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Molly GrahamBob的工作……我喜欢想他的工作基本上是让我变成最差的我自己。他是那个说，哦，那个人拿走了所有有趣的乐高，你应该去把他们推倒然后抢回来。Bob的工作是……Bob是那个想在晚上9点发出愤怒邮件、烧掉房子的人。关于Bob你需要知道的是，就像我说的，Bob永远不会消失。Bob是你必须学会应对的人。但Bob的工作是让你变成最差的我自己。所以你的工作是让Bob做他的事，但不根据那些情绪行动。基本上，所有这些情绪都是正常的，它们不是有用的。它们不是应该告诉你该做什么的指南针。
但我管理Bob的另一条规则是，很多人是这样的，哦，你感觉不对或累了或者什么。去睡觉，明天早上醒来你会感觉好点。但真相是，你在晚上9点想发愤怒邮件。早上8点你还是想发。很多这些情绪就是不会在24小时内消失。所以我在Facebook的经验法则是给它两周。那个情绪，那个Bob……Bob像波浪，它们滚滚而来。所以你做了一次新招聘或者有人进来了或者你被分层了或者什么。你会有一系列反应。那些反应，再一次，它们是正常的，但不是有用的。它们不是你应该听从的。它们是Bob。
通常它们几天就会消失，然后来一些新的波浪。但任何持续超过两周的事情实际上是你应该关注的。如果它待了两周以上，你应该去和某人谈谈。无论是经理、朋友、教练还是类似的人。那是真正的东西。其他都只是Bob。
Lenny Rachitsky有没有一个经验法则关于什么时候实际上你不应该让出你的乐高？什么时候像是，好吧，也许你应该反抗这次分层或者其他什么。
Molly Graham没有经验法则。一般来说，我实际上会说拥抱变化比反抗它好得多。而且几乎总是，你看不到拐角处有什么，但几乎总是应该专注的那件事。很多时候我觉得在变化中，我们聚焦在过去，作为经理和领导者你能做的最有价值的事情之一是帮助人们聚焦未来。我想……我确信有些时候人们做了然后后悔了，结果把他们带到了某个地方。
我觉得例如被加层级是这些经历中最难的事情之一——有人在你上面招了一个经理。我也看过很多这样的故事最终成为某人的好事。即使当时他们看不到。所以一般来说，我就说，走进未来，让过去过去，看看你会学到什么。有时候你会学到是时候离开了，或者这不适合你。但它最终会把带到某个值得探索的地方。守着东西几乎总是让我们变成最差的自己。
Lenny Rachitsky这也是一个很佛教的思维方式。不执着。
Molly Graham没错。
Lenny Rachitsky是的。我想这个比喻的另一个部分，我不知道你是否也这样想。但乐高甚至不是你的乐高，对吧？那是CEO的乐高、股东的乐高。所以你以为那是你的乐高，但，不，你做不了主。
Molly Graham嗯，我要说艰难获得的事情之一是它可能感觉非常有情绪性，可能感觉非常个人化。可能感觉像你的工作……我不知道，可能感觉像你的生活有时候在危险中。只是你的工作生活。哦，天哪，这太重要了。但随着你更资深、见过更多东西，你学到的一件事是——会没事的。我一个朋友说，职业是漫长的，没人告诉你这个。但它们是漫长的。这个时刻感觉如此艰难，感觉如此可怕，会没事的。所以是的，当时很难知道。而且我觉得故事会很长，这将是其中一章，或者甚至只是一章的一部分，不是整章。所以拥抱它的长度。
Lenny Rachitsky在那个观点上补充——我发现这是我做现在这个工作的第四次职业。不管这是什么。我是个工程师，然后我是创始人。然后我是产品经理，然后现在我做的这个狗屁东西。不管这是什么，那是一条完全不同的路。
Molly Graham你还没给它起个名字吗，Lenny？
Lenny Rachitsky没有。我讨厌人们用于这个世界的所有术语。
Molly Graham有人叫我影响者，我差点把他们脸撕下来。
Lenny Rachitsky是的。
Molly Graham是的。
Lenny Rachitsky是的。
Molly Graham是的，伙计。最有趣的职业是曲折的，它们有起点和终点、失败和成功，通常控制不是游戏的名字。通常只是，"让我们看看会发生什么。我们要试试这个，然后我们看看接下来发生什么。"
Lenny Rachitsky这是一个很棒的过渡到你另一个框架——我从你合作过的人那里听到的，对他们真的很有影响力。Sarah Caldwell，OpenAI的一个大人物，她告诉我，在她的职业生涯中对她帮助最大的框架是你所说的J曲线对比楼梯职业成长框架。讲讲那是什么。
Molly Graham实际上几年前我为此做了一个TED演讲，因为我对此非常热情，但你可以听这个打包好的8分钟版本，但我要告诉你真实的故事，因为它和很多听你播客的人非常相关。我在Facebook工作了五年。像我说的，前两年我在人力资源部，做雇佣品牌和文化工作，我准备留在那里。我想我的计划是留到公司上市，就因为我想帮助公司度过那个时刻，再一次，在我脑子里。
这个人很多人都认识，Chamath Palihapitiya，来找我——Chamath当时负责增长和移动业务。他来找我，我们一起吃午饭，他用他典型的Chamath方式说，"你没用。你在人力资源部做什么？这很蠢。你应该来为我工作。"任何认识Chamath的人都知道，是的，那真的是他说的。他成功在一句话里同时侮辱了你和表扬了你。
他给了我他团队的所有选项。最后他说的是，"我要去造一部手机。你想和我一起做吗？"我有四个同时的反应。第一是，"这太蠢了。为什么我们要做那个？"然后是，"我们真的要做一个东西吗？"然后是，"哇，我想那听起来有点有趣。"所以我离开和Chamath的对话，我去找我的老板Lori Goler，她是Facebook很长时间的CHO，说，"Chamath真的给你那个了吗？"她说，"我不能相信他给你那个，什么什么的。"
我基本上就是无法把它从脑子里拿掉，但事情完全没有道理，A，Chamath问了我因为我在人力资源部。像，"我在做什么？我对移动一无所知。"但我和他合作过一个项目，我猜他觉得我聪明。我和Cheryl谈，她说，"好吧，那个项目两个月内会死，但你可以做因为你仍然会在这里有工作。"我爸爸说，"好吧，不要做那个。"总之，很多非常聪明的人都说，"不要做那个。"
但我基本上就是无法把它从脑子里拿掉。我一个朋友对我说，"你已经证明了你在公司范围项目管理和人力资源方面真的很擅长。为什么不去展示给自己看你实际上多厉害？这个可转移吗？"所以我接受了这个工作，接下来的六个月我感觉自己像个绝对的傻瓜。我坐在那些聪明人中间，问我生命中最愚蠢的问题，六个月结束时，Chamath，我想，他很自豪地给了我我这辈子得到的最低绩效评分，那感觉就像从悬崖上掉下去。然后，慢慢地，我记得我们去了台湾好几次因为我们真的在做硬件，某个时候我从台湾回来，我为他在白板上画了一部手机的布局，试图解释为什么他想做的某个东西是不可能的。我如此清晰记得走出那个会议的感觉，"哦，我实际上知道东西。"然后慢慢地，接下来的三年，我成了移动专家。
Chamath向我推销这份工作时，真的在白板上给我画了一幅画。他说，"看，你可以留在……"很多人做职业的方式是一系列楼梯。"你可以无聊。"用Chamath的话说，"就待在楼梯上。走上楼梯，每两年就会晋升，你的头衔从经理变成高级经理、总监、高级总监，等等。"他说，"但那很无聊。"他说，"更有趣的职业像是跳下悬崖。"基本上，你跳下去，你会坠落一段时间。我总喜欢说是六到九个月，但然后这件事发生了——你爬出来。
他画的图有这个J曲线，基本上引导你到达远超楼梯能带你去的地方。完全说实话，那也是我的经历。冒险，接受那种可怕的坠落和坠落的体验，是完全值得的。Sarah提到它的原因之一是，我确实会向那些身处快速发展公司的人做这种演讲，因为这是一个非常重要的时刻——放下乐高、跳下悬崖，因为机会太多了。
你可以从那些公司走出来时带着没人会合理雇用你做的技能。但我在Facebook最后是在产品、业务开发和硬件领域，以及一路上的一大堆其他东西。同样，一开始没人会雇用我做那些，但只是因为我一直对事情说"好"。
Lenny RachitskyMolly，听这个故事我起鸡皮疙瘩了。哇。
Molly Graham听起来很熟悉吧，Lenny？
Lenny Rachitsky是的。我想问，跳下悬崖，有时候你坠落，真的坠落然后一直坠落。有什么特征可以判断"好吧，这可能是一个J曲线，值得冒坠落风险"，和"这时候你可能应该算了，不要做这个"吗？
Molly Graham是的。我只是觉得有不同的恐惧。我们在Glue Club经常聊这个，因为其中一件事是——有财务恐惧，对吧？离职然后接受一份有财务风险的工作，或者离职然后休息一段时间，这是我花很多时间和人们聊的事情——你得算账。有时候有一种恐惧告诉你，"这不是对的时间。"或者，"我不想连续几个月在经济上焦虑。"
我用财务作为最具体的例子，因为那是一种你真的应该听的恐惧。有时候你可以算出来。我总是通过这个给人建议。我说，"那个数字是多少——让你在经济上不会持续恐惧的数字？"那个数字根据人们的背景和生活非常不同。"你能做到吗？你能做咨询吗，你能做什么来为了这次跳跃吗？"但很多时候恐惧只是你说，"我害怕我做不到。我害怕我没能力。是的，我害怕我会失败。"
那是那种我认为像绿色闪烁灯的恐惧，因为……Matt McGinnis也这么说过——那种恐惧在说，"为什么不去证明给自己看你实际上能做到？"或者如果你失败了，"你也会学到一些东西。"你懂我意思吧？你会学到，"我在Facebook接受了那个产品工作作为我在那里的最后一章，让我告诉你人们永远不应该雇用我做什么。"我说，"我不是个好产品经理。"但我有很棒的产品思维。我能坐在各种椅子上，和产品团队相处，但我不是那个关心按钮的人。你懂我意思吗？
而且我永远不会学到那个。如果我没有冒那个险并失败，或者至少学到这不是我想再做一次的事情，我就不会知道我是谁。所以，从面对那些恐惧和跳下悬崖中有很多不同的教训，但大部分是更好地了解自己，知道你接下来去哪里。
Lenny Rachitsky这是非常有用的建议。我也喜欢你这样框架这个，"证明给你自己看你能做到。"不是，"我要向他们展示我能做到。"因为你描述的，通常这是一个给你的机会。"嘿，你能做这个吗？我们想让你领导这个新东西。"恐惧是，"我觉得我做不到。"而你在这里说的是，"证明给你自己看你能。"或者，我想，也可能是，"好吧，也许我不能，然后我会学到那个，然后我会更了解自己。"
Molly Graham是的，就是这样。职业生涯中最伟大的礼物之一是了解自己。那是一段终生的旅程，因为你是谁和你要什么会变化，但那种知识——没有什么比尝试做你不知道怎么做的事情并感到害怕更能加速你的自我认知了。
Lenny Rachitsky你在说这个的时候，我想到了我在这个播客上用得最多的引语——"你恐惧的洞穴包含你寻找的宝藏。"
Molly Graham太对了，就是这样。说得好。
Lenny Rachitsky就是这样。
Molly Graham我没听你说过这个，所以我明显需要多听。
Lenny Rachitsky好的，那太好了。我很高兴我没有过度使用它。它感觉就是一遍又一遍地出现，而且我觉得你关于跑道和财务的观点是非常重要的一个，因为这是一个非常实际的实际问题。我离职休息时做的一件事是，我离职后休息了一年。我帮助自己的是，我给自己设定了一个跑道目标。我说，"好吧，以下是我在没有收入的情况下生活六个月或一年要花多少钱。我是否愿意烧掉这些几万块钱去探索，看看有什么新东西出现？"所以你只需要感觉良好。"好吧，是的，我要烧掉所有那些钱，这是其中的一部分。"
Molly Graham是的，那正是那个练习。你说"跑道"，我说"燃烧率"，所以我们都是在公司里长大的，激励科技，但我觉得就是算账，对吧？你能负担得起什么？而且是你能负担得起并且仍然感觉安全的。有时候，我是说，再次，那对每个人来说都不同，但这是一组非常重要的数学，因为A，很多时候那个数字比你想象的要小，然后你的大脑把它放大如果你有这种存在性经济焦虑的话——我总是说，"具体的经济焦虑比存在性经济焦虑有用得多。"有些朋友要离职，我会说，"嘿，你的数字是每月5K或10K。你必须相信你能找到一个会支付你那个的咨询工作。你相信吗？"然后就是，"要么是，要么不是。"然后，"好吧，要么我们做，要么我们不做。"
Lenny RachitskyJ曲线的另一部分我觉得非常重要需要谈到的是——在最初的六或九个月，你会处于J曲线底部，坠落中，还在坠落。有些项目持续不了那么久，然后你会说，"好吧，完全失败。我从未从这次坠落中出来。"那么，那里有什么建议吗？怎么创造足够的空间给你一个机会开始停止坠落？
Molly Graham当你坠落时发生的最有价值的事情是学习。即使在失败的另一边，你也学到了大量东西。我总说，"在坠落阶段和冒险着陆时最重要的事情是学会拥抱做一个职业傻瓜。"基本上，做那个出现在会议上然后问，"我们在聊什么？那个词是什么意思？"的人。
有很多原因。第一，你可以学到这么多。而且再次，即使面对失败，没人能拿走你的学习。你懂我意思吧？但另一件事是，事实证明世界上很多问题——你坐在会议室里，你觉得，"这是一个愚蠢的问题。每个人都会觉得我是白痴。"但然后你鼓起勇气问了，结果发现那不是个蠢问题。你懂我意思吧？原来每个人脑子里都有那个问题，但没人有勇气问它。
