Tom Griffiths: This is Learning Works, a podcast presented by Hone. It's a series of in depth conversations with L& D experts, HR leaders, and executives on how they've built game changing learning and development strategies, unleashed business growth through talent development, and scaled their global L& D teams. Tune in for the wisdom and actionable insights, the best in the industry.

I'm Tom Griffiths, CEO of Hone. Welcome to Learning Works.

Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Learning Works. Today, we've got something special for you. An episode featuring Claire Hughes Johnson. Claire is the author of the book Scaling People. She's also a corporate officer and advisor at Stripe, where she was previously chief operating officer and helped to grow the company from fewer than 200 employees to over 7, 000.

Before that, she spent a decade at Google, leading teams on projects like Gmail, Google apps, and consumer operations. Her experience scaling businesses is second to none, and she's taken it a step further than others by distilling her approach into easy to use frameworks that any leader can use to refine their craft of managing and scaling their people.

This conversation was originally recorded as a live event, and we're excited to share it with our LearningWorks audience today. So, without further ado, let's dive in. Obviously, as co founder and CEO here at Hone, management is very close to my heart. And there are very few managers in the world that have the depth of experience and thoughtfulness that Claire does when it comes to managing, not just managing people and leading people, but doing that, In high growth, fast scaling environments, and really that scaling strategy lives or dies by management.

And so we're gonna have a really great conversation here today to learn a lot of tips and tricks from Claire and have a group discussion as well, so that you all can learn some of the best practices that she has. I think it's going to be a really rich conversation. I have scaled two companies, Hone being the second.

The first was a company called FanDuel in a very different space of gaming. We grew from five employees to over 500 in just nine months back in 2015. And so had to learn trial by fire of how to accommodate that scale and lead through that scale, both from a systems perspective and from a people leadership perspective.

And, uh, I tried to learn a lot as we were doing it. And I came across, uh, Claire's work, um, about five or six years ago. The entry point to that was her well known working with me document approach, where managers write a field manual for how to actually interface with a leader. And I think that's just an example of the many.

tactical tools that she also brings to the space, as well as some really important principles from which to lead and manage. So excited for the conversation here today with Claire. Claire, perhaps you could give a brief intro of yourself as well. 

Claire Hughes Johnson: Sure. Well, I'm so pleased to be here and Tom for seeking me out for this particular audience, since certainly it's.

When you think about scale, most people realize that probably involves, even with AI, a lot of humans who need a lot of support that we don't always think about that when we're building the product. Right. And then all of a sudden you face these challenges. I think we're going to get into more of my background, but the brief version is that it's a random career, politics, government, lots of different consulting business school, and ended up at Google right around when I was turning 30.

And Google was. I was about 1800 people pre IPO, and I was at Google for almost 11 years until it grew. I think we were about 58, 000 people when I left, which was a lot of scale. And then I took a role as the COO of a company called Stripe. I joined Stripe when it was about 160 people. Stripe today, I still work there, although in a different role, is around 8, 000.

And obviously the goal is the revenue and the product, which both of those companies have done well on, but it's certainly the thing you feel, as I said, is the human scale. And I, yeah, I'm really thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me. 

Tom Griffiths: Phenomenal. Yeah. Thanks Claire. I really appreciate you doing this and we're going to get into all of the lessons on those scale journeys in a moment.

Did want to call out that Claire's written a book. It's excellent. As I mentioned in the intro, I think it does an amazing job of capturing both the kind of high level principles. of management and leadership that you can apply in your own style, as well as giving you tactical tools that you can use immediately to enhance how you're running a team, how you're helping other teams or managers, how you're assessing yourself to grow your self awareness, which is one of the foundational principles there.

So really encourage anyone to go pick up a copy of this. It'll make you a better manager, leader. And if you're in a role that's supporting other managers and leaders, then full of good tricks and ways to support them as well. I think leadership is always challenging, but in the good times, it can make up in some ways for lack of proficiency or expertise in the skills of leadership and management.

Now that we're in a more challenging part of the economic cycle. We're definitely seeing numbers that would support. We're not doing as good as we could be when it comes to leadership and management. Certainly low trust in management that drops even more when you go to senior leaders and that is just brought to the fore when companies are seeing difficult circumstances and not having faith in leaders can lead to employee turnover.

They feel like time is being wasted by not being managed well, and only 40 percent of employees. A rating, their leadership quality is good or excellent. Yeah. So the majority could be doing so much better. So the employees see it, right? Not only does it affect your business results, if you're not an effective leader and manager, but your employees see it.

And they use that to determine how they perform and whether they stay with the company long term. So so much virtue in closing this gap that we see. Of course, if you can turn this around and it is possible, I think one of the foundational beliefs that we have at home, I know Claire has as well, is that You can get better at the skills of leadership and management.

And if you do that, if you invest the time to look and implement the frameworks that we'll talk about today in the, uh, Hone Teaches and that are in Claire's book, you can increase profitability. You can increase engagement of employees. And most importantly for the organization as a whole, product productivity goes up as well.

So it's difficult to measure these things precisely, but you can. Directionally, you can see it's clear. There's a real problem that continues to exist. Uh, but if you invest the time to get better, it has an impact on the company in the bottom line. Perhaps Claire, to lead us off, it would be great to hear a little bit more about some of those epic scaling journeys that you've been on and what led you to want to write a book about that.

Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah, I will say I actually, it was not my decision to write the book, the co founders of Stripe. It sounds like Tom, similar to you, had an observation. They had founded a company before that they actually sold when it was quite small and they were teenagers. So let's all feel bad about ourselves anyway.

And then. But in the journey building Stripe, Stripe is fortunate. We work with a lot of other companies. We're a platform also, and we partner closely with companies around the world. And so many of our interactions with them were not about our product, but really about scaling, like, what are you guys doing to build?

What do you, and so many organizational and human questions and company building questions. And so they decided, Patrick and John Collison decided I should write the book. And I said, what, I don't know. I think the book needs to maybe exist because they're, it's very tactical as Tom. It's very practical, bulleted.

There's examples, there's templates, there's exercises. They're feeling as really autodidacts, right? They really went out and did the L and D themselves. They taught themselves and they just didn't feel like there was something that sort of a lot of startup founders want to know. How do you do the thing?

Like, tell me exactly. Not that by the way, I'm such an expert on everything, but I think it's useful to see examples. Of like what exactly does a hiring rubric meet like look like and we just Um, I just adapted a lot of materials I had developed over the years at Google and at Stripe. The Working With Me doc that you referenced is actually from Google.

That's from early in my career, and I want to give credit where credit's due. It was, I stole with pride from an engineering leader at Google named Urs Holzel, who wrote a user manual, which was more engineering y. And mine, I actually never really read his until I'd written mine first. And you'll, if you saw them both, you'd say, oh, those are great.

Different kinds of leaders as we all are. But anyway, I did end up being convinced because founders are so persuasive to write the book. And it is something I feel fortunate being in a front, I'd say middle road, a front row seat of Google, and certainly a front row seat at Stripe. It's almost like playing the video game on hard mode.

You see a lot when you're in that kind of a growth environment. And you realize there is stuff that, as you said, that's learnable, that's knowable, and at least experiences that people want to hear your version of it so they can pattern match as they do their own work, whether that's other leaders or whether that's HR or other professionals who work with people and organizations.

And so I've been really touched actually by the reception. It's been more than I expected. So thank you for asking about it and, and sharing the, that we wrote the book and at Stripe we, it's funny cause Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

And Stripe's mission is to increase the GDP of the internet. And actually I think organizing information and making it accessible is a way to increase the GDP of the internet because really it is people that matter in the end. And if you want business results, you've got to learn how to lead and manage people in my opinion.

Tom Griffiths: A hundred percent. Yeah. And I think folks figuring it out in their own way or everywhere, whether that's modeling through one on ones or recreating the wheel when it comes to those, like, hiring rubrics, and I think what the book does so nicely is just give you some best in class advice. Uh, examples of that, again, you can adapt yourself, but it gets you right there and started.

So, uh, love that about it. If those are best practices, we'd love to hear some tales of like, what are some of the surprises that you saw as you scaled and that might catch leaders off guard that we can give a heads up to. 

Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah, I think that there's like two categories of surprises when it comes to growth.

One is, there's a thing you're doing, which is you're iterating on something, some process you've built or figured out that's more organic. And then this thing happens if you get to a certain size, which is you hit a wall. And you can't actually just improve the thing iteratively. You have to actually do a step function up and rebuild it.

Whether that's a tool you use, a process internally, Uh, a way of working with customers. If you're lucky enough to get into the thousands and millions of customers and so much of leadership in those environments or, or partnering with leaders is seeing around the corner and both of like, Hey, this thing we're doing today is not going to get us.

Like I always do the thought experiment. What if we had a million users? What if we, like, I always think about this as a random thing to say, but think about zoom, the product zoom during the pandemic, the usage of that product. Went through the roof overnight, basically. And I was lucky enough to actually interview Eric Yuan, the founder of zoom for the book, the book has some website only copy and has interviews with some leaders and Eric's one of them.

And, and I said, Eric, how are you ready for like, And he had founded a company before Tom, I think he knew this class of problem. And he was also a founder. Who's pretty paranoid. And he said, I always say to my team, what if we're five X or 10 X the volume? What, how do we be ready? And they actually were pretty ready, which is really actually quite impressive, but that's a whole side, but that's one class one classes.

That is like thinking around the corners and the other is related to thinking around the corners with teams, right? Do I have the people with the capabilities and the skills? For what I'm going to need a year from now, two years from now, because it takes time to hire, to upskill, to evolve a team, and I think you have to see around that corner and that's hard because then it's more subjective.

There's humans involved, but the mistake I made, I don't think it was a surprise. Unfortunately, over and over was I wasn't hiring the leaders for tomorrow. Or investing in the ones I would need tomorrow. And then I was ending up with too many direct reports or people who weren't scaling themselves. I think the third class, the unexpected surprise class is because it is people and things happen to people, right?

There's a section in the book where I talk about, I had an employee, a direct report at Google who just didn't show up for work and kind of went missing. And there was, I'm sure that. The HR professionals on the call are thinking, like, he was okay, but he had a mental health Issue and he had just gone off the grid and I, and I remember talking to a colleague at Google and trying and who was this person was a dotted line to this colleague.

