PDF Summary:Scaling People, by Claire Hughes Johnson

Fast-growing companies often focus on scaling key aspects of their business, such as their sales, marketing budgets, and manufacturing process. But, according to management veteran Claire Hughes Johnson, they often forget to focus on their greatest resource: their people. In Scaling People, Hughes Johnson outlines the four key processes you should implement to successfully manage employees in a high-growth environment.

In this guide, we’ll discuss Hughes Johnson’s four key processes: process #1, defining your guiding principles and solidifying your operating system; process #2, building a promising hiring pipeline to hire the best candidates; process #3, turning these new hires into thriving teams; and process #4, continuously coaching employees through informal feedback and formal reviews. We’ll also supplement Hughes Johnson’s advice with more concrete strategies for employee management and consider alternative management approaches from other business experts.

(continued)...

Hire the Right Person for the Job

After you’ve created a healthy hiring pipeline, the next task is to hire the correct individuals for any open roles. According to Hughes Johnson, doing so requires two steps: a consistent interview process and a collaborative decision-making process.

Step #1: The Interview Process

Hughes Johnson explains that you should implement a straightforward and consistent assessment rubric throughout the interview process. Otherwise, you’ll have no uniform criteria against which to judge candidates, making you more susceptible to hiring someone for the wrong reasons (for example, if you found them charming). Moreover, because Hughes Johnson recommends having multiple interviewers meet with each candidate, she advises that you train these interviewers to use your standardized rubric when assessing each candidate.

(Shortform note: Experts point out that consistent rubrics are especially useful in mitigating demographic bias, as they include standardized scoring systems that apply identically to all applicants, regardless of demographic factors. For example, a consistent rubric could ensure that you fairly judge the leadership capabilities of male and female applicants rather than succumbing to the bias that male applicants are better leaders.)

Step #2: The Decision-Making Process

After the interview process, it comes time to decide which candidates to hire. For this step, Hughes Johnson recommends that you embrace a collaborative approach to decision-making, in which the hiring manager ultimately decides whether to hire a given applicant, but only does so after listening carefully to the views of the hiring committee. This approach has two benefits: First, it allows hiring managers to hear the insights of their committees, which often supplement the managers’ initial assessments. Second, because this process leaves the ultimate decision in the hiring manager’s hands, it allows them to take responsibility for the decision.

(Shortform note: In Rebel Ideas, Matthew Syed offers another reason why collaborative decision-making results in better choices than unilateral decisions. He argues that such decisions allow us to harness the wisdom of crowds, the notion that groups of individuals with diverse views are more collectively intelligent because they have greater net knowledge. However, he clarifies that these groups only make better decisions when their leaders listen carefully to subordinates’ views—otherwise, leaders might be acting unilaterally even if they appear to be listening.)

Process #3: Building and Sustaining Thriving Teams

Hughes Johnson recognizes that the work isn’t finished after you’ve hired the best candidates to round out your team. On the contrary, you must take active steps to integrate these new employees successfully into the team. In this section, we’ll examine three of the steps that Hughes Johnson recommends for building—and sustaining—effective teams: evaluating your team members, developing a healthy environment, and deciding when to delegate tasks.

Step #1: Evaluate Your Team Members

Hughes Johnson relates that the first step toward creating a thriving team involves assessing your team members to see whether they’re capable of meeting their goals. To do so, she advises that you utilize Max Landsberg’s skill-will matrix to assess team members along two dimensions: their competency for completing their tasks (skill) and their drive to do so (will).

(Shortform note: Landsberg first presented his skill-will matrix in The Tao of Coaching, a guidebook for managers and leaders looking to become more effective teachers. In his book, the skill-will matrix is one of a handful of simple techniques that, according to Landsberg, are essential for becoming a master coach. For example, he recommends using the “GROW” model during coaching sessions, in which you set a goal at the onset of the session, refer to concrete examples as the reality, consider the options that your employee might implement, and finally wrap up by committing to a plan for improvement.)

With respect to skill, Hughes Johnson notes that there are two possibilities. First, it’s possible that a team member will have too little skill, in which case she recommends either training the team member or hiring new team members who already have the requisite skills. Second, it’s possible that a team member will have too much skill, such that their tasks will bore them because they’re insufficiently challenging. In this case, she advises that you shift your team’s goals so that they’re more demanding.

(Shortform note: For managers looking to continue increasing their employees’ skill level, Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness’s advice in Peak Performance may help. Stulberg and Magness argue that increasing skill requires partaking in challenges at the edge of one’s comfort zone—that is, activities that are challenging enough to stimulate growth, but not so challenging that growth is impossible. Thus, as a manager, you should find ways to continue encouraging your employees to engage with the edge of their comfort zone, such as by assigning them increasingly more difficult tasks.)