所以从技能的角度——不管结果如何——做那个自己掌控学习的人，不管怎样都学习，学会问那些蠢问题——那是超能力。我总说，"实际上，我的超能力是做一个职业傻子。"因为我是那个出现在房间里然后问，"我们有目标吗？我们在做什么？为什么我们在聊这个？为什么我们要开这个会？"而且大多数时候这实际上是我被雇来做的，也就是带来清晰。
Lenny Rachitsky太有趣了。我刚录了一期播客，嘉宾是一个叫Zevi的PM，他加入了Wix，他有个想法，他像一个非常年轻的PM，刚起步，他说，"好吧，我需要成为一个10X PM，因为那是他们对我的期望，那是所有真正优秀的人对我的期望，那是我对10X PM的理解。"然后他参加了第一次会议，他彻底搞砸了，他感觉糟透了。他说，"我想我不是一个10X PM。他们都会看到那个。他们觉得我很糟糕。"然后他后来又做了一次演示，人们对他学习和进化以及进步的方式印象非常深刻。他意识到他需要成为一个不是10X PM，而是一个10X学习者，那是人们对某人的期望，特别是对初级的人。
Molly Graham是的。嗯，昨晚我和一个朋友聊天，她有个高三学生，我说，"有什么计划？考虑到AI正在发生的一切，我们告诉这个高三学生关于他们职业生涯应该想什么？"我们聊了很多，但我们都回到的是这个软技能的想法——实际上你现在能真正锚定的是教孩子毅力，教他们努力工作，教他们学习，对吧？在一个变化如此快速的世界里，教他们如何学习、热爱学习、能够跌倒。我在公司里也这么说，对吧？我总说，"你今天知道的远不如你明天能学到的有价值。"如果你在一家增长曲线像这样的公司里，你今天知道的无关紧要。
有人曾经告诉我……我确定现在更快了，但他们在Google每八年重写整个代码库，这意味着如果你不学习，如果你不进化，你就会变得无关紧要并灭绝。这实际上是乐高东西的全部底层观点——进化是你保持领先的方式，而且我认为今天比以往任何时候都更真实。
Lenny Rachitsky幸运的是，AI真的非常擅长帮助我们学习。
Molly Graham完全。
Lenny Rachitsky所以，那很好。谢谢你，AI。这实际上在这个播客上出现了很多。我问很多做AI的人他们在教孩子什么，人们谈论的主要事情之一是好奇心。"帮助他们培养对世界的好奇心。"
Molly Graham是的。
Lenny Rachitsky是的。好的。我觉得我可以聊一整期播客的这个具体话题，但我想继续聊你开发的另外几个框架。一个叫做水位线模型，另一个以前的同事说，"这是我职业生涯中从你这里学到的最有影响力的东西。"所以，聊聊水位线模型。
Molly Graham好的。是的。嗯，首先，水位线模型不是我的。它来自某本商业书，但我实际上是从那里学的。我大学毕业后的第一份工作是带领野外旅行。我为一所叫NOLS的学校——全国户外领导力学校——在巴塔哥尼亚和阿拉斯加带领75天的野外旅行。NOLS基本上教学生领导力和沟通技巧。
我主要带领大学生年龄的孩子进行野外探险。所以，必须领导一群你不认识的同龄人。总之，水位线模型是我们在NOLS教的东西。它是一个非常非常有用的模型，用于理解如何诊断团队中什么时候出了问题，所以我在Glue Club里教它，我会快速解释它。基本上，思考水位线模型的方式是——团队是一艘船，它是一艘在海上试图到达某处的船——到达某处就是目标，对吧？"我们试图构建、发布或做什么？"本质上，这将更难或更容易，取决于海洋的形状，对吧？如果波涛汹涌，就更难；如果风平浪静，就容易到达你的目标。
所以，水位线基本上问这个问题："水下发生了什么？是什么让到达目标变得更难或更容易？"水下面本质上有四样东西，它们是按顺序递减的。最表面的一层叫做结构性东西。基本上，结构性东西像是目标设定、愿景、角色、期望——你为了使团队和公司和业务有意义而设置的框架，触及团队的每个成员。
下面紧接的是所谓的动态，也就是团队如何一起工作。是文化，是决策，是我们如何解决冲突，所有这些团队如何一起工作的交织部分。然后下面是人际，也就是两个人之间的关系以及我们作为人类带来的所有东西。最底层是个人内在，也就是一个人内部面临的挑战和问题。
这个模型有趣的地方是，当团队中出问题的时候，大多数时候我们总是去看最底层。我们去看人。我们说，"人们相处不好，那个人正经历艰难时刻。"我们去看人，但水位线模型的规则——这非常令人难忘——是你先snorkeling再scuba。所以，团队中80%的问题实际上是由于结构性问题或动态问题。所以，当你的团队有问题时，你从顶部开始，你从结构性问题开始。
我在Glue Club里一遍又一遍反复说的最大的事情之一是，"作为经理，你唯一的目标——如果你什么都不做的话——是清晰的角色和清晰的期望。就这样。"因为说实话，我接管过很多团队，在我的人生中我几乎总是出现然后发现没人知道他们的工作是什么，没人知道成功是什么样子的。如果你能把这两件事说清楚——再说，那是在snorkeling层面——它会解决团队中大量其他问题。但主要的事情是你从哪里开始，总是基本上从那个结构性层面或动态层面开始，而不是立即去看人等等。因为是的，人会引起各种问题，但很多时候问题发生是因为他们存在于一个令人困惑的结构中。
Lenny Rachitsky又一个非常生动的比喻，我喜欢它如何用snorkeling建立。好吧，为了超级清楚——这里的要点是，你和你的团队、公司有问题，很多人认为它是，他们跳到人是问题。"他们不够好，他们不够努力。"真的，你说的是，大多数时候，问题不是那个人，是环境——无论是他被设置工作的结构还是人与人之间的动态。特别是你说的——角色可能不清晰，或者那个角色成功的定义不清晰。
Molly Graham我合作或建议的每个公司，我经常首先问，"目标是什么？"通常你得到的回答是，"呃，不清楚。"那本身就是一个结构性问题，对吧？如果目标不清晰，如果他们真的不知道优先级是什么，某人怎么能出现并决定他们每天要做什么？然后是角色，对吧？"我知道我的工作是什么吗？我知道我被雇来拥有和推动哪个数字吗？"然后是，"我知道成功是什么样的吗？我的角色如何与公司拥有的那个整体目标联系起来？"就在那里。你可能面临公司内部80%的问题，因为这是公司建设中的艰苦工作。这是那些不直观的东西。"你如何组织一群人知道往哪个方向划？"
而且那个等式——再次，我要说80%的问题——我看到的绩效问题。我总是首先问，"这个人实际上知道你对他的期望是什么吗？"如果没有，回到第一步。你懂我意思吗？澄清期望，所以水位线模型只是帮助提醒我们，"从顶部开始。"
Lenny Rachitsky那么你会怎么做？假设你是一个经理，你和一个团队成员有问题，你会走过去问，"嘿，让我们确保我们在目标和角色上对齐。"你是那样处理的吗？还是有不同的方法？
Molly Graham所以很多时候我做的是双方面的，对吧？所以就像是，"嘿，这是我看到的，告诉我你这边发生了什么。你知道X、Y、Z吗？"当我接管一个团队，当我做我的倾听之旅时，我问的一部分是，"你认为你的工作是什么？你被雇来推动哪个数字？"因为你会发现通常他们的画面和你的画面不同。你以为你已经说清楚了，你描述了一头大象，他们吐出了一只老虎——然后回来说，"好吧，不，我们在建一头大象。你负责象鼻。"在某些比例的情况下，实际上会对那个人的工作和表现产生巨大影响。很多情况下不会，但那永远是我开始的地方，因为通常那只是一个更根本的问题，然后会让你去看团队中的其他事情。
但是的，我会说双向对话，但重新澄清角色和期望，一遍又一遍地重新描述那头头大象，是作为领导者最难的事情之一，因为你感觉自己像个坏掉的唱片，对吧？你觉得自己像个白痴。你说，"我已经说了45遍了。"原来前43遍没人听到，你必须这样做。你必须重新描述以便人们听到你并重新理解他们在做的事情中的角色。
Lenny Rachitsky我喜欢你如何重新框架我处理它的方式——从"这是我看到的。这是你看到的吗？你认为你的角色是什么？"那种非常符合非暴力沟通的，这是这个播客上一个明确的模式，那种具体框架的力量。
Molly Graham是的，完全。嗯，就像我说的，工作是关于人的，而且是把人组织起来完成某事并构建比部分之和更大的东西的艺术——这是我们所有人的人性艺术——我们如何让人们听到我们，我们如何让人们对齐。
Lenny Rachitsky够一辈子做的。
Molly Graham完全。
但我管理Bob的另一条规则是，很多人是这样的，哦，你感觉不对或累了或者什么。去睡觉，明天早上醒来你会感觉好点。但真相是，你在晚上9点想发愤怒邮件。早上8点你还是想发。很多这些情绪就是不会在24小时内消失。所以我在Facebook的经验法则是给它两周。那个情绪，那个Bob……Bob像波浪，它们滚滚而来。所以你做了一次新招聘或者有人进来了或者你被分层了或者什么。你会有一系列反应。那些反应，再一次，它们是正常的，但不是有用的。它们不是你应该听从的。它们是Bob。
所以从技能的角度——不管结果如何——做那个自己掌控学习的人，不管怎样都学习，学会问那些蠢问题——那是超能力。我总说，"实际上，我的超能力是做一个职业傻子。"因为我是那个出现在房间里然后问，"我们有目标吗？我们在做什么？为什么我们在聊这个？为什么我们要开这个会？"而且大多数时候这实际上是我被雇来做的，也就是带来清晰。 有很多原因。第一，你可以学到这么多。而且再次，即使面对失败，没人能拿走你的学习。你懂我意思吧？但另一件事是，事实证明世界上很多问题——你坐在会议室里，你觉得，"这是一个愚蠢的问题。每个人都会觉得我是白痴。"但然后你鼓起勇气问了，结果发现那不是个蠢问题。你懂我意思吧？原来每个人脑子里都有那个问题，但没人有勇气问它。
Molly Graham是的，完全。嗯，就像我说的，工作是关于人的，而且是啊……
就像我说的，工作是关于人的，而且是把人组织起来完成某事并构建比部分之和更大的东西的艺术——这是我们所有人的人性艺术——我们如何让人们听到我们，我们如何让人们对齐。
是的，完全。我感觉应该有少于六个但这就是我们现在的处境。在我说六个之前，我首先要说的两件事是：一个是我对OKRs确实有意见，我认为它显然对Google和其他公司是一个非常非常有用的框架，而且很多时候，当我出现在一家公司或我和一个领导者聊天，我说"你的目标是什么？"我得到的是这个有100行的电子表格，看起来像用希腊文写的，当我看着它，我想，"这不会给任何人带来清晰。"它让我回到——目标的重点是什么，我们为什么有目标——说到底，目标是一个沟通工具，它们就是。它们是一个设计用来创造清晰度的沟通工具，帮助人们知道我来到办公桌前，我应该做什么，什么是最重要的事情——你那100行电子表格帮不了任何人。
第二件事我只是想说，你真的必须问这个问题——什么对我和这家公司和这个阶段是正确的，对一个种子期公司正确的东西对一家拥有成熟业务和清晰Go-To-Market机器的公司是不正确的。所以，当我在种子期建设时，我每两个月设定一次目标，以一种非常迭代的方式。当我有一个成熟业务时，我可以实际上设定年度目标，但对早期公司设定年度目标只是浪费时间。所以，总之，我的很多目标设定东西实际上来自Facebook，我认为他们在这一点上非常非常好。
所以第一条是，任何公司都不需要超过三个公司目标，公司目标的目的是帮助人们知道什么是成功最重要的事情。所以Facebook基本上有三个目标，整个我在那里的时间——五年，我们做六个月目标设定，我想我们做年度目标设定但最终每六个月重置。三个目标是这个：增长——以月活用户衡量，那最终是对外报告的数字，MAU。第二个目标是参与度——也就是人们多久回来使用这个网站。第三个是收入。我们在那里五年， literally有三个目标。如果你能用三个目标管理那个业务，你就能用三个目标管理任何业务。所以任何公司都不需要超过三个目标。
第二件事是一个目标需要在冲突中获胜。所以，如果我坐下来问在给定的一天我如何优先安排我的时间，我需要知道最重要的是什么。在Facebook，我们有增长，有很多不同的方式你可以增加社交媒体网站的月活用户，包括你可以去印度尼西亚买一堆机器人，那会增加你的MAU数字，但不会增加你的参与度数字，而且在我在那里整个时间里非常清楚——参与度是最重要的事情。获取会一直使用网站的用户，那是驱动收入的，也是驱动那个网站核心的。所以如果你必须优先什么，你优先参与度，那个目标在冲突中获胜。
第三个我要说的是，我叫它"像五岁小孩解释目标"，但一个星期一来的实习生应该能够看你的目标并理解它们。如果他们不能，那你就失败了，因为它们不是有效的沟通工具。你必须能够理解目标，你必须解释首字母缩写，你必须有用普通人能理解的数字，否则，再次，它作为沟通工具失败了。
第四个是……实际上，我从Claire Hughes Johnson那里偷了一个短语——你请她来过你的播客，但她写了一本叫《Scaling People》的书，她在书中说了一句我非常喜欢的话："战略应该痛苦。"我的角色过去是设定非目标——基本上，让你清楚你不做什么和你要做什么一样清楚——但"战略应该痛苦"是一个解释给人们的好得多的方式——如果你没有在做痛苦的权衡，你实际上没有帮助人们优先安排他们的时间。因为工作的本质是人们每天出现做某事——要么你非常清楚地告诉他们优先级是什么，要么他们会为你优先安排，因为他们每天选择他们要做什么。我们看到创始人们很多这样的情况——他们不能从清单上划掉东西，他们就是要有10个目标，我说，"酷。这10个目标中有6个不会完成，所以要么你选哪四个，要么别人会为你选。"所以战略应该痛苦。如果你的目标设定过程不痛苦，那你的优先排序不够重。
