Scaling People

Metadata

• Author: Claire Hughes Johnson
• Full Title:: Scaling People
• Category:: 📚Books
• Document Tags:: Déjame sin trabajo, por favor, Déjame sin trabajo, por favor,
• Finished date:: 2023-05-10

Highlights

recognize the difference between being a manager and being a leader. Both are necessary for scaling a company, but they’re not the same thing. (View Highlight)

This again looks like project management:

Leaders don’t have to be managers, but if they aren’t, they need to know how to work with and hire managers to build the right teams to execute that vision. (View Highlight)

Great managers don’t initially have to be great leaders, but the more senior a manager becomes, the more important it is that they also develop leadership skills (View Highlight)

managers need to be able to set a vision and direction for their team—and potentially make the team uncomfortable with a bit of heat—or they’ll hit a ceiling in their careers. (View Highlight)

Once you become a great manager, you can get very comfortable. But once you become a true leader, almost every day is uncomfortable. Don’t confuse the two. (View Highlight)

Understanding the distinction between management and leadership has proved invaluable in my career. It has helped me retain high performers I might have been tempted to promote into management but who I recognized could be much more effective as leaders in non-manager roles. (View Highlight)

Management is how you get the mechanics of the pieces coming together. And leadership is more [about creating] a culture or energy of engagement—belief in the importance of winning. It’s that ‘We can do this’ energy.” (View Highlight)

Cabrero again:

I recently coached a talented up-and-coming product marketing leader at Stripe who kept running up against the challenge of syncing her team’s work with the company’s ever-changing product roadmap. We spent a whole 1:1 talking about solutions, at the end of which I observed that there would never be a one-and-done fix for the issue. Instead, she would need to continually adapt her approach and push the product team to adapt theirs.

The realization that this situation called for leadership via influence and careful communication, rather than building the perfect process, freed her from seeking the perfect “management” answer. In doing so, it tilted her toward adapting how she led herself and her team to improve over time. This employee needed to show up as a leader for her team, which included very experienced people who needed her less to provide internal guidance and more to push other teams to speed up, to their mutual benefit. (View Highlight)

Leadership is ultimately about driving change, while management is about creating stability (View Highlight)

Unfortunately, I disagree (experienced employees usually need project management too).

Experienced employees mostly need a leader and just a bit of a manager. If they’ve made it to a certain point in their careers, they’re probably good at getting their work done. (View Highlight)

But they’ll look to a leader to lay out the overarching vision and the milestones they should be working toward, and to pave the way for progress within the systems that operate outside of the team. The leader pushes their team to think and act differently, to welcome change, and, ultimately, to aspire to and achieve more ambitious outcomes. Less experienced employees mostly need a manager and just a bit of a leader. They’ll benefit from someone who can help them think through tactics, manage their work and their day-to-day, and help them develop and operate. (View Highlight)