对是值得的。因为当你的团队扩大到750人时，你就会看出，花了时间来考虑周全并记录下来的公司与其他公司有着天壤之别。”Graham说。
除了记录以外，你还要频繁地沟通交流。当你写下了你是谁，正在做什么事情后，你还需要经常性地谈到它。
这个阶段，公司的成功不是依靠一系列繁琐或过早计划的程序，而是依靠建立正确的原则。当Facebook处于这个阶段时，Graham做的正是巩固Facebook的企业文化。“在我们建立补偿金体系之前，我们创立了一套补偿金哲学理论来指导我们思考如何补偿那些升职的人。在发展壮大的过程中，这套理论让我们得以不断完善补偿金制度。据我所知，时至今日它还多多少少地指导着Facebook的补偿金制度。”
建立一套哲学体系能帮助企业回答不少问题：优秀员工的标准应当是什么？员工反馈在公司里应当扮演什么样的角色？经理人在公司的角色是什么？为什么有些员工会失败？
“许多初创企业的创始人都会倾向于把亚马逊这种大公司的复杂程序直接套用在自己的公司上，”Graham说，“但说到底，初创企业最需要的是设计一套准则，这套准则能告诉他们：他们是谁？他们喜欢什么？他们想为谁服务以及他们想成为谁？这才是能帮助你的公司发展壮大的东西。”
50-200名员工
“此时是绝佳的塑形时期，因为你的公司仍然不大，可塑性极强，员工们也都还听你的话。如果用造房子来比喻的话，现在就是打基础阶段，技术绝对重要。在这个阶段，做什么事情都不能急躁。如果你想要你的团队或公司树立一定的价值观，关心某些事情以及提高员工的多样化，最佳时期就是200名员工的时候，有可能的话100名员工时更佳。过了这个阶段，就会有大量别的事情产生了。”
人才招聘具有网络效应，头100名员工的素质会决定后面200名员工。
对于如何预测新进员工的工作能力，谷歌、Facebook以及其他一些公司都做过相关研究。研究表明，最大的预测指标就是这名员工是谁推荐的。如果你有优秀员工做推荐，那你找到的人工作能力也会很强。如果你因为害怕或感到不安心，而不敢开除能力低的员工，那你的公司未来的走向也不见得会光明多少了。下层基础决定上层建筑啊！
“你能做的需要最有利于你自己、你的员工甚至是那些即将被你开除的人，”Graham说，“否则，坐在能力低下的员工旁的有识之士就会想你为什要给那些差劲的人付工资。”
200-750名员工
这个规模的公司就像是一个青少年，有自己的脾气和爱好，还伴随着许多成长的伤痛。这时候一个公司的性格和习惯基本已经定型了。
但这不代表说你不能再作出任何改变，只是想要改变太难了，并且随着进一步发展壮大，还会变得越来越难。Facebook在发展到700人规模时，曾成功地将过快发展（导致公司环节断裂）的特点转变为缜密、快速的创新。但是，Graham表示，Facebook能够转型成功是因为Mark Zuckerberg非常清楚他想要公司做什么。在一个公司拥有200名员工之后，任何企业文化上的转变都必须小心谨慎地进行，同时还要公司领导集团，包括CEO以及各个主要部门的主管做大量的工作。
超过750名员工
一般来说，公司规模达到750人以上时，员工的身份标识就会从公司转向团队。比如，他们变成了Facebook的工程师，而不只是一名Facebook员工。CEO们也可能会开始听到这样的问题“市场营销团队到底在做什么？”。
此时，办公室政治也开始萌生，一开始会缓慢发展，之后便势不可挡。Graham认为办公室政治出现的标志就是：人们开始更加关注自身利益，而不是整个公司的利益。刚开始出现的时候你可能会感到很震惊。办公室政治的出现可能是在暗示你扩张过快或没有主动与员工多多沟通，以致他们不知道怎样的行为会被奖励，也不知道你想要为世界带来什么。和团队领导人深刻、频繁的沟通交流是维护公司健康发展的唯一途径。每个人都得感觉到自己的工作与公司的前景休戚相关。
在这个时期，团队领导人也应当回过头来寻求CEO的意见好让企业在达到初期规模时生存下来。团队领导人还可以充分利用相同的策略来保证团队业务蒸蒸日上，而且保证没有任何员工会产生消极的情绪，更不会成为指导工作错误下的牺牲品。
‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling Startups
Molly Graham has seen a lot. Her team at Google leapt from 25 to 125 in just 9 months. During her 4+ years at Facebook, the company exploded from 500 employees serving 80 million users to 5,500 employees and over 1.1 billion users. (Her job was to sort out the culture, compensation, and performance systems to help make that possible — no big deal.) And now, as COO of productivity tool startup Quip, she’s both laying the groundwork for her team to grow, and catering to a customer base of startups (Instacart and New Relic among them) who have the pedal to the metal.