Molly Graham是的，它剥离了。它剥离了情绪。
Lenny Rachitsky另一件我想确保我们花了点时间的是——你有这个沿着这些路线的另一个小点——关于把大部分精力放在高绩效者身上，而不是把所有时间花在需要帮助的人身上——聊聊那个。
Molly Graham作为领导者，作为经理，你在运行这些团队，某人在挣扎，很容易被拖进去，然后最终在上面花费大量精力——但高绩效者实际上是你公司的未来。如果你思考一下，如果你花时间在上面——那些人——如果你投资你的时间和精力在他们身上，你会得到人们一直在硅谷谈论的10倍回报。但我所目睹的是大多数人会有一位高绩效者，他们只是让他们自己——他们说，"那个人做得很好，所以我就让他们做他们的事情。"而当我有我世界上最爱的高绩效者时——我做的事情是投资时间和精力在他们身上——基本上建立一个与他们一起工作的完整系统——设计来引出潜力的。而且我要说这里有两件事——认识到我们的倾向——
这里有两件事。一是，非常重要的是认识到我们的倾向实际上是花时间在低绩效者身上——那不是你时间的良好使用。见解雇人的那一点。但另一件事是积极投资和发展高绩效者——这是作为领导者擅长的事情——因为那是你创造这些小火箭船的方式——你会管理一个只是项目经理的人，突然之间他们在公司内部运营整个职能——但那是因为你花了时间和精力投资在他们身上。我的基本方式——我不会在这个上花很长时间——但我只是说我做实验。我基本上发展一个关于某人的理论——"我认为这个人有能力做这类事情。"然后一块一块地——它不必须是一个完整的工作或完整的项目。它可以只是一个渐进的实验——"我要看看他们是否能在更少的我的指导或支持下做这个。"
我要给他们一个更大的项目。我要给他们一些有更多曝光度的东西。我要更少地管理他们，更少地监督他们，等等。所有那些都是基本上测试你的理论并深化你关于这个人潜力和他们帮助公司能力的理论的实验。而对我来说——我正在做的是深入了解那个人，然后尝试将他们与公司需求配对。我们需要什么？这人在斑马养殖方面很出色。我们在哪里需要斑马养殖？所以我如何让他们做越来越大、越来越关键的事情？
说实话——这是人们为我做的事情。尤其是在Facebook——人们有益于我，"哦，来帮我做这个。"他们在我身上看到了潜力，他们让我帮忙做某事——它为我解锁了大量东西。所以，对于从可能有点被困住的人那里获取更多——如果你让他们待在这个盒子里——这是一个如此有力的工具。但如果你开始扩展那个盒子——你可以真正解锁人们。
Lenny Rachitsky说到高绩效者——你和很多非常高绩效的创始人CEO合作过。他与Zuck、Cheryl Sandberg、Google的Larry和Sergei，以及Brett Taylor非常密切地合作过。我只是想起他试图读他的简历——需要三行字来写他职业生涯中做过的事情。所以我想花点时间在——你从他们那里学到的一些事情上——那群人——你发现自己最常与别人分享的。
Molly Graham那个清单很长——但我给你几个。第一个我认为有点反直觉的——我说过我曾在Facebook工作。我做文化——文化是那些实际上不代表任何东西的词之一。所以我定义它为"我们这里做事情的方式"。而且我以为我的工作是塑造文化。我以为它是推动文化的。我学到的最令人谦卑的教训是——公司文化的80%实际上是由创始人的个性定义的。Facebook是Mark。Google是Larry和Sergei。Google在我在那里的时候，感觉就像一个大学。想法在很多方面比发布的东西更重要。有一个校园，他们基本上希望人们住在那里，在我那个时候。它基本上被设计成两个博士生的天堂。
Facebook在我在那里的时候感觉像一个19岁黑客的宿舍。而且它以发布为最重要——一切都是。而且它渗透着Mark的DNA。我花了很长时间试图在公司内部创造各种改变或推动一个观点。而Mark会在全员会议上 literally 说一件事，然后就像有人把一块巨石扔进池塘。所以我们作为创始人周围的运营者或领导者的工作是帮助阐明他们正在创造的文化——并帮助延伸它。
那主要是由顶部那个人 literal 的个性优缺点定义的。那对Mark是真的——对Brett也是真的。我去的每个地方都是这样。你不需要咨询公司告诉你——只是去对你的创始人做个性诊断。而且那个弱点的事情是真的。我见过和看着朋友们试图在公司建立一套价值观，但它与创始人是谁不匹配。你说，"快速行动，打破事物，"或者你的什么版本。而你的创始人喜欢模糊，对不做决定完全满意。所有那只会导致文化失调。所以对你说的话真的要非常小心，因为当涉及文化时，人们实际感受到的是你做什么和你每天如何行动。
你永远不能写任何东西——而且你仍然会有文化。它会通过你的行动和你做出的决定以及你的创始人做出的决定来创造。所以那是一个巨大的。
Lenny Rachitsky让我多花点时间在这个上面因为这太好了。所以所有这些关于文化的建议——基于我见过的所有事情——感觉如此真实。第一个提示是你真的不能改变文化。也许在边缘你可以调整一点。它会从创始人、CEO那里向下渗透——可能主要是。
Molly Graham创始人-CEO可能是单一最大的。
Lenny Rachitsky创始人-CEO。
Molly Graham联合创始人——取决于公司很多。
Lenny Rachitsky太棒了。
Molly Graham我认为Stripe可能非常像Patrick和John——但不是每个联合创始人都有那种水平的力量。
Lenny Rachitsky太棒了。然后你描述文化的方式——我认为这也是Seth Godin谈论它的方式——他也来过播客。很酷，对吧？
Molly Graham太酷了。
Lenny Rachitsky他说——"文化是……"你说的——"文化是我们这里做事情的方式。"
Molly Graham我 run 文化——不管那他妈是什么意思——在Facebook就一小会儿。我从那以后 literally 没有做过价值观练习了。听起来疯狂，对吧？因为理论上我知道怎么做这些东西。但对我来说——要点是流程和系统以及我们如何做决定？那才是文化真正存在的地方。它是你做什么。它是你如何招聘。它是你如何解雇。它是谁你不招聘。这是所有那些决定。那是文化。所以每当我与一家公司合作或建立一家公司——那是我的焦点——不是那个我们放在墙上的闪亮词语。你懂我意思吧？
Lenny Rachitsky是的。所以你描述的方式是——就像你说的——它是你做什么。不是你说什么？
Molly Graham是的。
Lenny Rachitsky太棒了。继续。
Molly Graham我再给你两个有用的。这一个是Mark Zuckerberg的经典——但他有这个非常强烈的感受——人们升级不够。而且他在Facebook非常坚持。他说，"升级是一种工具。"他说，"人们被困住了。他们被卡住——两个有同等权力的人试图解决一个问题。你可以花这么多时间碰头，往返。但实际上你需要做的就是上去。你需要去。"
一旦你卡住了，升级。去一起去，向无论是谁提出你们的情况，一起上去。那是解锁。它为你节省了一大堆时间。而且我发现随着我与公司和Glue Club的领导合作——这不是人们非常舒服的肌肉——但它如此聪明。Mark有很多这些——但那个我真正记住了——因为再次，我认为这么多人认为升级是坏的，是失败——"我失败了，所以我必须升级。"不，它是一种工具。那是管理是做什么的。他们在那里是为了解锁你。让他们解锁你。停止为你们无法决定的事情争吵。
Lenny Rachitsky而且他们会很高兴知道你没有浪费一周争论这个然后只是争吵和看数据。就是这样，"好吧，我可以准确地告诉你我们应该做什么。让我们去做那个。"
Molly Graham正是。你缺乏背景或你缺乏权力。最后一个实际上来自Cheryl Sandberg，我从她那里学到了大量东西——巨大的——和她一起工作就像不上商学院但上了商学院。但我现在经常说它，所以我要在你的播客上说这个。
但我仍然看到公司——我仍然与创始人交谈——他们说，"是的，我们50人，明年我们要到150人。"我说，"你能用100人做到吗？"但这里基本上会发生什么——如果你每年增长超过100%——你在增长太快以至于无法去重复所有问题。所以有人发布这个角色，结果发现那个角色在另一个团队也在招聘。所以你雇用两个人，他们或多或少有相同的工作描述，被分配给相同的数字或相同的问题，但没人互相交谈。那两个人都出现了，然后……
如果你放慢——如果你为质量和真实需求而不是恐慌招聘而招聘——你会实际找到杠杆。你发现——"哦，我不需要那个人，"或者，"我不需要整个团队，"或者，"我不需要整个职能，"或者，"我可以等那个。"所以放慢。而且再次——这些都是指导方针——关于50%是快乐的，100%是可控的。但看过足够多的——我可以告诉你这些是好的规则，你应该注意它们。
有时候你会说，"我必须翻倍，或者我必须超过翻倍，或者我必须三倍。"或什么的。我说，"好吧，只要在你开放角色时问很多问题。当你招聘时问很多问题——因为你会发现重复——你会在前门发现混乱。"
Lenny Rachitsky这是一个很好的结束方式。而且只是关于放慢速度——这是违反直觉的但有道理。
Molly Graham是的。而且有时你需要通过。但这是——我认为这是正确的框架。
Lenny Rachitsky好的。这真的很有见地。我很想继续聊但我们已经接近尾声了。在我们结束之前还有什么你想分享的吗？
Molly Graham只是谢谢你，Lenny。和你聊天真的很有趣。
作为领导者，作为经理，你在运行这些团队，某人在挣扎，很容易被拖进去，然后最终在上面花费大量精力——但高绩效者实际上是你公司的未来。如果你思考一下，如果你花时间在上面——那些人——如果你投资你的时间和精力在他们身上，你会得到人们一直在硅谷谈论的10倍回报。但我所目睹的是大多数人会有一位高绩效者，他们只是让他们自己——他们说，"那个人做得很好，所以我就让他们做他们的事情。"而当我有我世界上最爱的高绩效者时——我做的事情是投资时间和精力在他们身上——基本上建立一个与他们一起工作的完整系统——设计来引出潜力。而且我要说这里有两件事——认识到我们的倾向非常重要——
我要给他们一个更大的项目。我要给他们一些有更多曝光度的东西。我要更少地管理他们，更少地监督他们，等等。所有那些都是基本上测试你的理论并深化你关于这个人潜力和他们帮助公司能力的理论的实验。而且对我来说——我正在做的是深入了解那个人，然后尝试将他们与公司需求配对。我们需要什么？这人在斑马养殖方面很出色。我们在哪里需要斑马养殖？所以我如何让他们做越来越大、越来越关键的事情？
Lenny Rachitsky说到高绩效者——你和很多非常高绩效的创始人CEO合作过。他与Zuck、Cheryl Sandberg、Google的Larry和Sergei，以及Brett Taylor非常密切地合作过——我刚刚……就像你试图读他的简历——需要三行字来写他职业生涯中做过的事情。所以我想花点时间在——你从他们那里学到的一些事情上——那群人——你发现自己最常与别人分享的。
Facebook在我在那里的时候感觉像一个19岁黑客的宿舍。而且它以发布为最重要——一切都是。而且它渗透着Mark的DNA。我花了很长时间试图在公司内部创造各种改变或推动一个观点。而Mark会在全员会议上 literally 说一件事，然后就像有人把一块巨石扔进池塘。所以我们作为创始人周围的运营者或领导者的工作是帮助阐明他们正在创造的文化——并帮助延伸它。我的创始人模式版本——我知道你在这个播客上花了一些时间——你的工作是建立一家公司——当他们不在房间时——它会以创始人会做的方式做决定。这是围绕创始人建立公司的工作——但你的工作不是塑造文化。
那主要是由顶部那个人 literal 的个性优缺点定义的。那对Mark是真的——对Brett也是真的。我去的每个地方都是这样。你不需要咨询公司告诉你——只是去对你的创始人做个性诊断。而且那个弱点的事情是真的。我见过和看着朋友们试图在公司建立一套价值观，但它与创始人是谁不匹配。你说，"快速行动，打破事物，"或者你的什么版本。而你的创始人喜欢模糊，对不做决定完全满意。所有那只会导致文化失调。它让人们说，"等等，什么？我以为我们说我们关心快速行动和积极决策——结果发现……"所以对你说的话真的要非常小心，因为当涉及文化时，人们实际感受到的是你做什么和你每天如何行动。
Lenny Rachitsky让我多花点时间在这个上面因为这太好了。所以所有这些关于文化的建议——基于我见过的所有事情——感觉如此真实。第一个提示是你真的不能改变文化。也许在边缘你可以调整一点。它会从创始人、CEO那里向下渗透——可能主要是——但就创始人总的来说。
他说——"文化是……"你说的——"文化是我们这里做事情的方式。那是文化是什么——我们……"那是人们描述你文化的方式——"我们这里做事情的方式。"
Molly Graham我在Facebook跑文化——不管那他妈是什么意思——就一小会儿。我从那以后 literally 没有做过价值观练习了。听起来疯狂，对吧？因为理论上我知道怎么做这些东西。我真的不知道怎么做这些东西。但对我来说——要点是流程和系统以及我们如何做决定？那才是文化真正存在的地方。它是你做什么。它是你如何招聘。它是你如何解雇。它是谁你不招聘。这是所有那些决定。那是文化。所以每当我与一家公司合作或建立一家公司——那是我的焦点——不是那个我们放在墙上的闪亮词语。你懂我意思吧？