With respect to will, Hughes Johnson says there are two analogous possibilities. First, a team member might have too little will, leading them to work inefficiently. If that’s the case, she suggests that you try to reorient the team member around the team’s mission. For example, if you were managing a marketing team for a healthcare company, you could remind unmotivated team members of your mission to (say) provide affordable healthcare for low-income families. Alternatively, a team member might have too much will, which Hughes Johnson warns can lead them to set unrealistic expectations that they can’t meet. In this case, she recommends explicitly setting expectations so that team members aren’t setting themselves up for failure.

(Shortform note: Although Hughes Johnson writes as if motivation comes before successful work, Jeff Hayden argues otherwise in The Motivation Myth. According to Hayden, we typically think—like Hughes Johnson—that strong initial motivation spurs us toward hard work and therefore success. However, he contends that the opposite is true: Motivation is generated after you’ve implemented a plan for success and begun working toward it. Thus, instead of explicitly trying to motivate low-will team members, you might consider helping them take a first step toward greater success in order to build momentum—and thus motivation.)

Step #2: Decide When to Delegate Tasks

Hughes Johnson contends that, after you’ve assessed your team members’ competencies and motivation, the next step is to start delegating assignments centered around your team’s goals.

For context, she explains that managers who delegate tasks too frequently or too infrequently risk harming the teams they’ve built. On the one hand, when managers delegate tasks all the time, they often overwork their teams and place too much responsibility in employees’ hands too quickly. On the other, managers who never delegate tasks run the risk of taking on too much work and leaving their team members insufficiently challenged.

To strike the perfect balance, Hughes Johnson suggests that you evaluate every task along two dimensions—its consequences and its reversibility—and only handle tasks that you can’t afford to mess up (those with serious, irreversible consequences). For example, if wealthy investors ask for a presentation on your company to decide whether to invest, the presentation itself would have crucial ramifications with no opportunity for a do-over. In such cases, the stakes are high enough that you should perform the task yourself. But, according to Hughes Johnson, you should delegate all other types of tasks to your team, because such tasks are good learning opportunities for them and also because delegating them affords you more time to focus on higher-stakes tasks.

Practical Advice for Managers When Delegating Tasks

Although Hughes Johnson offers a means to decide whether to delegate a given task, she doesn’t offer concrete strategies about how to delegate a task—for example, how to decide who should work on it and how to communicate the nature of the task. To that end, business experts offer a range of practical tips that supplement Hughes Johnson’s advice. For example, you can:

• Delegate tasks in accordance with your employees’ strengths and weaknesses. For example, don’t ask an introverted team member who struggles at public speaking to give a crucial presentation.

• Establish a clear means of communication (whether via email, instant message, or face-to-face) so that you can easily check in about your employee’s progress.

• Accept that your team members will occasionally fail, since failure is an essential part of the learning process.

• Acknowledge when your team members succeed at their delegated tasks so they feel appreciated.

Step #3: Develop a Healthy Team Environment

After you’ve started delegating work to your team members to tackle key projects, Hughes Johnson’s final step is to continuously develop a healthy team environment that establishes a safe culture of open expression and trust. According to Hughes Johnson, there are two primary modes of establishing this environment: offsites, which are multiple-day events that take place outside of the office, and regular meetings.

Mode #1: Offsites

Hughes Johnson explains that offsites can transform mere groups of employees into a unified team by offering a chance for deeper connection than is possible in the office. To execute a successful offsite, she recommends that you implement three strategies: using a common scheduling document that lists the order of activities before the offsite, beginning your offsites with vulnerable check-ins, and utilizing an agenda that keeps each individual offsite activity structured.

Before the offsite even begins, Hughes Johnson advises sharing a scheduling document with all of your team members that outlines the itinerary for the offsite, clarifies its purposes, and provides room for feedback. Such documents have several advantages: They make team members feel included, for example, and ensure that your offsite is oriented around a central purpose.

Once you’ve made it to the offsite, she recommends starting each day with a quick briefing in which team members share their candid feelings about the offsite and their goals for the day. For example, you might share that you’re anxious about the offsite because you don’t want to be away from your family, but that your goal is to grow more comfortable with your team. Hughes Johnson writes that such briefings are crucial for fostering vulnerability among team members, and can also help remind them of their driving purpose.

Finally, for each individual activity at the offsite, Hughes Johnson recommends that you reiterate its purpose and agenda before beginning. She suggests that this agenda will help provide a structure that maximizes your chance of meeting your goals for every single activity.