So I needed to tell him. I said, Mike, we got to have a phone call, but so and so has not been in for a few days and I haven't heard. I'm concerned we're, we're following up. And this guy says to me, he's like, I got into management. I thought it was going to be straightforward. It was going to be like, let me get the team from point A to point B.

Let me just paint the vision. And they're smart people. They're going to do it. And he's like, and instead, Claire, people go missing. He's like, this is not what I signed up for and stuff happens. And you gotta be a fellow human and empathetic, but also get the work done. And that, that can take its own burden on you too, right?

You're worried about people and you're trying to get the work done. 

Tom Griffiths: A hundred percent. And I think it is so much to react to there. I think on that last point, yeah, my undergrad was computer science. I went into engineering and product management. And as you move up to the, you know, Management and being an executive.

Yeah. You do have this picture that it's going to be charging leadership and replicating the great things that you've learned how to do across a bigger team and having more leverage that way. And yes, to some extent it's that, but it's so much about the people side. We're less prepared, certainly come from technical disciplines, but I think just in general, to know how all of that works and that, you know, to be aware of it in the first instance, and then some of the things that you can do or need to do to get the most from your people, both as a human and to drive the results.

And I think what we've seen over the years is just the essence of good management is that. Difficulty or the balance between the people focus and the task focus and if you go too far in one direction, it's not good and that can be true for the task focus. If you're not thinking about people, but you also go too far towards the people dimension and not go drive results and not 

Claire Hughes Johnson: hold people accountable exactly changes that you need to make.

Right? Exactly. That's definitely that was my major lesson is I was probably too far on the support the people side and I needed to move more toward the. I would say leader versus manager side, the more of having high standards and holding people accountable. 

Tom Griffiths: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. In the book, I love that distinction that you drew between leaders and managers.

It was framed a way I hadn't seen it before. So perhaps you could share that again. 

Claire Hughes Johnson: Sure. Sure. The book has a few operating principles that I lay out in the essentially first chapter before I get into the company building and the management content. And they're, and I think we'll touch on other ones, but they're build self awareness to build mutual awareness.

Say the thing you think you cannot say distinguish between leadership and management, which I will answer the question. And the 4th is come back to your operating system, but the distinguishing between leadership and management. I think different people have different philosophies on this and there's probably, there's, I'm very sure academic researchers who have written about this, but I'll give you my point of view.

My point of view is there is a difference between leadership and management and that often in my experience, an individual. Defaults more to 1 or the other. I think I'm going to be a little bit of a generalist here for generalized for a 2nd, but I think founders tend to default a little bit more toward leadership qualities in that.

They are comfortable setting ambitious visions. They have very high standards. They want it now faster climb this mountain. They're really seeing the future often. And in explaining it to people and building hopefully that team that's going to climb the mountain with them. I think management, I'm more of a default manager that certainly it took me time in my career to get comfortable being a leader and leadership is making people uncomfortable.

Okay. And management is different. It's like, okay, I think it's more knowable. It's like, I got to get from point A to point B. I'm accountable for these metrics for this project, whatever it is. I've got to assemble the right team, put the right people on the right tasks, set some metrics of success, set some goals, measure them, coach the people, track the status, management and hope and also help the people obviously grow and get better.

So the next time you have that project, you can do it in half the time or you can do it, you can automate part of it. Like managers have to be. Improving processes and people, but I think it's very trainable. I think there's a lot of folks on this call. No, it's a lot of just practicing having those conversations, setting those plans, learning how to manage a project, whatever it is.

Whereas leadership is a little bit harder. I think to just teach and train. Um, and it's more, I think you've got to coach and almost unlock people's confidence that they I'll give myself as an example at Google. We had this internal engagement survey called Google Geist. They still have it, but there's a whole set of questions upward questions you answer about your manager and one of them and I got generally pretty high manager scores.

And so I'm trying to build some credibility here writing the book. And also it's dry. But one, one area where I wasn't as strong was, or as consistently strong was holds my work to a high standard, which happens when you're maybe trying to help give the benefit of the doubt to all the people. And I really worked on that.

And when I got to Stripe, that's actually one of my highest, I think I've made that transition where I was like, you know, what, You got to deliver results and you got to meet my expectations and they're going to be high. And I am managing by telling you, Hey, this is your metric. This is what you're responsible for, but I'm leading in that I'm not doing the work for you.

Sometimes I was, I was making the mistake as a manager and trying to do the work for them. And that didn't feel actually like. really respecting them or holding them to high standards. 

Tom Griffiths: Yeah. No, I hear that. And it's great to hear how you adapted your style in the next role to embrace that feedback and do something differently.

Just like really tactically then, because it's something I've struggled with myself as well. It's like you have high standards for yourself and you work hard and you work the long hours and do everything to an A plus standard where you can. But then when that comes to others, you can often make excuses like it was a tough environment or the economy is difficult or they didn't have everything that they needed.

Or was I clear enough in the outlet? So like, how do you have that conversation and set the container where you don't have to be perfect as the leader or manager, but you can still have high expectations for people and hold them to that? 

Claire Hughes Johnson: I have a lot, I, a theme I come back to in the book that I'd come back to in my life, which is you've got to actually, I wish I had put this more in the book, this phrase, but I found it as I was talking about the book to people, which is making the implicit explicit is a very powerful tool and important tool for leaders and managers, but managers, and in this case, setting expectations with people about what you expect of them.

