Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building

“The first level [of your career] is hard skills, the second level is soft skills, and the third level is the most challenging level: how you show up emotionally, how you keep being a champion and make everything possible.

for them to ripen. Every once in a while, I would take a ‘fruit idea’ out of the bag and test whether it was ready. Usually, the test was easy—there was an issue and we needed a solution, or the founder heard the idea and was suddenly on board. Sometimes the founder would come to the conclusion independently and bring the idea up himself. If I took

He had a lot of ideas about how he wanted to change things, but he met with a lot of resistance. The company simply wasn’t ready. He explained to me how he changed his mindset: “I would think of my ideas as pieces of fruit that weren’t yet ripe. I’d put my pieces of fruit in a bag on the counter and wait

I’ll say it again: Ask for help. Management is not just about building a complementary team but also about having the mutual self-awareness to look at your entire orbit and seek out those with different strengths. You can’t go far together unless you’re not just self-aware but also confident enough to be vulnerable and seek others’ assistance.

There is a world of information and knowledge around you that you need to be receptive to. If you’re not a good listener, then it’s hard to imagine how you can be a good leader.

“All good leaders have to be self-aware. If you’re not able to learn from your experience and your mistakes—and we all make mistakes, all the time—and if you’re not able to evolve as a result of that kind of feedback, you’re not going to become a better leader.

When you feel overwhelmed, or just when you’re planning your week or day, one simple framework is a classic: the Eisenhower matrix of important–not important and urgent–not urgent.

There are also times when you can only feel your weaknesses and get discouraged. When that happens, take a moment to reframe the situation. In a high-growth company, everything is moving so fast that you don’t get a chance to stand still and take stock—so much so that you might make mistakes that were avoidable if you’d just had more time. But the

Give yourself permission to set boundaries Only you know what boundaries you need to set. No one else will protect them for you. For example, I only started to exercise regularly when I decided that exercise was part of my job to be the best possible leader I could be. Know when you’re most productive I get my best work done in the morning, so I tr