Further Strategies for Running Effective Offsites

In addition to Hughes Johnson’s advice for running offsites, business leaders offer several further strategies for ensuring you make the most of your offsite. For example, you should:

• Carefully consider which employees to invite, since it can be difficult to run an effective offsite with too many people.

• Focus on bigger picture work issues, rather than day-to-day tasks, since offsites are more likely to have lasting impacts if they resolve long-term problems.

• Develop a concrete plan at the end of the offsite detailing what each employee should do to meet their and the company’s goals. This ensures the implementation of any solutions proposed at the offsite.

Mode #2: Meetings

Because offsites typically occur only twice a year, Hughes Johnson adds that regular meetings provide a more consistent means of reinforcing your team’s culture. Successful meetings, she explains, require both a solid foundation laid ahead of time and sharp execution of the meeting plan.

First, to lay the foundation for your meetings, decide your roles, goals, and norms ahead of time. Setting meeting roles involves deciding, for example, who will take notes, who will present, and who will help facilitate transitions from one presentation to another. To establish your goals, consider your team’s broader long-term purpose to decide what steps can be taken toward this purpose in any given meeting. And finally, your norms are the agreed-upon behaviors and actions that are acceptable in meetings—for instance, whether it’s expected that meetings will begin and end exactly on time and whether it’s permissible to raise hands in the middle of a presentation.

Next, when running the meeting, stick closely to your agenda to ensure you meet your goals. To do so, Hughes Johnson recommends sharing the agenda ahead of time so that everyone’s on the same page about the meeting structure. And although no one meeting structure will work for every team, she suggests that using meeting check-ins and check-outs—just like in the offsites—will further strengthen your team’s trust and comradery.

Further Strategies for Running Effective Meetings

To supplement Hughes Johnson’s tips for running meetings effectively, experts offer a wide variety of additional strategies. For example:

• Limit the number of employees present to around 12, because it’s difficult to maintain an organized meeting when there are too many people involved.

• Avoid circulating the agenda too far in advance, as many employees will lose or forget about it if they receive it too early.

• Tackle problems that require creative thinking at the start, since energy is typically highest when meetings begin.

• Encourage employees to openly debate the merits of different ideas to determine which ideas are worth pursuing.

• Ask the most senior employees to share their ideas last, so that junior employees don’t simply defer to them instead of sharing their own ideas.

Process #4: Mentor Your Employees

Hughes Johnson recognizes that management’s work doesn’t end upon the formation of a thriving team. On the contrary, she holds that managers should continue to develop the skills of their employees through active instruction. In this section, we’ll discuss her informal approach to helping employees through inquisitive coaching and her formal approach of using official performance reviews.

Approach #1: Inquisitive Coaching

Hughes Johnson relates that one approach that has proven effective for her is hypothesis-based coaching—which we’ll call inquisitive coaching—in which you informally share your observations of your employees to guide them to better performance. Inquisitive coaching has three steps: First, observe your employees carefully; second, identify any persistent shortcomings; and third, share these findings tactfully with your employees.

Step #1: Observe Your Employees

Before you attempt to provide any feedback, Hughes Johnson advises you to carefully observe your employees’ performance in various situations. She explains that, because different strengths and weaknesses will emerge in different circumstances, waiting until you’ve seen your employees across these circumstances can provide you with a fuller picture of their tendencies.

(Shortform note: Experts point out that when you observe your employees, it’s crucial that they don’t know that you’re observing them. After all, many employees will grow anxious if they know that their performance is being monitored, which ironically leads to worse performance.)

Step #2: Identify Shortcomings

Hughes Johnson writes that after enough time spent in observation, you’ll be able to identify consistent shortcomings that afflict individual team members, as well as certain strengths. For example, you might find that one of your team members excels whenever they work on projects without strict deadlines but tends to become inefficient whenever you impose a deadline. Further, Hughes Johnson explains that the longer you look for patterns among your team members, the more effective you’ll become at identifying them.

(Shortform note: Business leaders note that you should write down specific observations when identifying shortcomings that you’ll later discuss with your employees, rather than more general musings. If you can point to specific instances, your employees will be more likely to understand the suboptimal behavior that you’ve been observing. By contrast, when you provide overly general feedback, it’s more difficult for employees to understand what exactly the problem is.)

Step #3: Share Your Thoughts

After you’ve identified possible shortcomings that hinder your employees, Hughes Johnson recommends that you share your observations with them so they can continue to grow. However, she clarifies that you must be tactful to do so: You shouldn’t frame your observations as a judgment about them as a person, but rather about their behavior and its effect on their performance. For instance, rather than telling someone “I’ve noticed that you consistently underperform when you’re under time pressure,” try saying, “I’ve noticed that time pressure can make it difficult for you to finish projects on time.” By focusing on an external circumstance rather than an internal failing, you remove any semblance of blame from your observation.