Right. And so I start out with my teams every quarter, we do an exercise where the team has goals. Okay. Ours, whatever you want to call them. We have our metrics where and our strategy that we're pursuing, which is a part of leadership and management building all that. But I also do the same thing with individuals.

And I say to them, all right, come to the one on one in the first week of the quarter and tell me, given our team plan, what are your personal goals? Okay. Ours, what you can, and what are you going to impact the most in our metrics, in our plans? And I also always ask them, this audience will appreciate, what is your development area?

What are we going to do? That is focused on the area we've talked about for your longer, medium and longer term professional development, personal development. And so they have, so they come to me with a draft and we agree. Are these the priorities? Are these the goals? And we stack rank them because things like this, like, environments, change, macro, whatever.

And so we stack rank them and then I asked for a mid quarter report from them and an end of quarter. It can be red, yellow, green. It does not have to be. It's not an essay, but we have a conversation and. If they're not meeting the X and I make sure those are aggressive goals. Like I make sure it's what I would expect given their role, their level, their experience, what they can accomplish.

You're going to hire these three people. You're going to set up this new process. You're going to, you know, deliver for a hundred customers, this thing, whatever it is, and we are having a conversation through the quarter about what's on track, not on track and why. And sure, people are going to come up sometimes with excuses.

They're going to say the macro environment, and I'm a big fan. Well, I think two things, one acknowledging that, but then turning it back to the person and saying, but what could you have done differently or what could you do differently? And there's a coaching, uh, there's a training that I actually went to as a manager at Google and the coach liked this phrase, which is a little bit funny phrase, but it's be that as it may.

But you're like the person while my teammates been out sick and the macro is terrible. And you say, well, be that as it may, like, put that aside. What are you going to do? I don't want to have a conversation about other others. I want agency and people I coach and so I do and lead and manage and I want to.

Steer them toward of understanding that they have impact and ownership and that they have most of the roles I've been fortunate. I'm working at companies where they have choices they can make about how they spend their time and they need to adapt. That's part of the job is if something's going wrong.

All right, let's get a different customer list. I want them to be the people who say that. And I'll say to them, this is where you make the implicit explicit. In my previous, like early in my career as a manager, I don't think I would say out loud the following thing, which is I expected you to come up with a new customer list and you didn't.

And so now after I've given them a chance, right. And I say, and so this is feedback for you, which is given your experience, your role, the environment we're in. I get it. You didn't have the right target. Say this is a salesperson, but your role is to like, let's get scrappy. We've got a quota to meet. What can you do about it?

Tom Griffiths: Like 

Claire Hughes Johnson: this is, and this is where that shift for me went into high standards because I'm saying what really good performances it's doing. It's owning the work, 

Tom Griffiths: it's 

Claire Hughes Johnson: coming up with a new list without me telling you. And so, and I think getting more comfortable, that's a very okay, like, that is not threatening.

Tom Griffiths: I'm 

Claire Hughes Johnson: not saying you're a bad person. I'm saying this is like the best teachers. If you all think back, my parents are teachers and this is probably where all this came from. But if you think back to the teachers, you learn the most from, they're the ones, the learning zone is one where you're a little uncomfortable, not panicking, but uncomfortable.

And it's because they're holding you. So, They're expecting a better, they see your work and they see what you're capable of. And they're saying, do better, give me more. And those are the people who you end up looking back and saying, God, that guy was, I really respected him. He was rough. He had high standards, but I always think it's like the Latin teachers.

There's like certain disciplines, certain teachers are always tough. But I really think that's very respectful. That's showing the individual that you believe in them. You're there. You believe they're capable of more. It's not a threatening comment to make to them. But too many managers are shy about being direct.

Tom Griffiths: Yeah. No, it's very relevant. And I think particularly in difficult times where teams feel fragile, you can be reticent to push too hard. But I think the way that you laid that out is totally like a fair way to have the conversation. I think it does. Depend not depend, but it is important up front to set those expectations.

Like you said at the start of the course, like, this is what the outcome that we're trying to create. And I'm going to expect you to get there. And I'm going to expect you to have agency and ownership to figure out how we get there. Yeah. And then that sets you up for the later conversation. If they're not taking.

Their own actions and agency to get there that you can give them the feedback. That's right. And if you haven't 

Claire Hughes Johnson: said that ahead of time, it's much harder. 

Tom Griffiths: Right. Right. 

Claire Hughes Johnson: Right. And the other thing is that mindset of I'm not insulted. I'm not giving you feedback. I'm not saying, Tom, you're bad at this. I'm saying, Hey, this task, we had this joint task.

We agreed on. And I'm giving you feedback that I think there was a better way to do it. And I believe you can do better. 

Tom Griffiths: Yeah. 

Claire Hughes Johnson: And that's why I gave you all the ownership of the task, right? Yeah. It's really. 

Tom Griffiths: That's great. And I think it really clear tactical ways and words to do that. So appreciate that.

Thank you. We started to start, there's this two sides to at least management, the task and the results that we just talked about, and then there's the people side and maybe the empathetic side of management. So I feel like there's some good perspectives on the book of the empathy side. So how could you, how do you need to show up as a manager to do that?

