In the newest episode of the Transform Your Workplace podcast, Brandon Laws invites Rob Bier to sit down and discuss the hurdles businesses encounter as they scale. Rob delves into frequent growth challenges and shares proven strategies for fostering development, drawing from his book, Smooth Scaling. Their conversation highlights key topics such as the necessity of effective communication, the influence of remote work on team interactions, and creative methods to maintain cohesion and efficiency as companies grow. This insightful episode is essential for anyone looking to scale their business without all the growing pains.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, Sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
BEHIND THE BOOK
Guest Rob Bier began working as an advisor with start-ups about fifteen years ago, and he watched as many of his clients became scale-ups, with their companies becoming “quite successful and quite large.” Rob explained, “I viewed that as a kind of learning laboratory because big companies have all the problems big companies have, and you can’t really trace where they come from. Tiny little companies, like five-man start-ups, don’t have any of these organizational frictions.”
A Day-Zero Organization, a term that Rob coined, is one such company: “Everything works, everybody’s aligned, all the problems get sorted, decision-making is fast, and everybody is vibing with each other.” But somewhere along the line, things begin to fall apart. In his advisor role, Rob had “a perch to see where they go wrong, what goes wrong, and to start noticing patterns.” It turned out that all of his clients, as they grew, were running into a similar set of issues and virtually the same stage of the growth process. That’s when Rob realized that he could help his clients by providing his insights in a guidebook for scaling: Smooth Scaling: 20 Rituals to Build a Friction-Free Organization.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Defining Terms
“Scaling is just the cool new word for growing, but it’s very different. Growing is […] a very quantitative measure. Scaling is a qualitative measure, and the definition of scaling I use is that the essential qualities of the thing you are scaling remain the same as you grow them. So the simple example is if I take a photograph, and I blow it up, and it’s all grainy, it may be big, but it’s not been scaled. But if I blow it up, and it’s still as fine resolution and clear as it was when it was small, that is what scaling means. And so in practice, what this means is that at that perfect organization you had when you were six or eight people — where everybody was aligned, and decisions got made really quickly, and problems got sorted out, and everybody knew exactly what everybody else was doing — those elements of the organization should still be as close to true as possible when you’re 250. And if you don’t have that, then you’ve grown, but you haven’t scaled.”
Growing the Headcount
It’s still pretty easy to connect with 10 people or 20 to get to know them, to rub shoulders with them, and to build those relationships as long as you are working at least part of the time together — physically together. […] So as long as you’re working together, the problems aren’t so bad when you’re 10 or 20. You start to feel them more around 50, 60, and then they go completely nonlinear and crazy around 150 people, and everything that you were doing that worked pretty okay until that point stops working, and there’s a whole bunch of reasons for that that we can get into. But the thing I notice is that these problems creep up on you and take you by surprise. So if you’re a CEO or founder, you’re thinking ‘My organization is doing great.’ And then all of a sudden, six months later, you’re like, ‘What the heck happened?’”
The Power of Productive Dialogue
“I do think that dialogue is the foundation, and it doesn’t replace, of course, the need for technology and process. But I think that it is the upstream thing. Your strategy came out of a dialogue. Your technology came out of a dialogue. The people you hired came out of a dialogue. And if you improve the quality of dialogue, you improve all those downstream decisions and products and plans and tools.”
Scaling and Remote Work
“The technological interface reduces the way we talk to each other to a very transactional kind of conversation, the Slack and messaging tools in particular. And so those tools are super powerful for transactional type of work, […] but not very good for building relationships. […] When you look at the world of problems, there are two kinds of conversations, what I call ‘it’ conversations: projects and code and milestones and budgets and customers, right? All the stuff of business. And then ‘us’ conversations. ‘How are we working together?’ And ‘I didn’t appreciate the way that you hung me up to dry in front of the boss’ and all of those conversations. Those conversations require trust. They’re also the conversations that build trust. And we tend to have those conversations only in person, often over a beer or a cup of coffee outside the office. And when you remove the opportunity to have those ‘us’ conversations, and everything becomes more transactional, then it’s much easier for problems to take hold and never get resolved.”
“Thinking Together”
“If every time you start talking, I make a face like, ‘No, that’s not right,’ and I look like I’m about to interrupt, and then I do interrupt, that puts you off, right? You’re not able to do your best thinking and you become defensive. When I listen with genuine curiosity and space, your mind not only does a good job of communicating what you already think, but it’s continuing to think in real-time. And the dynamic between us is helping you to get to new ideas, new thoughts. And you’re also hearing me in that same way. What that leads to is, when you and I get together, two things happen: we learn from each other, and we develop ideas and solutions that are better than yours and better than mine. Now, that has a profound impact.”
“The Personal User Guide”
“It’s super simple, and it’s absolutely essential to scaling. […] The Personal User Guide, again, just makes explicit something that happens naturally and implicitly in very small groups. It says, ‘Hey, we need to start having those ‘us’ conversations before there are problems.’ Because once there are problems, it’s really hard and awkward. ‘So, tell me about yourself. How do you work? What are you good at? What are your strengths? By the way, I’m going to share some of my vulnerabilities. I know I’m not perfect. I have self-awareness about that.’ Maybe you’ll share a little bit about that, too. Now, we’re having those open, vulnerable, high trust conversations before there are any problems so that when problems come up, we feel much more comfortable, and we’re much more likely to surface those problems and work through them.”
“An Information Marketplace”
“People want to know what they want to know, and it has to be demand-led. If you force-feed them information about everything that’s going on in the organization, they just won’t digest it. But if you don’t give them a way of finding out what’s going on, then they get very frustrated. And so the Information Marketplace is literally a marketplace. It’s like setting up a big trading hall, like the Seattle Fish Market picture — Pike’s Place or whatever it’s called. […] And so you set up a few booths, virtually or in person, of different departments, maybe new projects, things that people might be curious about, and you give them a chance to interact just like they would in a Pike’s Place market and say, ‘Hey, what’s going on with your project? How come we’re doing that? Tell me more. Oh, that’s interesting.’ And so it’s just a very lively and fun way for different parts of the organization to connect with each other for the express purpose of finding out what’s really going on.”
LEARN MORE
Grab a copy of Rob Bier’s book, Smooth Scaling: 20 Rituals to Build a Friction-Free Organization, wherever books are sold, or find out more about his work at robbier.com.