我再给你两个有用的。这一个是Mark Zuckerberg的经典——但他有这个非常强烈的感受——人们升级不够。而且他在Facebook非常坚持。他也把它带到了CZI——他说，"升级是一种工具。"他说，"人们被困住了。他们被卡住——两个有同等权力的人试图解决一个问题。你可以花这么多时间碰头，往返。但实际上你需要做的就是上去。你需要去。"问题是——我们把升级想成是——"我和B不同意。所以我要去找C，告B的状。我要去向老师打小报告。"那不是升级。升级是——"我们不同意。我们两个都没有足够的权力做这个决定。让我们去找一个有这种权力的人。"我的老板，我老板的老板，无论是谁。
正是。你缺乏背景或你缺乏权力。最后一个实际上来自Cheryl Sandberg，我从她那里学到了大量东西——巨大的——和她一起工作就像不上商学院但上了商学院。但我现在经常说它，所以我要在你的播客上说这个所以也许有些人会听到我。每年增长超过100%是个坏主意。最快乐的增长率是50%，100%是可控的。任何超过翻倍的事情——你是在为痛苦签合同。我一遍又一遍又一遍地看到这个。五年前我不得不比现在大声疾呼更多——因为我们共同经历了很多痛苦和很多裁员。而且显然2021年和AI的组合使我们谈论单位经济学和用工具而不是人扩张。
但我仍然看到公司——我仍然与创始人交谈——他们说，"是的，我们50人，明年我们要到150人。"我说，"你能用100人做到吗？"但这里基本上会发生什么——如果你每年增长超过100%——你在增长太快以至于无法去重复所有问题。所以有人发布这个角色——结果发现那个角色在另一个团队也在招聘。所以你雇用两个人——他们或多或少有相同的工作描述——被分配给相同的数字或相同的问题——但没人互相交谈。那两个人都出现了——他们说，"我正在做这个。"那个人说，"等等，我以为我在做那个。"总之——然后你有了所有那个……想想所有的时间和精力以及金钱进入去重复那个。
如果你放慢——如果你为质量和真实需求而不是恐慌招聘而招聘——无论你的销售模型输出什么或什么——你会实际找到杠杆。你发现——"哦，我不需要那个人，"或者，"我不需要整个团队，"或者，"我不需要整个职能，"或者，"我可以等那个。"所以放慢。而且再次——这些都只是指导方针——关于50%是快乐的，100%是可控的。但看过足够多的这个——我可以告诉你这些是好的规则，你应该注意它们。有时候你会说，"我必须翻倍，或者我必须超过翻倍，或者我必须三倍"——或什么的。我说，"好吧，只要在你开放角色时问很多问题。当你招聘时问很多问题——因为你会发现重复——你会在前门发现混乱。"
更多的人实际上不会让你更快。你懂我意思吧？我们以为会。不是的。它让事情更难。让完成工作更难。它让事情更慢。所以你应该害怕增加人——不是，"哦，这是解决我所有问题的方法。"
Lenny Rachitsky令人惊叹。而且只是澄清——你说的是公司的增长。所以一年内翻倍——坏主意。可能，但你说会很困难和痛苦，可能真的是个坏主意。
Molly Graham是的。超过翻倍的人员增长。
Lenny Rachitsky超过翻倍。
Molly Graham说得对。
Lenny Rachitsky人员？
Molly Graham是的，正是。
Lenny Rachitsky太棒了。这是——
Molly Graham请对你的业务做任何你想做的事。
Lenny Rachitsky只是建议。这是首要的因为我刚和Matt McGinnis做了访谈，但他谈的很多和你们谈的很共鸣。他谈了很多关于让你的团队资源不足——
Molly Graham完全。
Lenny Rachitsky导致更好的结果——因为人们不做低优先级的事情。他们只专注高优先级的事情。另一个是这个升级的想法。他谈了很多关于那个。就像——"升级是好的。告诉我什么时候有我能帮助的。我在不断等待——
Molly Graham你说得对。
Lenny Rachitsky"帮忙。"
Molly Graham是的，100%。
Lenny Rachitsky令人惊叹。所以也许最后一个问题——你的一个前同事Eric Antonow——他是这个几乎没人知道的传奇人物——
Molly Graham完全。
Lenny Rachitsky在过去几个月我和他聊过——因为他认识很多来这个播客的人。他是前Facebook人，现在在OpenAI。我问他我应该问你什么——他告诉了我关于你的一些非常有洞察力的事情。他说你曾在Facebook有巨大的增长爆发——你分享和聊过了。然后你离开后——你有这个巨大的野心成为COO、CEO——成为这个巨大的大人物——接管世界。然后他注意到你的野心显著转向了社区建设和帮助人们的职业发展。你拒绝了真正大的C级别角色机会。他描述的方式是——你曾经是一只以为自己是一只猫的狗。另一个他用的比喻是——你从交流电变成了直流电——我不知道那是什么意思。所以这有共鸣吗？如果是，发生了什么？
Molly GrahamEric实际上比我更擅长比喻——我经常引用他的比喻。但是的——Eric Antonow——我生命中最不知名但最聪明的人。所以我在最近一家公司做了演讲——有人问了问题——"你有什么改变了想法的事情？"我说，"呃。"但我实际上聊了这个因为……所以我的大脑正在发展这个模型——还没完成——但它基本上是这个想法——每个人职业生涯都有一个证明阶段——你在向自己和可能向你的父母以及其他一些人证明你擅长这些东西。你说，"我要证明。"这是一个重要的阶段因为你需要学习。我们聊的所有东西。你需要学习你擅长什么。你需要学习你擅长这些事情，人们应该因为这些事情雇用你——那些是什么？
但那个阶段的一部分也是做你认为重要的事情——你认为你应该做的事情。家庭规划或职业书籍告诉你这是你应该做的——头衔和所有东西。然后，我想每个人都的时刻——我觉得这个时刻因人而异非常不同——当你遇到某种墙或我不知道是什么——减速带、什么东西——世界迫使你说——"好吧，我已经向自己证明了我擅长这个。我想用它做什么？"对我来说，我花了10年或15年向自己和他人证明我非常擅长这个——基本上与聪明的创始人合作帮助他们实现愿景——"那是你应该雇用我做的事情。"那是我出名的事。
Molly Graham原来那不再是我喜欢做的事情了。真的真的很难放手——因为有很多"应该"。就像是——"你应该接受这个有华丽头衔的工作。人们会觉得你很酷。"然后你可以……我叫它LinkedIn crush——你在LinkedIn上po这个工作真的很兴奋——但你做那个工作却一点都不兴奋。所以你有所有这些LinkedIn crushes——然后你……我清晰记得我拒绝的一个工作——我不得不出去散步好几次。我一遍又一遍对自己重复的是——"这会给你什么你还没有的？这会给你什么你还没有的？"我认为——对我来说——这是一个认识——这些在我职业生涯早期喂养我的东西不再喂养我了——我不再从做这些工作中获得快乐和兴奋——而且我不害怕。
所以它真的带我走上了一个非常漫长的曲折旅程——一个创始人旅程——虽然我对那个头衔有困难——就像 influencer 头衔——去弄清楚我想构建什么。三年前我会告诉你我想构建的实际上不是我现在在做的——但通过很多真正有趣的实验和一个永不结束的旅程——我发现的是——我喜欢的是为领导者构建安全空间让他们学习和成长——但也在一个有点疯狂的世界找到理智和联系——无论是在创业公司工作还是某种其他疯狂——但那喂养我——没有什么比那更让我热爱——我三年前不能告诉你那个——但是——对Eric的观点——真的花了很多工作来切换电流或从一只狗切换到一只猫——或者不管他的比喻是什么。我认为这是 ongoing 的工作——但那是关于我想什么 vs 我认为人们对我期望什么的那个东西。
Lenny Rachitsky那里有这么多深度。这可以是另一期完整的播客对话——聊这个旅程——但我要用你伙伴Sarah的一张纸条结束。她告诉我——她的笔记本上有一个贴纸——上面写着你刚开始在OpenAI时给她的三条建议。了解你的客户，他们有答案；要有耐心，因为一切都会改变；继续尝试。所以作为最后一个问题——有没有类似的东西你觉得可能对人们有帮助听到？有没有其他你想分享或留给听众的？
Molly Graham我认为在扩张和变化的公司和世界中非常重要的要认识到的是——有些事情永远会是真实的。她写下的三件事中"了解客户，客户有答案"——我要说的部分——不管你周围有什么废话——不管这周墙壁和天花板被重新排列——客户永远不会变。那是一件永远不会改变的事情。我认为找到那些不可动摇的东西——那些在风暴中的指南针——在一家扩张得如此快的公司内部就像龙卷风。我认为OpenAI在那方面格外特殊。你得找到这些引导灯帮助你度过风暴。我认为这和"服务业务，不是人"是同样的事情。什么是永远会是真实的？我们在这里做这个。我们在这里服务客户。
然后她写下的三件事中的另一件——我认为我们作为人类——我们寻求稳定性。我们的大脑希望事情停止变化。我们希望事情保持不变。但这在增长和变化如此快的公司里不是现实——比如OpenAI或今天正在构建的很多公司。所以实际上——你需要开始期待不稳定。你需要开始假设事情会改变。假设你六个月后会有一个新老板。我和OpenAI的人聊这个很多——"你需要停止期待六个月或一年后任何事情会是一样的。你会有不同的工作。你会有不同的老板。"
你如何为此做准备？你懂我意思吗？你如何几乎把不稳定视为稳定——因为那是唯一肯定会是真的。部分是继续前进。你懂我意思吧？找到这些灯和这些指南针——或者任何你记住的比喻——专注于那些——因为无论你周围发生什么——你只需要继续前进——继续尽可能多地学习——因为那是真正的机会。无论公司发生什么——无论它多成功——你从中带走的所有……我总说你带走的所有是——喜欢和你一起工作的人——想再次和你一起工作的人——以及你学到的东西。就这样。你可能希望拿一堆钱——但你可能不会。所以人和你学到的东西——就这样。专注于那个。
Lenny Rachitsky这一切都是关于你一路走来交的朋友。那句老话是真的。天哪，Molly——我觉得我们聊了这么久——我们只是触及了表面。我很想让你再来——深入很多这些东西。我要跳过闪电轮——因为我们已经很长了——我不想让人们听更多。所以我要以——人们应该知道你正在做什么？人们在哪里可以在线找到你？听众如何能对你有用？
Molly Graham你可以在LinkedIn上找到我——你也可以在Substack上找到我。我有一个叫Lessons的Substack——我慢慢在把它变成一个社区——我们可以聊东西——真实的东西。你可以在Glue Club找到我——如果你是一个在这些疯狂公司内部的领导者——一切都在变化——我们可以成为你的好去处。
Lenny Rachitsky那边的网址是什么——给大家看看？
Molly Graham是glueclub.com。
Lenny RachitskyGlue——G-L-U-E？
Molly GrahamG-L-U-E。
Lenny RachitskyC-L-U-B.com。很棒。
Molly Graham是的，正是。在人们能为你做什么方面——我喜欢帮助领导者解决问题。我真的从帮人解脱和帮助人们感到被支持和被看到以及帮助他们成长中获得很多能量。我通过Glue Club做这个。所以如果你是一个领导者——你觉得在面对任何龙卷风时你要一些理智和一些支持——那是一个很棒的来的地方。但同样的适用于Substack。所以如果Glue Club不适合你——来Substack。我开放了很多频道聊东西——听人们的问题——回答问题——因为我喜欢帮助人们。我认为现在作为领导者弄清楚哪个方向是上是复杂的时刻。所以过来吧。
Lenny Rachitsky令人惊叹。Molly——非常感谢你来这里。
Molly Graham谢谢你——Lenny。这真的很有趣。
Lenny RachitskyYou've worked with many very high performing founder CEOs. Zuck, Cheryl Sandberg. Larry and Sergei at Google. Brett Taylor.
Molly GrahamGoogle, when I was there, felt like two PhD students paradise. Facebook felt like 19-year-old hacker's dorm room. 80% of the culture of a company is literally defined by the personality of the founder. Our job as operators or as leaders is to help articulate the culture that they're creating.
Lenny RachitskyWhen a lot of people think Molly Graham, a lot of people think of giving away your Legos.