And maybe how can HR and L& D help you? Folks help their people with that empathetic side of balance. They need to strike. 

Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah. I take a position just personally, my position, but the book takes this position, which is a lot of management and leadership training starts with, okay, you have this team now let's focus on the team and build the right team and do the right training with them.

Okay. So my position is actually start with you, which is the way you build self awareness. The way you build empathy for others is starting with your own self awareness. Uh, and here's the tricky part about self awareness, which is there are in fact things you are not aware of. Like there, we are all humans.

I think often for as a human now, I've, I've had a lot of reps as we talked about managing for, you know, 30 years or whatever that. Often actually a human's greatest strengths. They're unaware of, cause it's like breathing to them. That's just the way their brain works. They're like, what do you mean? Not everyone can like figure out how to format a spreadsheet and do an analysis in like five seconds.

You know what I mean? Like to them, they like woke up, like just thinking in those kind of structured ways, especially if you maybe are an engineer with a, by background, like you just, So one, they often don't know their strengths because it's like breathing. The other is blind spots are real. And until you get feedback and do work and ask for surveys about you, you don't realize, oh, there's this thing that I do.

And I, or I don't do, I forget. Right. And so I want to build empathy. I want people to really say, okay, how do I know myself? So that. I can help them do the same work with my team and then I can make sure it's complimentary that it's covering my blind spot. So this is a very simple, those of you on the call who've administered a lot of these work style assessments, I'm sure you're familiar with them.

There's Gallup Strength Finder and MBTI and Insights Discovery and. Disc and there's the Hogan assessment, whatever. There's a million of these things. I think they're valuable. I think they're valuable because they start, they give you a framework. They give you a common vocabulary. They start the conversation.

What I did in the book is simplified my experience of all of them. And I think I've taken them all is that there's people who are naturally, I always think about default settings with human beings or people who are naturally More task oriented and then if you just this is the vertical axis and then on the bottom there are more people oriented And then there are people on the horizontal axis who are more Extroverted again by default and there are people who are more introverted and you can be and you might be very Strongly in one way or you might be somewhere on the continuum So it's like a two by two and I say, okay The first thing I want you to think about is how do you?

Extroversion versus introversion, and the best litmus test for that is do you talk to think or do you think to talk? And I am not a very strong extrovert, but I definitely talk to think. I am much better at ideation in a conversation with someone than on my own with a blank sheet of paper. Whereas I've had direct reports.

Who have said to me that, here's a great example of a blind spot. You don't give us enough detail of meeting agendas of what we're expected to prepare. Like, if it's not clear, I'm not going to be able to participate. And I'm like off the cuff. I love giving an unstructured conversation. Fine. And these people are saying this is not helpful because I need to think before I talk.

You want me to participate in the meeting. You've got to prepare me. And I think it's very good feedback. And it's not something I was aware of because I have a different default setting. And then there's the task versus the person. And this is my test. It's a little bit of a short, it's hard, but Essentially, picture you're in your workplace and someone comes up to you with a like, a really massive problem.

Like, oh my gosh, this crazy thing just happened and I need your help. I just want you to think, is your immediate first thought, As someone who's being asked to help about the thing that needs to get done, or about the people impacted. Because in any massive problem, both of those things are happening.

There is a thing that needs to get done, and then there's also people who need to know, or who are impacted. Where do you go first? What's your default? But anyway, this matrix, and then I give each quadrant some names, and as you're probably familiar, people who are a little more task and introverted oriented tend to.

The more analytical maybe they, I mean, I don't want to stereotype and we all are have range in us, but tend to be maybe more in finance or engineering. Sometimes often founders tend to be more task and extroverted a little more directive. Um, because they're just like, let's get this thing done. And sales people tend to be more extraverted, and people are in it.

Right? If you think about so just think about plotting yourself. Bye for now. Think about plotting your team and building an awareness of the group. And this is an exercise, by the way, even just with this simple framework in the book, I do a strike teams all the time, which is I give them a sticky and I just say, Hey, let's all write what we think, where we think we are.

And then we're going to put ourselves on the whiteboard or the virtual whiteboard. And then we're going to, if you've built enough psychological safety, we're going to have a conversation of people's reactions. Like. I didn't know that you were so oriented, um, toward like analytical, like there's people who look like they're very extroverted and it turns out they're not, or they don't identify that way.

And then it builds in yourself and in them, like how do I compliment that person as a manager, but also in the team. So, so that's the, those are just some ways, like, I think if you can get a leader to reflect on themselves, then you're going to get stronger empathy from them as they start to realize, hey, wait a minute, not everybody.

And then you map the team. You're like, not everybody is built the way I'm built. I got to be curious. I gotta check with them. Like, do you like it when I send the agenda at a time? Yes, I do, you know. Anyway, so. 

Tom Griffiths: Yeah, and that really stopped me in my tracks when I read it in the book because I've taken all the insights and MBTI and Enneagram stuff over the years.

Oh yeah, Enneagram, 

Claire Hughes Johnson: that's a good one. Yeah, 

Tom Griffiths: there's commonalities, there's some like nuances and extras to each of them, but boiling it down into those two dimensions, kind of like the 80 20 to get the essence of it. And I thought that was really powerful. And to your point, start with yourself, but doing it with the team, I feel as a manager puts on a new pair of glasses where previously you couldn't see.

