Over the past few months, I’ve been reading Claire Hughes Johnson’s Scaling People book. I recently added this book to my leadership library. It focuses on the strategies and tactics that leaders can apply to build and scale their organisation. In this post, I’ll be covering some of my highlights from the book. This post only covers the surface level. Claire goes into much more detail on all of the below topics in her book, so I would highly recommend you buy a copy for yourself and give it a read.

I’ve got several headings below that go into detail on some of the topics Claire covers. I’ll start with Recruitment.

Recruitment

Within the book, Claire talks about the idea of “Recruiting Commitments” which is a documented process that outlines the commitments between the recruitment team and the rest of the organisation. It covers what is expected of everyone involved in the hiring process and how they should set up candidates for success. It also includes how the hiring process ensures that the right decision is made for the company. I thought this was a great example framework and something that after reading I feel that all businesses should have.

Following this, Claire talks about understanding who in your organisation is thriving and trying to hire more people like that. She lays out a Venn diagram with three categories.

  1. People who are good at their work
  2. People who have a great impact on their company’s progress
  3. People who love what they do

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Think about who in your organisation or team fits into this cross-section and the qualities they have. Structure your interview questions in a way that allows you to identify these qualities in others.

Company and Team Offsites

Over the years I’ve attended and hosted team offsites and some have been more successful than others. In the book, Clarie recommends some check-out questions that I will be using the next time I am involved in organising an offsite.

  • What’s the topic you’re still thinking about and why?
  • What do you think was our most important decision?
  • In one or two words, describe how you are feeling coming out of this offsite

Meetings

Claire covers the topic of meetings and offers several pieces of advice. Once again, one of the highlights for me was the check-out questions. These questions aren’t for every meeting. However, we all sometimes attend those bigger department-level meetings or perhaps the ones where we share a new initiative or plan. The questions are:

  • What’s one thing you’re going to take away from this meeting?
  • What’s one thing you will commit to after this meeting?
  • I’d love to hear everyone’s final thoughts on the topic we just discussed
  • One word on how the meeting has left you feeling or thinking

Underperforming teams

Within the book, some advice and strategies are offered to attempt to course-correct an underperforming team. Ideally, teams will be reviewing their goals and metrics at a regular cadence, so catching that something is off should be managed early. However, sometimes teams don’t hit their milestones for weeks running. These are the steps you may want to take:

Investigate the root cause

As a leader, you probably have a feeling or theory on what may be causing the team to underperform. Test this theory in 1:1s with your team members and see what you learn. Team members may confirm your theory or you might learn something else that is causing the team to go off-track.

Have an open conversation in a team meeting

Ask the team the following questions with curiosity.

  • Why do you think we’re behind on our goal?
  • Do these reasons feel in or out of our control?
  • What can we do now to get back on track?
  • When it comes to the reasons that really are out of our control, how much impact will they have on our ability to make progress? What could we do to control these external factors?

If the issue is down to the wrong goal, then adjust the goal and clearly document how the goal has changed and why, then communicate with stakeholders. This is essential to maintain credibility.

If the issue concerns a lack of skills or collaboration then feedback needs to come into this. People need to be coached to develop the skills and facilitation may be required to enable better collaboration.

Working with other teams

When it comes to working with other teams, Claire talks about how some of the hardest accountability problems for managers come up when a team’s work is dependent on work from another team.

Claire highlights the importance of de-risking those dependencies and offers a quick guide for doing so.

  1. Identify dependencies during the planning process - Discuss work with other teams before plans are finalised. Discuss what needs to be done and align on an outcome.
  2. Set up a semi-regular check-in to keep the teams up to date - This could be an email or a meeting but having a regular check-in on progress is important.
  3. Embed someone on the team - Sometimes it can be useful to have a representative from the team you’re working with join you in your team meetings. Ask them to send someone.
  4. Form a working group - Sometimes it makes sense to create a temporary working group comprising members from the different teams to solve a specific goal or metric.

Career Conversations

Career Conversations is a topic I’ve read a lot about in several different books. Claire provides her template for carrying out this exercise which follows a format like so.

Pre-conversation

  1. Let your team know that you’re planning to have a career conversation over the next few weeks and share the context and goal of this conversation.
  2. Send a reminder outlining the goals for the conversation the day before you meet. Do it the day before, as you deliberately want to avoid people overpreparing.

The Conversation

Be prepared to take a lot of notes and ask “why” a lot. You want them to reflect on their choices. What do they think of them now? How did these influence their thinking? What do they want to return to?

Outlined below is the rough structure that Claire recommends to follow:

  • Tell me about where you grew up - Do not pry or push too much on family life, but family life and patterns will often manifest in people’s work selves.
  • Tell me about where you went to school - Get them talking about what interested them in school and why they chose to study what they did.
  • What did you do right after university? - Want to understand why they did what they did after graduating, if applicable. Remember to ask why. These will help give you insights into early motivations.
  • Tell me about your favourite job and least favourite job. How and why did you make the decisions you made when choosing these roles? - You want to focus on the choices they made. Get a sense of their learnings and especially the work they are good at and enjoy and also what they find harder. Drive in if there is a nugget. You want to spot some patterns.
  • What sort of work do you see yourself doing in the future? - Take some time to look forward in the conversation. This is a more exploratory part. Probe on future thoughts, no matter how abstract.

This conversation should be used to support a discussion on career development. Off the back of this, you should be better equipped to spot opportunities for the person.