If there’s one thing Graham knows for sure, it’s that scaling comes with an utterly unique set of problems. Some of them are funny — like needing to replace everyone’s big desk with smaller ones so all the new folks can fit, or moving into an office that's already too small for your growing team. But some of them are far more serious.
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“If you’ve ever watched an extremely high performer go from killing it one year to struggling the next, you know what I’m talking about,” she says. “There’s a unique feeling of ambiguity, chaos and stress that comes with doubling or tripling your team every six months. If you don’t manage scaling proactively, you can end up in trouble.”
Here, Graham explains why scaling companies and teams is, in her words (and she’s putting it lightly), “crazy hard” and what you can do as an early employee or a startup founder to make it easier on yourself and your team. She covers what rapid scaling actually feels like as an experience (something too few people talk about), the toughest phases of growth and how to survive them, and — most importantly — how you can anticipate the biggest challenges before they really hurt your momentum and your chances for long-term success.
In the Eye of the Storm
“I think it’s important for people to talk about what it feels like to be inside a scaling company because it helps people realize how normal their experience is — and identifying that experience as a leader can actually help your team,” says Graham. She saw so many people struggling with the same emotions during her time at Facebook that now she actually gives a talk to people on her teams about it. “I call it the ‘Give Away Your Legos’ talk,” she says.
Let her explain.
“The best metaphor I have for scaling is building one of those huge, complex towers out of Legos,” she says. “At first, everyone’s excited. Scaling a team is a privilege. Being inside a company that’s a rocket ship is really cool. There are so many Legos! You could build anything. At the beginning, as you start to scale, everyone has so many Legos to choose from — they’re doing 10 jobs — and they’re all part of building something important.”
You have so many choices and things to build during this early phase that it’s easy to get overwhelmed. There’s too much work — too many Legos. You’re not sure you can do it all yourself. Soon, you decide you need help. So you start to add people. That’s when something funny happens on a personal level and to teams: People get nervous.
“As you add people, you go through this roller coaster of, ‘Wait, is that new person taking my job? What if they don’t do it the right way? What if they’re better than me at it? What do I do now?’” says Graham. “These are some strong emotions, and even if they're predictable, they can be unnerving.” In order to get to a really high-functioning, larger team, you have to help everyone get through this roller coaster. If you don’t, you can end up with a real mess.
If you personally want to grow as fast as your company, you have to give away your job every couple months.
That’s why her talk is about Legos. The emotions you feel when new people are coming in and taking over pieces of your job — it’s not that different from how a kid feels when they have to share their Legos. There’s a lot of natural anxiety and insecurity that the new person won’t build your Lego tower in the right way, or that they'll get to take all the fun or important Legos, or that if they take over the part of the Lego tower you were building, then there won’t be any Legos left for you. But at a scaling company, giving away responsibility — giving away the part of the Lego tower you started building — is the only way to move on to building bigger and better things.
“Almost everything about scaling is counterintuitive,” says Graham. “And one of the foremost examples is that reacting to the emotions you’re having as your team adds more people is usually a bad idea. Everyone’s first instinct is to grab back the Legos that the new kid took — to fight them for that part of the tower or to micromanage the way they’re building the tower. But the best way to manage scaling (and one of the secrets to succeeding in a rapidly growing company) is to ignore those instincts, and go find a bigger and better Lego tower to build. Chances are if you pick your head up and look around, there’s a brand new exciting pile of Legos sitting right next to you.”
That’s one of the other counterintuitive things: Adding people doesn’t mean there’s less work for the people that are already there. It means that the entire company can do more. If one person was managing all of marketing before and then you hire someone to manage your content channels — the person who was doing marketing before is not going to have less to do. It either means that she'll be able to do the rest of her job better, or that she'll be able to take on new things.