And now you see why someone behaves a certain way. Then you have to send the agenda ahead of time for this person. You're never going to get an agenda maybe from this person or the same kind of structured written document from this person. Maybe you just need to spend more time with them and have those live conversations.

So you then end up adapting your style of management to each individual person based on now what about them and have a vocabulary for that you didn't before. So it's super powerful. Given the audience, what's something that an HR or an L& D person could do to bring that visibility or exercise to their team, would you say?

Claire Hughes Johnson: Well, I think we talked about, like, I think suggesting to a leader and even partnering with them. I will say I had an amazing HR partner at Google. Where I had an international global team. We were not together very often. We'd get together at least ideally once a quarter, either in SF or Dublin or Singapore and do work together, obviously, but then try to get some team awareness and team building, and this woman came up with this cool exercise.

Involving, uh, actually MBTI so, uh, but basically we drew these squares on the floor of like making a decision together and then we actually did actual work. We're like, all right, let's make this really hard decision. We have and people would go to the square of like, where they were comfortable in the decision process, like, who had decided and not decided.

I look up at one point, I mean, I reference this very lightly in the book, but the more detailed story is I have decided I am already on the decision square and half my team is on square one. And there's like, 2 people who are 2 squares in and I'm thinking, and we just had talked about our results and my sort of sensing process data.

People were like, there's not enough data here. Like, lady, you already made a decision and you left us way behind. This was a big wake up call, but my HR partner and I were like, let's come up with an exercise where we can be better as a unit, not just Claire making the decisions. Right? And so she's like, let's make decision together and see what happens using some insights on ourselves.

So, I think planning those exercises with a leader in partnership, and the leader has to have some. Interest in this, but I do credit her in particular because I was at a kind of a rocket ship moment going from the manager to a leader at Google. And she was happened to be my partner. She I was open to her ideas and I gave her some trust and she really showed up showing me.

How powerful some like a 2 hour exercise could be. And I think that probably changed my trajectory as a leader and that team's trajectory, and I would directly attribute that to her. I think we have some questions. Tom, you want me to get this? 1 of them is very related to this leader managers. 

Tom Griffiths: Yeah, I know.

I love that. And I think just to cap the personality assessment, we'd definitely encourage people to do that. I think they can be some of the hardest management issues to diagnose and just having that vocabulary is really helpful. Yeah. Excellent. Yeah. Let's do some Q& A. So I think the first one to come in was a while back when we were talking about ownership.

Yeah. Is that learnable? Is that something you hire for? 

Claire Hughes Johnson: I think it's both. These things were never binary to me, but I think it's both. I do think it's also, you build it into the culture. Yeah. So it's if their earlier career, it's easier to make an impression as you onboard them and hire them and teach them the culture.

That's a culture of ownership. And again, stuff like that is more about leadership behaviors than saying you can't say words. Like, we are a culture of ownership. You actually yourself have to display high ownership. You have to show that every leader around you has to display high ownership. You have to reward high ownership, like all those things.

And I think this group hopefully knows that, but that takes, you got to weave it into the fabric of the reward system, the hired system. So hiring, yes. And another thing I think you hire for is self awareness. One of my favorite questions to ask, even a junior, if they've had a little work experience, tell me about a project you were involved in that was not successful.

And then you're probing on what was their role and do they throw everyone under the bus? Do they blame people or do they show curiosity? They show they were learning. Do they take ownership for things that didn't go? Well, like, you're looking for both self awareness, learning orientation and ownership and I think there's some ways to test for it, but you really want to weave it into the culture.

And then, and I think, so I do think you can build. I think you can build it. I never think founders feel like employees have enough feeling of ownership. And there's a reality check here, which is. They aren't the owners as much as the founder. And so you can also be honest about that. 

Tom Griffiths: No, I agreed. I think it's right.

It's both like higher for it and then try and cultivate it. And I think, as you rightly point out, there are anti patterns that you can spot maybe even more easily like this. Blame or victim mindset or complaining. That's the opposite of ownership. And so that's a good signal as well. We've got the question about founder mode.

I didn't know whether it was going to come up or not, but thank you, Sana. How do you see the role of CEOs and founders evolve as companies scale? Love your perspective on that. And what are your thoughts on the founder mode discussions happening right now? 

Claire Hughes Johnson: I have so many thoughts. I don't think we have enough time.

I believe I certainly learned a lot from working for, with some very talented founders at Google and Stripe, and they all do get into the details and get very involved, even when the companies were quite are quite big. However, the reason they're able to do that is because they have people around that.

Balance them out and so my concern about the founder mode discussion is it's not very nuanced. It's it almost I think could be used as an excuse for some bad behavior, but I think the right founder with the right amount of their own learning algorithm and curiosity continuing to show deep. Involvement is amazing in a company, but only if at a scale, there's someone who is, we can, I have an MBA.

I don't think it's a dirty word. Like people who have done some professional education around. How do you do. Like things at scale. Let me give you my definition of scale early in this conversation. I mentioned it often is equated to having a lot of humans involved, like a lot of employees. My actual definition of scale is not about that.