Additionally, Hughes Johnson advises you to work together with your team members to investigate problems, rather than telling them what to do. She explains that when you order someone on your team to address a personal shortcoming, they’re often put on the defensive and become reluctant to help. By contrast, when you position yourself as a mutual investigator of the problem, you become a collaborator, making your team members more receptive to your thoughts and suggestions. For example, instead of simply telling a team member who struggles with time pressure to implement a daily schedule, you could instead ask, “What measures do you think you should implement to address the time pressure?”

Approach #2: Formal Reviews

While Hughes Johnson’s intuitive approach to coaching is an informal process that occurs throughout the year, she also points out that managers should implement formal reviews that occur on a consistent basis. Such reviews have three parts: gathering feedback from various sources, adjusting that feedback to account for irregularities, and determining any changes to compensation.

Part #1: Gather Feedback

First, Hughes Johnson writes that you should collect feedback about your employees from three sources: the employees themselves, their co-workers, and yourself.

To begin, ask each reviewee to submit a brief self-assessment that summarizes their accomplishments, highlights their strengths, and discusses one potential area of improvement. Because your employees are often most aware of their own work, their reports could provide insights that you’ve missed.

Next, choose a handful of each reviewee’s co-workers who are especially familiar with the reviewee’s work to give feedback on their performance. Whereas the reviewee might be motivated by self-interest, their co-workers should be able to give more candid assessments.

Finally, after you’ve taken each reviewee’s self-assessment and peer assessments into consideration, write down your own feedback report, discussing the reviewee’s accomplishments, strengths, and weaknesses. In particular, Hughes Johnson suggests rating employees on a concrete five-point scale, from “does not meet expectations” to “greatly exceeds expectations,” which will inform your later decision on whether to promote.

The Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Employee Evaluations

In addition to gathering feedback from employees, their co-workers, and yourself, some companies are now utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) to assess their employees. This practice involves utilizing AI technology to collect and analyze data about employees’ performance, such as working metrics designed to track efficiency and productivity. However, there are competing opinions about whether AI should feature in employee evaluations.

According to its supporters, AI offers myriad benefits when assessing employees. For example, AI allows for the continuous assessment of your employees with real-time feedback, rather than the biannual assessments that most managers opt for. Moreover, supporters contend that AI eliminates human error by providing objective, data-driven reports on your employees. Finally, they point out that AI assessments are more scalable than human assessments, meaning they’re much more efficient for larger companies with many employees.

However, AI’s detractors maintain that its drawbacks are damning. For instance, they note that allowing AI to constantly evaluate employees raises serious concerns about privacy, as it’s too intrusive to monitor employees all of the time. Moreover, they argue that AI often perpetuates human biases because it draws on data that was originally created by humans, meaning that AI-driven assessments could actually be more biased than their human-driven counterparts.

Part #2: Adjust Feedback

Hughes Johnson recognizes that biases and other suboptimal circumstances can influence performance reviews. For example, you might find that women consistently receive worse evaluations than men, or that one manager consistently rates employees lower than other managers. For this reason, you should use data analysis to track performance ratings from different managers and across different demographic groups.

She points out that by analyzing performance ratings, you can identify any abnormalities in the review process and dig deeper into them. For instance, if you notice that one manager provides significantly higher ratings than other managers, you could carefully re-evaluate the employees to see whether they’re actually performing better than those on other teams, or whether the manager is being too generous.

(Shortform note: While Hughes Johnson recommends using data analysis to calibrate your performance reviews, other experts argue that this analysis isn’t necessary at smaller companies. Rather, they maintain that human resources professionals (who perform the calibration) should conduct one-on-one meetings with every manager in smaller companies to understand how these managers assess their employees. These conversations will show you which managers tend to be stricter or more generous in their assessments, which in turn allows you to manually calibrate performance reviews.)

Part #3: Determine Changes to Compensation

Finally, after you’ve gathered and adjusted your feedback, it’s time to rely on your compensation philosophy to determine whether to give your employee a raise. Your compensation philosophy, Hughes Johnson explains, is your guiding framework for determining how much compensation any given employee should receive. And although she doesn’t offer concrete advice for establishing a compensation philosophy, she suggests that incorporating some component of merit—such that higher performance is met with higher compensation—is a prudent way to continue to motivate your employees.

(Shortform note: There are several popular compensation philosophies that different companies employ. For example, market pay bases compensation on the standard rates that other companies offer for similar positions, with the possibility to move from low, medium, or high market compensation. Equal pay, by contrast, bases compensation on the principle that all employees should be paid equally, regardless of their official position.)