“People think, ‘Oh, that person joined! Now I can finally work a little less.’ But that’s almost never what happens,” Graham says. “Adding people is the opportunity to find a new job (or the new version of your old job). But this requires individuals to freely give away parts of or sometimes all of their old job — handing over projects, programs, products, code that they probably built from scratch. It means trusting other people with something you care about.”
For high performers in really fast-growing situations, this happens all the time. Graham emphasizes that one of the secrets of people who are really successful at fast-growing companies is how rapidly they're able to adapt to the chaos and uncertainty of adding new people. They become adept at redefining their jobs on a regular basis, and they become comfortable with the largely uncomfortable emotions that naturally happen when a team doubles or triples in a short period of time.
At Quip, Graham’s job changes every three months. This doesn’t mean her title changes, but the content of her work shifts radically. For example, she’s gone from basically being the only sales person (and the marketing person too!) to functionally operating as VP of Sales and Marketing. “Every three months, I go through a phase where I’m a little uncomfortable and certain I’m doing the wrong things or operating at the wrong level, but then it passes and I find my new job,” she says.
A week ago, someone might have told you they hate their Legos and want to get rid of them. But as soon as you hire someone else, they suddenly want to hang on to all of them.
Graham’s had the benefit of conditioning to weather these changes. At Facebook, when they were onboarding 20 to 60 people a week, she got soused to ceding responsibility every three to six months that she considered it part of her job.
Her advice to managers? “Honestly, the best thing you can do is normalize what people are experiencing,” she advises. “As a leader, you want to head it off at the pass and proactively say, ‘Hey, this is what you can expect to feel during this time of growth. It’s pretty universal. Other people are going through the same thing. I’ve been through it too. There’s no need to be scared.’”
Help them understand that the emotional chaos they feel is normal so there’s no need to overreact. And in fact, they should often do the opposite of what their instincts tell them: Don’t latch onto the Legos you had before. Give them away and move on to building the next taller, cooler tower.
“Listen to the questions people ask during your one-on-ones or in team meetings. When you start to hear a lot of, ‘So… why did we hire that person?’ or ‘Do we really need someone to do that job?’ or ‘Is Suzie going to take over this project?’ Those are the signs that either individually or collectively, you should start talking to your team about giving away their Legos.”
One thing you can encourage people to do is not fixate or act on their emotions right when new people come aboard. Instead, tell them to ride it out and see how they feel in three weeks or a month — that’s when they should be coming out the other side and feeling better. Maybe set a meeting up to chat after that time has passed to see how things are going. That's a good way to keep an eye on how scale is affecting your team, says Graham.
The next best thing you can do is point to the new bright, shiny tower that needs to get built. At Facebook, one of her closest co-workers had built the beginning of a big project and their manager asked Graham to take it over. They wanted her co-worker to move on and focus on a new area that was even more important to the company, but she had a tough time letting go. “This was actually a very good friend, so it wasn’t that she didn’t trust me, she was just uncomfortable with giving away something she had started building,” she says.
“That’s when our boss did this brilliant thing — he gave her a huge goal. He basically said to her, ‘We need you to do the same thing over here only five times bigger.’ Immediately, my co-worker let go of every single Lego she was holding and ran to the new project because she was so scared and excited. It was like someone had flipped a switch and she was suddenly like, ‘Good luck, peace out!’”
One of the best techniques for getting people through job-change anxiety is to help them picture the reality of their next job and the size of the opportunity.
People get lost when they’re overly focused on the job they used to have and they can’t see what awaits them on the other side of these emotions.
“If you want to be one of these type of people who started at Facebook at 25 people and ended up running a huge department, you have to get really good at giving away your Legos,” says Graham. “If you hold on to answering customer support queries yourself or writing all the blog posts yourself, you’re never going to run customer support or product marketing.”
The Phases of Scale
Graham says she sees this pattern again and again on teams she’s led, with people she’s coached, and with startups she works with at Quip. It seems like a fairly universal experience.
“At Quip, we hear from a lot of startups as they grow past 50 people, and as they grow through the 300 to 500 phase. They’re looking for new ways to communicate, organize, and increase transparency in their organizations. They start looking for new tools in those moments in part because things are breaking. Those are very uncomfortable moments for scaling teams. It's when teams start to experience a lot of the growth challenges, and when you can start to see problems if you haven’t proactively managed your scaling process.”