Molly GrahamYou have to grow as fast as your company is growing if you really want to take advantage, both learning to give away what you've gotten good at and move on to the next shiny pile of Legos.
Lenny RachitskySarah Caldwell. She told me that the framework that helped her most in her career is something that you call the J-curve versus stairs.
Molly GrahamSo Chamath, when he pitched me on this job, actually drew me a picture on a whiteboard. He said, the way a lot of people do careers is a set of stairs. Just walk up the stairs and you'll get promoted every two years. But that is boring. The much more fun careers are like jumping off cliffs and you do fall, but then you climb out way beyond where the stairs could ever get you.
Lenny RachitskyToday, my guest is Molly Graham. Molly was an early employee at Google, also at Facebook, where she worked closely with Zuck on building the Chan Zuckerberg initiative. She also worked with Brett Taylor on scaling Quip, which he sold to Salesforce. She's also worked with hundreds of companies and founders helping them grow into the leaders that they want to become. Today, she leads Glue Club, which is a community for leaders operating in changing, growing environments who want to develop themselves as quickly as their companies. Molly is maybe most known for her advice to give away your Legos, which we chat about. Along with basically all of her favorite frameworks and mindsets and pieces of advice that she's developed and collected over time. For leaders who are going through rapid scale and growth and are just struggling to keep up. I think of this episode as a high growth handbook for leaders who are experiencing rapid scale.
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Molly GrahamThanks, Lenny. I'm excited to be here.
Lenny RachitskyI feel like this conversation was in an inevitability. I feel like you're the kind of guest where it's like, we will do this someday. I'm such a fan of your stuff. I've read all the stuff you've put out there over the years. We're going to be talking about the best frameworks and mindsets that you've developed over the years that have been really helpful to you, to founders, to companies that you've worked with to help them with growth and scale and change and all the stuff that comes with success. The way I think about this, I want to make this the greatest hits of Molly Graham.
Molly GrahamLove it.
Lenny RachitskyAnd so I sourced what I think are the greatest hits from a lot of colleagues that you've worked with, a lot of people you've worked with. We've chatted about the stuff that you find other people find most helpful. So we're going to be going through all that stuff. But let's help people understand why they should listen to this advice. What's kind of the backstory on these frameworks? Where did they come from? Where did you develop them? Tell us that story.
Molly GrahamSo first of all, Ami Vora, who you have had on your podcast, once said to me that all advice is just someone telling you what they did. And I always think about that. Because I really think that basically what I tell people is I've made every single mistake in the book. And then I got to the end of the book and I started inventing new mistakes. So mostly what I feel is that I like sharing my stories because I want to help people. I want to help people not make the same mistakes I did. And I also want to help people make sense of what they're experiencing. But I started in tech in 2007. I actually started at Google the week the iPhone launched and a lot of my scaling battle scars come from a couple of experiences. They come from a year and a half at Google, which is not very long.
And Google was pretty big when I was there. It has thousands of employees. But my department, which was the communications department, was 25 people when I joined and it grew in nine months to 125 people. And that was really my first experience with just all the sort of things that I still talk about today. In terms of what it feels like to grow really, really fast and sort of all the tools that I started developing from there. After Google, I left and followed Cheryl Sandberg and Elliot Schrage to Facebook. And I spent five years at Facebook. And I joined Facebook in 2008, and it's important context because it was 80 million users at the time. We were smaller than MySpace. It was 270 million in revenue, 500 employees. It did not feel inevitable. Most people thought we were going to sell it to Microsoft. When I told people I was going there, they were like, isn't that place just like a site for college kids? And so I was there for five years and it was a crazy five years.
When I left, it was 5,500 employees, five billion in revenue, over a billion users. So a huge amount of what I experienced, what I write about, what I talk about in Glue Club, which is the community that I run, comes from that rapid scale at Google and Facebook. But I also, I left Facebook right after we went public, about six months after we went public. And I only like doing jobs that I'm highly unqualified for. I like being on learning curves so steep that I'm scared I'm going to fall off. And so I left and I wanted to learn what it took to build something from nothing. And so I joined this little startup founded by Brett Taylor, a startup called Quip. I joined a couple of months before we launched and ran everything that wasn't product and engineering there for him. And that was such a valuable experience to me because the experience of building something from nothing is actually quite different than the experience of holding on for dear life while things are scaling so fast around you.