My definition of scale is that you can repeatedly deliver excellent results without the same people involved, because let's not kid ourselves. Like. You've got if you've got thousands or millions of customers if you've got thousands of employees hundreds or thousands You it's going to be a different recruiting coordinator who does the interview.

Uh, it's going to be a different sales rep It's going to be a different customer success person It's going to be a different executive sometime who's handling the thing that happened three years ago that's happening again and I think that You need people who know how to build that environment around you.

If you're going to be in founder mode and you need to trust them and you need to believe they're excellent and validate. Believe me, the Stripe founders get right in my business, but that I welcome it because we actually together have a really, this goes through myself. We really balance each other. And so I feel like it was, sorry, I did go on for a while.

I'm concerned that it wasn't the full picture. And it may create some bad behavior. And it also, I think for operators and manager types out there, and I guess I would count myself as one of them, it, I think it undermines the value that they provide. Anyway, that's, I may write a response. We'll see. 

Tom Griffiths: Yeah.

Yeah. I think you should. It's a much more nuanced picture. And I think you can only be in fandom mode at any kind of scale. On one area or two areas and you need those areas to be well run. And I think it's to your point in a healthy functioning company, it will function without you being in founder mode and then you can choose to go deep on certain areas.

I used to call it a fan duo when I worked for my CEO, the lighthouse effects, like the light beam goes around. Oh, I call it the eye 

Claire Hughes Johnson: of Sauron. Like from the Lord of the Rings. Yeah. Same idea. Yeah. Totally, but they never do that. 

Tom Griffiths: They go in deep, it makes you better because it's going to come around again.

And so you up your game and there are perspectives that they have that you can't have because they're talking to investors in the market and you're deep in your area. And so the collaboration can be really helpful at that detail level, but try doing that across eight different functions in parallel.

Just, it's not possible. So you need both. Yeah, we agree. We agree. Um, Claire shared the difference between leaders and managers is her point of view. That to be successful you need to exhibit elements of both or is the goal to grow and settle into leader, and I guess we'll manage you one, one or the other.

Yeah. 

Claire Hughes Johnson: I really appreciate this question because it's actually, I, I wanted to, to talk about this and I, I didn't, which is, I think, again, there are some people who believe you're one or the other. And if you're a leader, you hire managers. So we almost just talked about it. Like founder mode needs some good manager leaders around you.

But I actually believe what happens is okay. So we all default to one or the other a little bit. And as we grow in our career, we need to start to build the other skillset. And if we don't, and this is where hone or L and D platforms or learning comes in. So in my opinion, you do need eventually you can get actually quite far as one or the other often, but you eventually need both.

And I don't love it when I need a CEO founder who says, well, I'm just a great leader and I hire managers. And I have a funny anecdote in the interviews I did for the book. One of them was with read Hoffman and read is right that he does have a superpower, which is he creates environment where there's very direct feedback.

Including to him, very transparent. And he tells the story, he hired this operator who was helping him scale this company. This is before Reed founded LinkedIn. And Reed said, give me some feedback. What's, what do you see? What could we do? And the guy said, Reed, I wouldn't hire you to manage a McDonald's.

And Reed was like, I know I'm terrible manager, but he lets that be part of his brand. I don't know. But I would say if you're a CEO founder, you have direct reports. You have an executive team and a higher functioning executive team. That's an actual team, not a collection of individuals will equal higher ROI.

You showed the stats at the beginning of this video. conversation, Tom. And if you're not investing in yourself as a manager, you are not going to get those results out of your team. Your company is not going to get those results. And I think there's a lot of stuff that's getting papered over when young companies are just doing well, because the product has good product market fit.

But over time, you got to learn how to manage. And the same thing for the managers. I was the manager, I needed to learn how to lead. Or I was not going to be a C level executive. So it's really about hitting that, knowing you're hitting that ceiling and pushing through, getting the learning and getting uncomfortable and pushing 

Tom Griffiths: through.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And maybe there's an emphasis as you've described on one side or the other that will determine where you can flourish the most in an organization when you're looking at that spectrum as an individual, but to progress meaningfully, I think you need elements of both. Great. We do have one more question.

I think we're good. Both of us could give an answer here. What are the best ways to grow manager capabilities to prepare the company for scale? Training and coaching are often very expensive and it's hard to assess impact. What's worked for you or your past teams? 

Claire Hughes Johnson: Well, let me say two things. When I was at Google and we were in like the total dragon of so much growth, like I was interviewing people all the time.

My team was changing constantly and Google started to invest in some L& D. And I got included in some, I think I was probably a high potential person and they were, I was like, Oh my gosh, I cannot go and do two days of this training or, and I'm sure it was expensive. And Google, obviously it's very nice margins and could affect, but I, and at the time I wasn't sure how valuable it is.

And now I look back. And I would say, oh, those things had an impact on me and those, they did matter. It just wasn't the next day. Right. And that's also tricky about investments, right? In people that you don't get the, or maybe a sales kickoff, you get some immediate knowledge of a new product, but you don't really, but I do think.

Platforms like hone or there are ways now to do this. I think more scalably, more reasonably, you don't need a bespoke coach for every single person, but to the point of what else can you do or how, what if you don't have even the bandwidth to do a few hours of something and the reality is you need to build it into your manager and leader behaviors, which means you need to do some investment, which is like, Hey, we have a responsibility to develop people because we'll get better results.