Just as the personal experience of scaling comes with a separate, unique set of emotions, the phases a company goes through each have a character all their own. As either an employee or a partner, Graham has experienced each of these phases in turn, has absorbed the challenges that come with each, and has seen these changes handled both well and poorly.
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What follows is a definition of each of these movements in a company’s life, with one caveat: Like people, companies are distinct in how they work, look and feel. One startup may still feel like a “chaosfest” (Graham’s word) at 150 people, while another might feel bureaucratic and static at the same number. It all has to do with the unique character of the company — how it was founded, who its founders are, its product, etc.
Graham claims that for the majority of companies, the true chaos of scaling (and also the formation of most of your company’s identity) happens roughly between 30 and 750 people. After that milestone, the scaling emotions are more team-oriented rather than company-oriented — like “Wow, now engineering is growing so fast!” vs. “Facebook is growing so fast!” These phases and how to handle them apply to team scale as well.
30 to 50 Employees
“There’s something really interesting that happens when a company can’t fit around one table anymore — things just start to get a lot harder,” says Graham. “Where it used to be simple to communicate, people suddenly complain that they don’t know what’s going on anymore. They don’t know why you’re making certain decisions. They don’t know each other as well. They don’t know what they should be doing. I’ve seen so many companies really struggle in this phase.”
30 to 50 people is where you go from being a family to being a company, and everything starts to get really hard.
With under 30 people, everyone knows each other well enough to walk up and strike up a conversation with practically anyone. You don’t even need to invest that much in communication. People can turn around in their chairs and talk to each other, and the priorities are clear because everyone’s talking about them all the time.
“When things start to change at this tipping point, it’s the CEO who feels it most,” says Graham. “I’ve talked to a number of people who are experiencing this and they say it’s like night and day. At 50 people, everything that used to come naturally is now a struggle. And as a new leader, you start getting difficult questions that you’ve never had to answer before. I had a CEO tell me that someone asked them about their career path at the company, and they were like ‘I don’t know! Why are you asking that? We have so much to do!’ Or you have someone ask, ‘How do I do XYZ?’ and you want to say, ‘How do you not know that?!’ But it’s not their fault. Things have changed. You're a company now — not just a team — and you have to start acting like one.”
The best remedy here is to start writing things down — especially the stuff that's never needed to be formal or official before, like mission, values, philosophies. (You can see more of Graham’s advice on how to approach writing these things down here.)
“Who we are and how we do things — write that down as fast as you can before you hit rapid growth (ideally),” says Graham. “Yes, that might seem like a nuts thing to do at 25 people when you have so many competing priorities, but it's beyond worth it. At 750 people, you can tell the difference between the companies who did take the time to be thoughtful and record these things and those who didn’t.”
You also need to over-communicate. Once you’ve written down who you are and what you’re doing in the world, you should always be talking about it constantly. It’ll feel like you’re repeating yourself every day and every All Hands meeting, but that’s probably when you’re communicating just enough.
Success at this stage isn’t coming up with a bunch of bloated or premature process — it’s about developing the right principles. This was Graham’s focus when she was helping Facebook solidify its culture. “Before we came up with a compensation system, we created a compensation philosophy that would guide how we’d think about paying people going forward. The philosophy helped us evolve our system as we grew. It more or less still guides the way Facebook does compensation today as far as I know.”
Philosophies can answer a host of questions about an organization: What does a high performer at the company look like? What role does feedback play? What is the role of a manager at our company? How can someone fail here?
“Too many founders have this tendency to take a really elaborate process they see working somewhere like Amazon and then just grafting it onto their company — like some huge complex performance management system or engineering roadmap process,” says Graham. “At the end of the day, what early startups really need are design principles that tell them who they are, what they like, what they want to select for, and who they want to be. That is what helps you scale.”
50 to 200 Employees
“If we’re talking about child rearing, this phase correlates to those years right before adolescence,” says Graham. “This is an incredibly formative stage where you’re still small enough to change major things, people are still able to listen to you and hear what you’re saying fairly easily. If we use the metaphor of building a house, this is the foundation — and craftsmanship is incredibly important. This is not where you want to rush things. If you want your team or company to have certain values, to care about certain things, to have diversity (of thought, of identity), the time to do it is in these first 200 people — or the first 100 if possible. After that, a lot of other stuff takes hold.”