And it really taught me about all the tools and skills you need to go from zero to one and then from one to two and how lonely it can be to build something. And we eventually sold that company to Salesforce. And then again, only take jobs I'm highly unqualified for. But the last really chaotic scaling experience I had was actually helping Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan start their philanthropy, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. And I basically helped them for the first two years of its existence or its sort of like first full existence. And philanthropy sounds calm. You know what I mean? We're like, oh, giving money away. Must be so peaceful over there. And CZI grew from, I think the week I joined, it was 30 people and we bought two companies that week and it grew to 250 people that year. And it was like using every single tool in my toolkit that I had taken from every other job that I'd had.
So my advice and frameworks, like I said, come from having made a lot of mistakes. But I've also sort of made a personal study over the last 18 years, believe it or not. Essentially what does it take to thrive inside growing and changing companies, not just to hang on for dear life. What does it take to lead in the face of constant change? And really the other piece that I find truly fascinating is what genuinely makes the difference between a business that grows but then plateaus versus these generational businesses. The ones that go on forever. Sort of the difference between a Twitter or MySpace and a Facebook. Billions in revenue versus hundreds of billions in revenue. So what I like to do is take my experience and use it to help other leaders. I want to give people tools that work. And I also want to be honest about how hard all of this stuff really is.
Lenny RachitskyAmazing. I say this a lot in this podcast. I just love the ROI that listeners of the podcast get. You spent 20 years toiling, struggling, working so hard, learning so much. And you're just here, here's all the answers that I've learned. And obviously not all the answers, but so many things that will help people avoid the pain and suffering that you've gone through.
Molly GrahamThat's the goal.
Lenny RachitskyAlso, a couple quick threads I want to follow here. One is Ami Vora, who you mentioned. She's now, I think, head of product at Anthropic.
Molly GrahamYes.
Lenny RachitskyAmazing. Former podcast guest, also speaker at Lenny and Friends Summit two years ago. This other point you just made about how you've always gone to places that have been way beyond your... I forget how you phrased it, but just beyond your current capabilities almost. And were very difficult. I just had Matt McGinnis on the podcast. He's CEO at Rippling, now CPO at Rippling, and just recorded an episode with him. And he had this really powerful quote that if you're ever comfortable at work and feel like, oh, I got this, you're making a huge mistake. Something's going terribly wrong. That's not where you want to be.
Molly GrahamYeah. I always say I get bored really easily, which is both a strength and probably my greatest weakness. So I like being scared.
Lenny RachitskyOkay. So let's actually dive into some of your greatest hits of frameworks. And the greatest of all greats, when a lot of people think Molly Graham, a lot of people think of giving away your Legos. Some people haven't heard of this, many people have, so let's cover this. What is this advice of giving away your Legos?
Molly GrahamSo this definitely started in my experience at Google. And then Facebook was a masterclass in giving away the Legos. But the way I like to talk about it is basically when I watch leaders and employees go through rapid scale, I like to think of somebody putting down a giant pile of Legos in front of a bunch of kindergartners and then just being like, build something. And that's sort of what it feels like when you start. It's like, well, there's so many Legos and it's so fun. There's a lot of opportunity, but it's also kind of scary and overwhelming. And you're like, there's so many Legos. What do I do? Isn't there an instruction manual hidden under this pile somewhere? But then you start building and you're like, oh, okay. You build something and then you take it apart and then you put it back together.
And then eventually you start to get momentum and you're like, okay, it's like I'm building a house. I got this. It's a house. All right, great. And then you're like, I'm good at building houses. I was put on earth to build houses. And almost assuredly inside of scaling companies, as soon as you're like, I feel good at this and I should do this forever. Somebody's going to show up and be like, okay, it's not a house. It's a neighborhood. And you need to take this house that's kind of half built and you're going to pass it off to this other person that we just hired. And you are going to go build dog parks and streets and other things that are entirely unhouse-like. And what happens when someone does that to you is you're like, wait a minute. First of all, I'm not done with this house. And I'm worried that this person's going to screw it up.
I'm also worried that building houses is actually the most fun thing and that I'm going to give the Legos to that person and they're going to have all the fun work and I'm going to hate building dog parks. Or that dog parks are irrelevant eventually and it's going to turn out we're in the house building business. So there's this incredible set of emotions that come territorialistic, paired with excitement. Fear paired with joy. But eventually you pass the house off and then you go work on neighborhoods and you're sort of like, okay, dog parks, I'm good at dog parks. I got this. And then again, you get to the like, I'm great. I was put on earth to build neighborhoods. And immediately someone shows up and says, it's not a neighborhood. It's a country or a city or a world. And it just goes on and on and on.
And for me, learning this muscle of both learning to give away what you've gotten good at and move on to the next shiny pile of Legos. And learning that the emotions associated with that are inevitable. I've been doing this for 18, 20 years, I still get attacked by these emotions all the time, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't give them away and move on to the next thing.
That is both the torment of scaling companies, which is that the ground is moving under your feet. And as soon as you're comfortable, someone will make sure that you are uncomfortable, but it's also the opportunity, which is that you can go from being someone that's good at building houses to someone that knows how to build entire worlds. And that is where the Legos metaphor came from.
Lenny RachitskyThat is such a good metaphor. And if you've gone through this, you so understand what this is like and what... And also just the Legos is metaphor is so good for the different things you build.
Molly GrahamI have a very weird brain that for some odd reason just always thinks in metaphors.
Lenny Rachitsky.
Molly GrahamSo it showed up when I was... At Facebook in particular, I would find that every so often I would have to have what I called a Legos talk with someone where I would just see them start to ask these questions like, why are we hiring that person? Or what's that team even do? And I was like, okay, we need to have the chat about the Legos. And then eventually it turned into an article and a whole thing.
Lenny RachitskyA whole thing. And just to be clear, the advice is give away your Legos, this is actually the path to a successful career.
Molly GrahamI have watched a lot of people over many years struggle with feeling like they should hang on to the thing that they've been good at. And it almost always... Because, you know, essentially the nature of a scaling company is that the Lego pile is just getting bigger and bigger and bigger however fast that graph is going up into the right. I always say that's the graph of how fast your business is growing. It's the graph of how fast your company is expanding. And it's the graph of how fast your job is getting bigger. That means that if you actually just stay and build houses, eventually you're literally buried under a pile of Legos. Do you know what I mean? You held onto something that's down here and the opportunity is actually to stay on top of that pile and to learn to just give away your job every so often.
At Facebook, I got to a place where I was literally giving away my job every three weeks. I was constantly rehiring myself essentially because you have to sort of grow as fast as your company is growing if you really want to take advantage of the opportunity that comes with companies that are growing and changing quickly.
Lenny RachitskySo people are hearing this, they're like, okay, my rational brain's like, I should give away my Legos. It'll help me. It'll be good for my career. In real life, it's very hard to actually do. To give away this empire that you've built, this team that you've built. This project that you're like, oh, this is going to be my thing. I know you have a really fun, useful tool to help people deal with that kind of irrational part of their brain. Talk about that.
Molly GrahamSo like I said, my brain works in weird metaphors. It's a weird brain. I was raised on The Muppets, and I like to think that this one came from, I guess, growing up watching weird animals. But basically, at some point I realized that this emotional rollercoaster that comes with scaling, with growing. With going through change, any kind of change. People feel that. Was never going to go away. And that no matter how good I got... Sometimes I think it gets worse the more senior you get, actually. Because you sort of feel like you're supposed to know what you're doing, and then you just get attacked by this monster that's like, who even gave you this job in the first place? So basically I externalized all these emotions that come with change into this little tiny monster. I named my monster, Bob. Your monster can be named whatever you want him to be named or her or them.
And Bob's job... I like to think his job is basically to make me the worst version of myself. He's the one that's like, oh, that person took all the fun Legos and you should go push them over and grab them back. Bob's job is... Bob's the one that wants to send the rage emails at 9:00PM and burn the house down. And the thing to learn about Bob is that, like I said, Bob never goes away. Bob is someone that you have to learn to deal with. But Bob's job is to make you the worst version of yourself. So your job is to let Bob do his thing, but not act on the emotions. Basically, all these emotions are normal and they are not useful. They are not the compass that should be telling you what to do.
But the other rule I have for managing Bob is a lot of people are like, oh, you're feeling off or tired or whatever. Go to bed and wake up tomorrow morning and you'll feel better. And the truth is that you're like, I want to send the rage email at 9:00PM. You still want to send it at 8:00AM. And a lot of these emotions just do not go away in 24 hours. So my rule of thumb from Facebook was give it two weeks. And the emotional, the sort of Bob... Bob is like these waves and they just roll through. So you made a new hire or somebody came in or you got layered or whatever. You'll have a set of reactions. And those reactions, again, they're normal, but they're not useful. They're not the ones that you should listen to. They are Bob.
And typically they go away in a couple of days, you get something new. Some new wave. But anything that lasts longer than two weeks is actually something you should pay attention to. It's something that if it's been around for two weeks, it's something you should go talk to someone about. Whether it's a manager or a friend or a coach or someone like that. That's the real stuff. Everything else is just Bob.
Lenny RachitskyIs there a rule of thumb for when it actually, when you shouldn't give away your Legos? When it's like, okay, maybe you should fight back on this layering or whatever.
Molly GrahamNo rule of thumb. In general, I would actually say embracing change is far better than fighting it. And almost invariably, you cannot see what is around the corner, but it is almost always the thing to focus on. A lot of times I think inside of change, we get focused on the past, and one of the most valuable things you can do as a manager and a leader is help people focus on the future. I think... I'm sure there are times when people have done it and regretted it and it has led them somewhere.
I think being layered, for example, is one of the hardest things for people inside these experiences where someone brings in a manager above you. And I've also seen so many stories of that ending up being a great thing for someone. Even though they couldn't see it at the time. So in general, I would just say, step into the future and let the past go and see what you're going to learn. And sometimes you'll learn that it's time to leave or that this isn't the right pile of Legos for you. But it'll end up taking you somewhere that's worth exploring. Holding onto things almost always leads us to the worst version of ourselves.
Lenny RachitskyIt's a very Buddhist way of thinking too. Just don't cling.
Molly GrahamThere you go.
Lenny RachitskyYeah. And I think another part of this metaphor, I don't know if you think of it this way. Is the Legos aren't even your Legos, right? They're like the CEO's Legos, the shareholders' Legos. So you think they're your Legos, but no, you're not in charge.
Molly GrahamWell, it is... I will say one of the hard-earned things is it can feel very emotional and it can feel very personal. It can feel like your work... I don't know, it can feel like your life is on the line sometimes. Just your work life. Oh, gosh, this matters so much. And one of the things that you learn as you get more senior and just have seen stuff is it's going to be okay. A friend of mine says, careers are long and nobody tells you that. But they're long. And this moment feels so dire and it feels so hard and it feels scary and it's going to be okay. So yeah, it is hard to know in the moment. And I think the story is going to be long and this is going to be one chapter or maybe even a part of a chapter, not a whole chapter. So embrace the length.
Lenny RachitskyTo build on that point, I've realized this is my fourth career doing what I do now. Whatever the hell this is. I was a engineer and then I was a founder. Then I was a product manager, and then what the hell I do now. Whatever this is, that's a whole different path.
Molly GrahamYou don't have a name for it yet, Lenny?
Lenny RachitskyI don't. I hate all the terms people use for this world.
Molly GrahamSomebody called me an influencer and I almost ripped their face off.
Lenny RachitskyYeah. .
Molly Graham.
Lenny RachitskyYeah.
Molly GrahamYeah, man. The most interesting careers are winding and they have starts and stops and failures and successes and control. Anybody that's been through a lot of this stuff, control is usually not the name of the game. It's usually just like, "Let's see what happens. We're going to try this and we're going to see what happens next."
Lenny RachitskyThis is a great segue to another framework that I've heard from folks you've worked with that have been really impactful on them. So, Sarah Caldwell, who's a big deal at OpenAI, she told me that the framework that helped her most in her career is something that you call the J-Curve versus Stairs career growth framework. Talk about what that's about.