And so I think at one point in Stripe, a guy, a colleague of mine, Billy and I, we built a mini curriculum and taught a little class. There's a lot of good content online. We said, okay, everybody read this article, everybody watch this video, and we're going to have a lunch time. I actually, I started a brown bag lunch series where we, anyone who is a manager could come bring their lunch and we would take a topic.

Delivering hard feedback. How do you structure a one on one? And we would, I do peer to peer facilitate and I would get at the whiteboard and try to help bring. So I, again, I'm not going to pretend I was an expert on all this, but I do think you build it into the culture. Hey, we need to develop ourselves.

We need to develop each other. We need to work on our skill sets as managers and leaders need to set that example. And by the way, the brown bag lunch, it was very popular, like our conference room was overflowing, which showed me, okay, maybe we need some training. It was actually a good test because I said, okay, this much demand for some of these basic topics.

Uh, we got to invest in it. 

Tom Griffiths: Yeah, a hundred percent. When I think you think about it from first principles, like every day at work, leadership and management is happening, whether it's good or bad, it's definitely happening. And so if it's not as good as it could be, you're paying a cost every day for it not being as good as it could be.

So therefore we should invest something to improve that, whether it's a DIY approach or some kind of vendor experience. I think what we've, some of our founding principles at home were. You've got to impart the knowledge in some way. And it's better if that way is engaging and not like flat or single player mode.

It's good if it's interactive and it's good if it's with other people to impart that knowledge, but that's only half the equation. You've actually got to go and use the new behaviors in the workplace and kind of get feedback on whether you can do it or not. And then it's really helpful to support in a structured way.

Coming back together to talk about applying things and then debug that approach and learn from others and can have this kind of reinforcement loop of continuous improvement. And I think where traditional models tend to fall down is that you're either not an engaging, upfront learning experience, like watching a video.

Or even if it's upfront, engaging and live, there's no follow on reinforcements for it. And that's where we've tried to productize some of those best practices to make it easy for companies to roll out to anyone, but also at scale to use the word of the day. Cause that's often where we see the DIY approaches start to break where you need to reach a lot of people on different time zones and so on.

So we. Yeah, I think it, again, if you can impart the knowledge in a good way and then support the application, however you do that, that's the way that you really drive to behavior change. 

Claire Hughes Johnson: Absolutely. I agree. And I like that mixing. It's like not one mode. That never works. It needs to be this combination.

Tom Griffiths: Yeah, exactly. One last question from me, Claire, if I can, would be scale often comes with a positive, um, and growing economy and it's a mixed picture economically now. Right. And folks feel at times like companies are still playing defense and it's tough out there. So how do you sustain morale through the difficult times as well as kind of high growth times?

Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah, I would argue, well, morale, I would say, first of all, good management is needed more. When there's more pressure economically or otherwise, and so don't forget to invest in that, even though it's feels painful. So when you're running lean, right? In terms of morale, I get really worried that there's these tropes around morale being about, like, let's have a party or let's celebrate it all swag.

I think here's where morale comes from to two places. So one is. Winning so being part of something that's working. And I think your job as a leader is even in hard times, even when not everything is working, how do I keep score and point and say, Hey, we said we were going to get this done and look at what we did in six months, like point out traction, winning results and appreciate the people who contributed and say, we are getting it right.

And despite this environment, look at this. So that's one is just. And the other place it comes from is I'll just steal from Daniel Pink. He's right. Autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Like, when is my morale low? It's when I feel micromanaged. When there's a bad manager or when someone doesn't give me the freedom to do the work the way I think I should do the work.

When I'm not learning, when I'm not mastering something, no one's giving me feedback when I don't think what I'm doing matters. No leader has pointed out and said, Hey, we got these results. Thanks to your work. And so morale is not a party. Morale is good management. And so I think we just circled back to the reason we're having this talk, but I really worry that everyone puts their heads down in hard times and doesn't do that work and ends up in a worse place.

Tom Griffiths: No, I couldn't agree more. And there's almost a parallel with the task and people focus. They're like task. Let's go win people. Are they set up to connect to the mission and feel like they're not micromanaged and so on. So, you can almost bring it full circle, like you said, so. Claire, thank you so much for a really rich and deep conversation.

There's so much more of your insight in the book. Folks should definitely go check that out. And to the point I made about Hone, then go apply it and really test it for yourself using a lot of the tools and techniques that Claire shares there. We're back with our next webinar on October 1st, talking about the future of employee development.

So there's a lot to launch, as I gave a little perhaps early preview of earlier. So much more new stuff coming to hone to support all of you in applying and training on these best practices. So excited to see you then. I'll just say a final thanks to Claire. Really appreciate it. Great to see you 

Claire Hughes Johnson: all for inviting me and Tom for the wonderful chat.

Tom Griffiths: Thanks for listening to LearningWorks. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, we encourage you to subscribe to the podcast for our exciting lineup of future episodes. Learning Works is presented by Hone. Hone helps busy L& D leaders easily scale training through tech powered, live learning experiences that drive real ROI and lasting behavior change.

If you want even more resources, you can head to our website, honehq. com. That's H O N E H Q. com for upcoming workshops, articles, and to learn more about Hone.