Don’t forget the wrap-up. Recap the conversation, share any notes you took and try to write some development goals together.

Creating a culture of feedback

One of the points Claire highlights in her book around feedback is the difference between team and individual feedback. Team feedback is feedback about the performance of a team of people and this feedback should be data-driven and presented in a way that displays it as an honest assessment of how things are going from that team. Talking publicly about what a team learned and what a team can do differently to improve helps to build that feedback culture.

Next, Claire dives a little more into how to create a “culture of informal feedback”.

Informal Feedback Culture

The point that Claire makes in her book that resonated with me the most is that leaders need to model the behaviour they expect. To build a healthy feedback culture, leaders need to be the people demonstrating feedback in both team meetings and 1:1s. Once again, the rule of thumb of “praise publicly, criticize privately” is mentioned. You should solicit and welcome feedback. If you’re trying something new or know that what you are doing is something you want feedback on, then set the expectation up front that you want feedback with your team or people.

The best way to create a feedback culture is to ask for it yourself, here are some pointers Claire makes in her book:

  • Ask on different occasions and through different forums. Ask in 1:1s, over email, in work sessions, etc. Phrase the request as asking for something you can improve, this makes it clear you want feedback. Ask “What could I have done differently?”, “What can I do to make this project more successful?”.
  • Normalize the practice of giving feedback. If you were given feedback in private, mention in a public meeting that you received some feedback. You want to try and set the norm and culture that giving and receiving feedback is welcome and is a regular occurrence.
  • Let the feedback sit. When presented with feedback, you may be tempted to problem-solve or explain. Instead, try to repeat the feedback to ensure you’ve understood and heard it correctly and then thank them. If you want to problem-solve, come back to this at a later time.
  • Follow up on feedback. At a future point, tell the person who gave you the feedback how you plan to act on it. It’s important that the person who gave you the feedback knows they were heard.

This is a point that I think is worth emphasising again. When you receive feedback, say “Thank you”. Don’t explain your choices as this may send a signal that the feedback you received is not welcome or respected. I could not agree with this more. Whenever I provide feedback and am met with excuses, it just makes me feel like I wasted my time and I’m less likely to provide it in the future.

Questions for 360 feedback/peer reviews

In the book, Claire also suggests some prompts you could use when asking for peer reviews. I thought these were great and I’ve been inspired by them for use in future 360 feedback requests.

  • Share a couple of sentences on how you work with this individual and how closely you work together.
  • Review the relevant job ladder/competency matrix and share which capability you believe is a strength of your peer and how you’ve observed it in action.
  • Share one capability from the job ladder that you think your peer might improve upon. Provide suggestions on how they might do so.
  • Review our operating principles and note which one you feel your peer most embodies. Provide an example of how they embody this operating principle.

I love these questions and think they can be adapted to suit your organisation quite easily.

Managing High Performers

In the book, Claire touches on managing high performers. High performers do pull more than their weight and what makes them top performers is often their ambition, motivation and impact on their coworkers. Managing high performers can take up more energy from you as a manager as they often exert and demand more from those around them. Claire talks about this concept of “Pushers and Pullers” which I found fascinating.

Pushers and Pullers

Pushers are ambitious and often critical. They quickly recognise when something is broken and they set high standards for themselves and the people they work with. They are internally motivated and they don’t mind disrupting the norm.

At their best:

  • Get better results from teammates and the organisation
  • Model good work and motivate others
  • Have an eye for top talent and helping to attract them
  • Have a sharp radar for things that aren’t working
  • Act like company owners and don’t stop at team boundaries

At their worst:

  • Have an “all-or-nothing” understanding of “good” and “bad”, reserving “good” for a small proportion of all-stars
  • Write off people they have placed in the “bad” bucket
  • Can inspire a feeling of distrust in others, who feel that their own work is not being acknowledged or they put unfair pressure on others to perform at their level
  • Focus on bringing work into their team at the expense of developing internal talent

Support them by:

  • Encouraging and rewarding them for their high standard. Praise publicly and privately. Promote them and give them raises.
  • Work with them to hire top talent.
  • Work with them to improve the organisation.
  • Get them to lead projects.
  • Help them to develop others.
  • Teach them how to exert influence indirectly
  • Coach them to delegate work and build mutual trust.

Pullers take on more work than they should. Managers love them for projects because they will agree to work on something and their output is high-quality. Pullers get burned out though.

At their best:

  • Are great resources to lead projects. Can jump into urgent work that needs to be done well.
  • Model high-quality work.
  • Are motivating for the rest of the organisation.
  • Demonstrate energy and commitment.
  • Are fun to have on a team.

At their worst:

  • Burn out.
  • Take on work that’s not the best use of time or skills.
  • Don’t delegate work.
  • Can be demotivating if they always get the best projects.

Support them by:

  • Helping them prioritize work and boundaries.
  • Encourage and reward them for their contributions in public and private. They often will not seek the reward but will resent the lack of acknowledgement.
  • Before they take on work, coach them to check if this is the most important thing they could be working on?
  • Help them find their own interests and passions.
  • Help them identify other talent to work on projects.

Conclusion

Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building by Claire Hughes Johnson is a great book which acts as a brilliant resource for any leader. It is full of exercises and templates which are super useful and it covers a broad range of topics. The range is so good that I think there is pretty much something for everyone. I would highly recommend giving this book a read, especially if you are in a leadership position and have decision making power.