Molly GrahamI actually gave a TED Talk about this one a couple of years ago because I am so passionate about it, but you can listen to the very packaged eight-minute version of this, but I will tell you the real story because it's very relevant to a lot of folks that listen to your podcast. I was at Facebook for five years. Like I said, the first two years I was in HR and I was doing employment branding and culture work and I was ready to stay there. I think I had in my head I was going to stay there until we went public, that was my plan just because I wanted to help the company through that moment, again, in my head.
This guy that many people know, Chamath Palihapitiya, came to me and Chamath ran growth and mobile at the time. And he came to me and we had lunch and he said in his very Chamath way, "You're useless. What are you doing in HR? This is stupid. You should come work for me." And anybody that knows Chamath is like, "Yes, that is actually what he said." He managed to insult you and compliment you in one sentence.
He gave me all these options on his team. And then the last one he said to me was like, "I'm going to go build a mobile phone. Do you want to come do that with me?" And I had four simultaneous reactions. The first was like, " That is incredibly stupid. Why are we doing that?" And then it was like, "Is that actually a thing that we're doing?" And then it was like, "Whoa, I think that sounds kind of fun." And so I left the conversation at Chamath and I went and asked my boss, Lori Goler, who's the head of people at Facebook for a very long time, like, "Is this actually something we're doing?" And she was like, "I can't believe he offered you that, whatever."
And I basically just could not get it out of my head, but it didn't make any sense, A, that Chamath had asked me because I was in HR. Like, "What am I doing? I don't absolutely jack shit about mobile." But I had worked on a project with him and I guess he thought I was smart. And I talked to Cheryl and she was like, "Well, that project will be dead in two months, but you can do it because you'll still have a job here." My dad was like, "Well, don't do that. " And anyway, a lot of very wise people being like, "Don't do that."
But I kind of couldn't get out of my head. And my friend said to me, "You've proven you're really good at this sort of company-wide project management and HR. Why don't you go show yourself how actually good you are? Is this transferable?" So, I took the job and I spent the next six months feeling like an absolute idiot. I basically felt like a total jackass all the time. I was sitting in rooms with these brilliant people asking the dumbest questions of my life and at the end of the six months, Chamath, I think, took a lot of pride in giving me the lowest performance rating I've ever gotten in my life, and it just felt like falling off a cliff. Then, slowly, I remember I had been doing all these trips to Taiwan because we were actually working on hardware and I, at some point, came back from Taiwan and I drew on a whiteboard for him the layout of a mobile phone and trying to explain to him why something he wanted to do was not possible. I so vividly remember walking out of that meeting being like, "Oh, I actually know things." And slowly then, over the following three years, I became an expert in mobile. And I basically... The phone itself was a giant failure, massive, costly failure for Facebook, but it was not a failure for me. It was a huge job that taught me that I was capable of things that I never could have dreamed of if I had stayed in HR. It set me up to be capable of taking on things that I didn't know about.
Chamath, when he pitched me on this job, actually drew me a picture on a whiteboard. He said, "Look, you can stay..." The way a lot of people do careers is a set of stairs. "You can be boring." To use Chamath, "And stay on these stairs. Just walk up the stairs and you'll get promoted every two years and your title will change from manager to senior manager to director to senior director, whatever." And he was like, "But that is boring." And he's like, "The much more fun careers are like jumping off cliffs." Basically, that you jump off this thing and you do fall for a period of time. I always like to say it's about six to nine months, but then this thing happens where you climb out.
And the picture he drew had this J-curve sort of basically leading you to places that are way beyond where the stairs could ever get you. And to be totally honest, that has been my experience. That taking risks, accepting the sort of terrible fall and that experience of falling has been more than worth it. Part of the reason why Sarah mentions it is that I do give this sort of talk to people that are inside of really fast-growing companies, because it's such an important place to let go of Legos and jump off cliffs because there's so much opportunity. And it is a place where if you prove to people that you're actually good, if they believe that you are the kind of person that they can use to do lots of things, you can get these opportunities that you are just so deeply unqualified for, but they can take you to places that you could never have imagined.
You can come out of those companies with skills that no one would ever have reasonably hired you to do. But I ended my time at Facebook in product and did business development and hardware and a whole bunch of the stuff along the way. And again, nobody would've hired me to do that at the beginning, but it's just because I kept saying yes to things.
Lenny RachitskyMolly, I got tingles listening to this story. Wow.
Molly GrahamDoes it sound familiar, Lenny?
Lenny RachitskyIt does. I want to ask, jumping off a cliff, sometimes you fall, really fall and you keep falling. Are there any kind of traits of like, "Okay, this is one that might be a J-Curve and worth the risk of falling, and this is when you should probably just not, let's not do this".
Molly GrahamYeah. I just think there are different kinds of fear. We talk a lot about this in Glue Club because one of the thing, there is a financial fear, right? Leaving a job and taking a job that has financial risk associated with it, or leaving a job and taking time off, which is something that I spend a lot of time talking to people about, you got to do the math and you got to... Sometimes there is a type of fear that is telling you like, "This is not the right time." Or, "I don't want to be financially anxious for months and months and months."
I use finances because it's the most concrete example of a type of fear that you should actually listen to. And sometimes you can do the math. I always counsel people through that. I'm like, "What is the number that you need to hit so that you're not constantly terrified financially?" And that number is wildly different for people based on their background and their life. "Can you do that? Can you consult, can you whatever in order to take this leap?" But a lot of times fear is just you saying, "I'm scared I can't do this. I'm scared I'm not capable of it. Yeah, I'm scared I'll fail."
And that's the kind of fear that I think of as a flashing green light because... And it sounds like Matt McGinnis said this too, where it's like, "That's the kind of fear that's saying, 'Why don't you go prove to yourself that you are actually capable of this?'" Or if you fail, like, "You'll have learned something, too." You know what I mean? You'll have learned, like, "I took this job in product at Facebook as my last chapter there, and let me tell you things that people should never fucking hire me to do." I was like, "I am not a good product manager." But I've got a great product mindset. I can sit in a bunch of chairs and hang with the product folks, but I'm not the person that cares about the button. Do you know what I mean?
And I would never have learned that. I wouldn't have known who I was if I hadn't taken that risk and failed or at least learned that it's not something I wanted to do again. So, there's many different lessons that come from facing down those fears and jumping off the cliff, but mostly what it is is knowing yourself better and knowing where you go next from there.
Lenny RachitskyThat is such helpful advice. I also love how you frame this of, "Prove it to yourself that you can do this." It's not, "I'm going to show them that I can do this." Because the way you describe this, usually it's an opportunity given to you. "Hey, can you do this thing? We want you to lead this new thing." And the fear is like, "I don't think I can do that." And what you're saying here is, "Prove it to yourself that you can." Or, I guess, it's also, "Okay, maybe I can't and then I'll learn that and then I'll know more about myself."
Molly GrahamYeah, exactly. I mean, one of the greatest gifts in a career is knowing yourself. And that's a lifelong journey because who you are and what you want changes, but that knowledge and that gift, nothing accelerates your self-knowledge faster than trying to do something that you don't know how to do and that you're scared of.
Lenny RachitskyProbably the quote I use most on this podcast comes up again in my mind as you talk about this, this line that, "The cave you fear contains the treasure you seek."
Molly GrahamHell yes, exactly. Well said.
Lenny RachitskyThere it is.
Molly GrahamI haven't heard that one from you, so clearly I need to listen more.
Lenny RachitskyOkay, that's great. I'm glad I don't overuse it. It just feels like it comes up again and again, and I think your point about the runway and the finances is such an important one because that's a very real practical question. One thing I did when I took time off, I took a year off after I left my job. What helped me was I just created a runway goal for myself. I'm just like, "Okay, here's what it's going to cost me for six months or a year to live without any income. Am I comfortable just burning through these tens of thousands of dollars to explore and see something new emerge?" And so you just have to feel good. "Okay, yes, I'm going to burn all that money and that's part of it."
Molly GrahamYeah, that's exactly the exercise. You're saying "runway" I say "burn rate", so we both were raised inside of companies, incentive tech, but I think it is do the math, right? What can you afford? And it's both what can you afford and still feel safe? Because sometimes, I mean, again, I think that is different for everyone, but it is such an important set of math to do because, A, a lot of times that number is smaller than you think it is, then your brain makes it out to be if you have this sort of existential financial anxiety versus, I always say, "Specific financial anxiety is much more useful than existential financial anxiety." And some friends are leaving jobs and I'll be like, "Hey, your number is 5K or 10K a month. You have to believe that you can get a consulting gig that will pay you that. Do you believe that?" And it's like, "Either yes or no." And then, "Okay, either we're doing it or we're not.
Lenny RachitskyThe other part of this J- Curve that I think is really important to touch on is this idea of for the first six or nine months, you're going to be at the bottom of the J curve falling, still falling. And some projects don't last that long and then you're like, "Okay, total failure. I never emerged from this fall." So, is there any advice there? Just, how do you create that enough space to give you a chance to start to un-fall?
Molly GrahamI mean, the most valuable thing that happens as you fall is learning. And even on the other side of failure, you've learned a shit ton. I always say, "The most important thing to do in the falling phase and the risk taking land is to learn to embrace being a professional idiot." Basically, being the one that shows up at the meeting and is like, "What are we talking about? What does that word mean?"
For a bunch of reasons. Number one, you can learn so much. And again, even in the face of failure, no one can take away your learning. Do you know what I mean? But the other thing is that it turns out that a lot of the questions in the world that, you're sitting in the meeting and you're like, "This is a dumb question. Everyone's going to think I'm an idiot." But then you get brave and you ask it and it turns out it wasn't a dumb question. Do you know what I mean? Turns out that everyone had that question in their mind, but no one was brave enough to ask it.
So, from a skills' perspective, again, regardless of outcome, being the person that sort of takes their learning in their own hands, learning no matter what and learning to ask those dumb questions, it's a superpower. I always say that, "Actually, my superpower is being a professional moron." Because I'm the one that shows up in a room and is like, "Do we have goals? What are we doing? Why are we talking about this? Why are we having this meeting?" And most of the time it's actually what I was hired to do, which is bring clarity.
Lenny RachitskyIt's so funny. I just recorded a podcast episode with a PM named Zevi who joined Wix and he had this thought, he's like a very young PM, just getting started and he's like, "Okay, I need to be a 10X PM because that's what they expect of me, that's what everyone that is really good, that's how I think of a 10X PM." And then he went into his first meeting and he just failed and he just felt so bad. He's like, "I guess I'm not that 10X PM. They're all going to see that. They think I'm terrible." And then he did another presentation a little bit later and people were so impressed with how he learned and evolved and improved. And he realized that he needs to be not a 10X PM, but a 10X learner, and that's what people actually expect from someone, especially a junior person.
Molly GrahamYeah. Well, I was having a conversation last night with a friend of mine who has a senior in high school and I was like, "What is the plan? What are we telling this senior in high school to think about relative to their career given everything that's going on with AI?" And we talked about it a bunch, but what we both circled back to was this idea of soft skills and that actually the only thing you can really anchor on right now is that teaching kids grit, teaching them hard work, teaching them learning, right? Learning how to learn, loving learning, being able to fall, in a world that's changing this fast. And I say this inside of companies too, right? I always say, like, "What you know today is way less valuable than what you can learn by tomorrow." If you're inside of a company where the growth curve is like this, what you know today is irrelevant.
Somebody once told... I'm sure this is faster now, but they rewrote the entire code base at Google every eight years, which means that if you're not learning, if you're not evolving, then you become irrelevant and extinct. It's actually the whole underlying point of the Legos stuff is that evolution is the way you stay on top, and I think that's more true today than it's ever been.
