![]() ![]() But the best way to manage scaling (and one of the secrets to succeeding in a rapidly growing company) is to ignore those instincts, and go find a bigger and better Lego tower to build. Everyone’s first instinct is to grab back the Legos that the new kid took - to fight them for that part of the tower or to micromanage the way they’re building the tower. “And one of the foremost examples is that reacting to the emotions you’re having as your team adds more people is usually a bad idea. “Almost everything about scaling is counterintuitive,” says Graham. But at a scaling company, giving away responsibility - giving away the part of the Lego tower you started building - is the only way to move on to building bigger and better things. There’s a lot of natural anxiety and insecurity that the new person won’t build your Lego tower in the right way, or that they'll get to take all the fun or important Legos, or that if they take over the part of the Lego tower you were building, then there won’t be any Legos left for you. The emotions you feel when new people are coming in and taking over pieces of your job - it’s not that different from how a kid feels when they have to share their Legos. If you personally want to grow as fast as your company, you have to give away your job every couple months. If you don’t, you can end up with a real mess. “These are some strong emotions, and even if they're predictable, they can be unnerving.” In order to get to a really high-functioning, larger team, you have to help everyone get through this roller coaster. “As you add people, you go through this roller coaster of, ‘Wait, is that new person taking my job? What if they don’t do it the right way? What if they’re better than me at it? What do I do now?’” says Graham. That’s when something funny happens on a personal level and to teams: People get nervous. You’re not sure you can do it all yourself. You have so many choices and things to build during this early phase that it’s easy to get overwhelmed. At the beginning, as you start to scale, everyone has so many Legos to choose from - they’re doing 10 jobs - and they’re all part of building something important.” There are so many Legos! You could build anything. Being inside a company that’s a rocket ship is really cool. “The best metaphor I have for scaling is building one of those huge, complex towers out of Legos,” she says. “I call it the ‘Give Away Your Legos’ talk,” she says. ![]() ![]() She saw so many people struggling with the same emotions during her time at Facebook that now she actually gives a talk to people on her teams about it. “I think it’s important for people to talk about what it feels like to be inside a scaling company because it helps people realize how normal their experience is - and identifying that experience as a leader can actually help your team,” says Graham. She covers what rapid scaling actually feels like as an experience (something too few people talk about), the toughest phases of growth and how to survive them, and - most importantly - how you can anticipate the biggest challenges before they really hurt your momentum and your chances for long-term success. Here, Graham explains why scaling companies and teams is, in her words (and she’s putting it lightly), “crazy hard” and what you can do as an early employee or a startup founder to make it easier on yourself and your team. If you don’t manage scaling proactively, you can end up in trouble.” “There’s a unique feeling of ambiguity, chaos and stress that comes with doubling or tripling your team every six months. “If you’ve ever watched an extremely high performer go from killing it one year to struggling the next, you know what I’m talking about,” she says. Some of them are funny - like needing to replace everyone’s big desk with smaller ones so all the new folks can fit, or moving into an office that's already too small for your growing team. If there’s one thing Graham knows for sure, it’s that scaling comes with an utterly unique set of problems. (Her job was to sort out the culture, compensation, and performance systems to help make that possible - no big deal.) And now, as COO of productivity tool startup Quip, she’s both laying the groundwork for her team to grow, and catering to a customer base of startups ( Instacart and New Relic among them) who have the pedal to the metal. During her 4+ years at Facebook, the company exploded from 500 employees serving 80 million users to 5,500 employees and over 1.1 billion users. Her team at Google leapt from 25 to 125 in just 9 months.
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