Hiring is a network effect. The first 100 people you hire will define the next 200.
Google, Facebook and others have all conducted studies about what predicts the performance of a new hire. The single biggest indicator is who they were referred by. If you have high performers referring people, you’ll hire high performers. If you let low performers stay on staff because you’re too scared or insecure to fire them, then you’re building your future company in that mold. Early hires plant seeds. And what ends up growing depends on their character and commitment. That also makes this phase the most critical one for firing people (as unpleasant as that can sound).
“The biggest favor you can do yourself, the other people who work for you, and really even the person you’re firing, is to just do it,” says Graham. “Otherwise you have really great people sitting next to low performers wondering why you’re paying them money. It really erodes confidence and has long-term ramifications. Really it should only take a couple months to assess whether someone is a good fit, and one of the healthiest things you can do for your company is — if the answer is no — part ways quickly. It doesn’t take a year to get to this answer.”
200 to 750 Employees
A company of this size has the temperament and biases of a teenager — and the growing pains to prove it. The personality and habits of the organization are pretty much molded. Now it’s all about scaling them as more and more people join. “You’re literally going through a growth spurt, and you have to really focus on getting your maturity to match your big feet,” says Graham. “A lot of how this phase feels has to do with how good of a ‘parent’ you were earlier on.”
That’s not to say you can’t make changes at this size. It’s just that everything is much harder — and gets increasingly so as you grow. Facebook was able to shift its personality away from moving fast and breaking things to thoughtful, rapid innovation after 700 people. But it was only possible, Graham says, because Mark Zuckerberg was so good at articulating what he wanted the company to do and feel like. After 200 employees, any shift in culture needs to be undertaken very deliberately and with a lot of work by the leadership of the company — the CEO, of course, but also the leader of every major department.
“Think about parenting an average teenager — you have to decide how to handle the bad habits they spontaneously develop. You catch them drinking or doing drugs, for instance. How do you handle it? Maybe it’s just the one time, or maybe it’s a sign of something you actually need to address. It could be bad later on if you ignore it completely but you also can’t overreact.”
At an organization, you can see bad habits like people acting like assholes and getting away with it, and you have to decide how to respond. Netflix’s famous culture deck declares that they won't accept brilliant assholes. Sounds reasonable, but Graham would assert that there are many companies who do. “So the question is, what do you want your company to be like? When you see a trend over time that you don’t like, you need to aggressively manage it. Otherwise you can end up with some really bad habits as a company.”
You have to pounce on any bad habits that could become part of your company's DNA. Whatever your company looks like at this stage is how it will be, floor to ceiling, when you're older and bigger.
Over 750 Employees
Typically around this point, individual people’s identities shift away from the company and toward their team. They become Facebook engineers, for instance, not just Facebookers. CEOs may start to hear questions like, “What does the marketing team even do?”
This is also where politics start to emerge, gradually at first and then with greater momentum. Graham defines politics as the moment when people start to act in their own self interest rather than the best interest of the company. It's often shocking when it first shows up. It can be a sign that you hired too quickly or aren’t communicating proactively enough about what behaviors will be rewarded, and about what you’re doing in the world. Strong, constant communication with the leaders of teams is the only way to keep things healthy. Everyone has to feel that they and their work are clearly tied to the broader goals of the organization. Everyone has to own calling out bad behavior when they see it.
This is also when team leaders should look back at advice for CEOs to survive initial company scale. They can use most of the same tactics to keep their teams humming along without people feeling disillusioned or falling prey to the wrong priorities. You can also find great advice on team scaling from other experts here, here and here.
If Graham had to distill all of this advice into a simple checklist for founders eyeing rapid growth, here’s what she’d say:
Make a list of the qualities you want your company to embody. Who do you want to be? How do you want it to feel to work there?
Write down what you’re doing in the world. What’s your vision for the change you want to make?
Communicate these things again and again and again. Through all the channels. All the time. You can’t overcommunicate these ideas.
Focus on hiring quality people rather than speed. Don’t lower your bar because you need to grow faster. It will come back to bite you.
Fire people. Just do it!
Hire amazing leaders as early as you can and help them grow their capabilities as the company grows.
Prioritize principles over process.
Keep giving away your Legos! And tell everyone around you to do the same. It’s going to be okay.
Source:firstround
编译：蔡妙娴
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