Ave Leslie highlights the signs of successful scaling in a fast-growing company, and how to approach employee layoffs.
A strong signal that a fast-growing company is doing a good job scaling is that it sheds some of its best employees.
Working at a small company is fundamentally different from working at a larger company, and not every employee should want to make that transition. If someone likes company-wide visibility and input, they’re going to be frustrated as those things necessarily become reduced or indirect. There’s a lot that a savvy leadership team can do to scale the most important kernels of the culture, but some employees don’t want scaled adaptations–they want the original, unmediated version.
And that’s a valid preference! It just has to be surfaced.
Where things go really wrong is when either or both parties attribute the employee’s frustration to company mismanagement rather than to a fundamental structural change. That’s when former company stars become toxic–loudly complaining that the company is losing everything that made it great. And that’s when the company in turn spins its wheels trying one fruitless change after another–communication channels, engagement tools, working norms, offsite activities…
Really everyone just needs to say, “It’s not you, it’s not me, we just want fundamentally different things out of life.”
I haven’t seen a lot of solutions for this problem, at least not ones that are scalable, but I’d start in three places: First, creating a special kind of employee check-in with someone other than the employee’s own manager, that’s different than a traditional stay interview or career goals conversation–more frequent, and more sharply focused on organizational factors. Second, adding a theme in the executive team’s existing whole-company comms (the monthly all-hands or whatnot): an overt and repetitious “This is what it’s like here now.” And third, making a big public celebration when a CXO or VP leaves for exactly the same reason–because again, in a healthy organization, at least one of them surely will.