Lenny RachitskyAnd luckily, AI is really good at helping us learn.
Molly GrahamTotally.
Lenny RachitskySo, that's good. Thank you, AI. And this actually comes up a bunch in the podcast. I ask a lot of AI-forward people what they're teaching their kids and curiosity is one of the main things people talk a lot about. Just like, "Help them develop curiosity about the world."
Molly GrahamYeah.
Lenny RachitskyYeah. Okay. I feel like I could be talking about this specific topic for a whole podcast episode, but I want to move on to a couple other frameworks that you've developed. One is something called a Waterline Model and another former colleague of here said, "This is the most impactful thing that they've learned from you on their career." So, talk about the Waterline Model.
Molly GrahamOkay. Yeah. Well, first of all, the Waterline Model is not mine. It's from some business book somewhere, but I actually learned it. My first job out of college was leading wilderness trips. I led 75-day wilderness trips in Patagonia and Alaska for a school called NOLS, the National Outdoor Leadership School. NOLS basically teaches essentially leadership and communication skills to students.
I was mostly leading college age kids through wilderness expeditions. So, by having to lead a group of your peers that you don't know. Anyway, the Waterline Model is something that we taught on NOLS. It's a really, really helpful model for understanding how to diagnose when something is not working on a team, so I teach it inside of Glue Club and I'll just quickly explain it. Basically, the way to think about the Waterline Model is that a team is a boat and it's a boat on an ocean trying to get somewhere, getting somewhere is goals, right? "What are we trying to build or ship or do?" Essentially, that is going to be harder or easier based on whatever the shape of the ocean is, right? If it's really choppy, it's harder, if it's smooth and calm, it's going to be easy to get to your goals.
So, the Waterline basically asks the question like, "What is going on under the water? What is going on that's making it harder or easier to get to your goals?" And there's essentially four things underneath the water and they are in a descending order. The surface level is what's called structural things. Basically, structural things are like goal setting, vision, roles, expectations, kind of the structures you put in place to make a team and a company and a business make sense, that touch every single member of the team.
Right below that is something called dynamics, which is essentially how the team works together. It's culture, it's decision making, it's how we resolve conflict, all the sort of like interwoven pieces of how teams work together. And then below that is interpersonal, so basically relationships between two people and all the things that come with us being humans. And then the bottom is intrapersonal, meaning within one person, challenges and issues there.
The interesting thing about this model is that most people, when something's going wrong on a team, a lot of times we always go to the bottom. We go to the people. We're like, "The people aren't getting along, that person's having a rough moment." We go to the humans, but the rule with the Waterline Model, which is very memorable, is you snorkel before you scuba. So, 80% of problems on teams actually happen because of structural issues or dynamics issues. So, when there are problems on your team, where you start is at the top, you start structural issues.
And one of my biggest things that I say all the time over and over again inside of Glue Club is, "Your only goal as a manager, if you do nothing else, is clear roles and clear expectations. That's it." Because honestly, I've taken over a lot of teams in my life and almost always I show up and it turns out that no one knows what their job is and no one knows what success looks like. And if you can make those two things clear, which again is at the snorkel level, it will fix a huge percentage of other issues on a team. But the main thing is where you start and just always sort of starting at that structural level or the dynamics level and not sort of immediately going to the people and all that. Because yes, people cause all sorts of problems, but a lot of times the problems are happening because they're existing inside of a structure that's confusing.
Lenny RachitskyAnother very vivid metaphor and just, I love how it builds on it with the snorkeling. Okay. So, just to be super clear about this, the takeaway here is, you have a problem with your team, with the company, many people think it's, they jump to the people are the problem. "They're not good enough, they're not working hard enough." Really, what you're saying is, most often, the issue is not the person, it's the situation, whether it's the structure of how they're set up to work or the dynamics amongst the people. And specifically what you're saying is that the role maybe isn't clear or what success means for that role is not clear.
Molly GrahamEvery company I've worked with or advise, I often start with like, "What are the goals?" And usually what you get the hack is, "Uh, not clear." And that in and of itself is a structural issue, right? How can someone show up and decide what they're going to do with their day all day if the goals aren't clear, if they don't actually know what the priorities are? And then it goes to, okay, role, right? "Do I know what my job is? Do I know what number I was hired to own and drive?" And then, "Do I know what success looks like? How does my role tie to that overall goal that the company has?" Just literally right there. You got probably 80% of problems inside of companies because this is the hard work of company building. It's the stuff that's not intuitive. "How do you organize a group of people to know which direction to row?"
And that equation, again, I would say 80% of problems that I see, performance issues. I always start with, "Does this person actually know what you expect of them?" If not, go back to step one. Do you know what I mean? Clarify expectations, so the Waterline Model is just helpful for reminding us, like, "Start at the top."
Lenny RachitskySo what would you do there? Say you're a manager, you're having an issue with a team member, would you go and ask, "Hey, let's just make sure we're aligned on goals and roles." Is that how'd you approach it or is there a different approach?
Molly GrahamSo a lot of times what I do is two-sided, right? So it's like, "Hey, here's what I'm seeing and tell me what's going on for you. Do you know X, Y, Z?" When I take over a team, when I'm doing my listening tour, part of what I'm asking is, "What do you think your job is? What number were you hired to drive?" Because what you'll find is often their picture is different than your picture. You think you've been clear, you described an elephant and they spat out a tiger and that coming back to like, "Okay, no, we're building an elephant. You're in charge of the trunk." Will, in some percentage of cases, actually make a huge difference to the person's work and time and performance. In plenty of cases it doesn't, but that's always where I would start because it so often is just a more fundamental problem that then would lead you to look at other things across the team.
But yeah, I would say two-way dialogue, but re-clarifying roles and expectations, re-describing the elephant over and over and over again, is one of the hardest parts about being a leader because you feel like a broken record, right? You feel like an idiot. You're like, "I've said this 45 times." Turns out no one heard you the first 43 and you have to. You have to re-describe it in order for people to hear you and to re-understand their sort of role in what they're doing.
Lenny RachitskyI love how you reframed the way I approached it by starting with, "Here's what I'm seeing. What are you seeing? What do you think your role is? " The very non-violent communication oriented, which is a clear pattern on this podcast, just the power of that specific framework.
Molly GrahamYeah, totally. Well, like I said, work is about humans and it's...
Like I said, work is about humans and it's the art of organizing humans to get something done and build something that's greater than the sum of its parts and that is an art of the humanness in all of us, how do we get people to hear us, how do we get people aligned.
Lenny RachitskyWork for a lifetime.
Molly GrahamTotally.
Okay, so let me actually follow this thread of the importance of goals and just being clear around this stuff. You have these six rules for creating clear goals and alignment on teams, talk about these six roles.
Molly GrahamYeah, totally. I feel like there should be less than six but it's where we're at. I would say, at a high level, two things before I get to the six. One is that I definitely have a bone to pick with OKRs, I feel like it's obviously been a really helpful framework for Google and others and, a lot of times, when I show up inside a company or I'm talking to a leader and I'm like, "What are your goals?" what I get back is this spreadsheet that has 100 lines and feels like it's written in Greek and, when I look at it, I'm like, " This doesn't create clarity for anyone." And it brings me back to what is the point of goals, why do we have them and, at the end of the day, goals are a communication tool, that's what they are. They're a communication tool designed to create clarity, to help people know I'm going to show up at my desk, what should I work on, what's the most important thing and your 100-line spreadsheet doesn't help anybody.
And the second thing I would just say is you really have to ask the question what is right for me at this company and this stage, what is right for a seed stage company is not what is right for a company that's got an established business and a clear go-to-market machine. So, when I'm building in seed stage, I'm setting goals every two months in a very iterative way. When I have an established business, I can actually set annual goals but annual goals for early stage companies is just a waste of time. So, anyway, a lot of my goal setting stuff actually comes from Facebook which I think was very, very good at this.
So, the first role is that no company needs more than three company goals and the point of company goals is to help people know what the most important things are to success. So, Facebook basically had three goals for the entire time I was there, it was five years and we did six-month goal setting, I think we did annual goal setting that ended up getting reset every six months but whatever. So, the three goals were this, there was growth which was measured as monthly active users, that was the externally reported number eventually, MAUs. The second goal was engagement meaning how often do people come back and use the site and the third was revenue and we literally had three goals for the five years that I was there. If you can govern that business with three goals, you can govern literally any business with three goals. So, no company needs more than three goals.
The second thing is that one goal needs to win in a fight. So, if I'm sitting down and asking how do I prioritize my time on a given day I need to know what is the most important thing. At Facebook, we had growth and there's a lot of different ways you can add monthly active users to a social media site including you can go buy a whole bunch of bots in Indonesia and that would add to your MAU number but it would not add to your engagement number and it was very clear for the entire time that I was there that engagement was the most important thing. Acquiring users that were going to use the site all the time, that's what drives revenue, it's also what drove the heart of that site. So, if you had to prioritize something, you prioritized engagement, that goal won in the fight.
The third I'll say is, I call it the explain it to me like I'm five goal, but an intern that started on Monday should be able to look at your goals and understand them and, if they can't, then you are failing because they are not a communication tool that's effective. You have to be able to understand the goals, you have to explain the acronyms, you have to have numbers that make sense to average people, otherwise, again, it fails as a communication tool.
The fourth one is ... Actually, I stole a phrase from Claire Hughes Johnson who you've had on your podcast but wrote a book called Scaling People and in it she says this sentence that I love which is strategy should hurt. And my role used to be set non-goals, basically, make it as clear what you're not going to do as what you are going to do but strategy should hurt is a much better way to explain it to people which is, if you're not making trade-offs that are painful, you are not actually helping people prioritize their time. Because the nature of work is that people will show up every day and do something and either you are very clear with them about what the priorities are or they're going to prioritize for you because they're going to choose what they work on every day. And we see this so much with founders where they can't cut things off the list, they just have to have the 10 goals and I'm like, "Cool. Six of these goals are not going to get done so either you pick which four it is or other people are going to pick for you." So, strategy should hurt. If your goal setting process is not painful, then you're not prioritizing heavily enough.
Okay, ready? We're on number five. This is more of an organizational point but it's really important for the waterline model too which is that one goal has one owner. You have a number, that number has a name next to it. If you cannot do that work, you haven't done the most important work to actually make sure that these goals get accomplished. And it's organizational work and it's very painful because sometimes it feels like, oh, this person can own it or this, maybe they'll just own it together, two people owning a goal is no one owning a goal. One person owns the goal, who is it? It's not you as the CEO, it's someone that works for you so one goal, one owner. And then the last, which is the hardest, is that goals by themselves are not enough. I've spent a lot of time with founders that are like, "I did it. I set the goals. Why not working? I don't understand." And I'm like, "What did you do after you set the goals?" And they're like, "I don't know, I set the goals." Goals ...
James Clear who wrote Atomic Habits has this really lovely sentence which is winners and losers have the same goal. Goals by themself are not enough, you have to have a process by which you follow up on the goals and you hold people accountable to the goals and you learn from the goals because so much of goal setting, particularly if you're earlier in building your company, is about learning from trying to do something. You set a goal, can we do it, how hard is it to move this number, that is the ... You might be wrong all the time but you're learning what it takes to move the number. So, setting the goal by itself, not enough, you have to build a process in the system to actually learn from the goal.
Lenny RachitskyWow. This list is ... There's so much power in this list, it's such a succinct-
Molly GrahamIt's too long.
Lenny RachitskyNo, I don't think it is because each of these has so much depth and power to them that saves you so much headache and just wasted time and resources. Just the idea of one owner, one goal, something I've personally discovered to have such power because, and correct me if I'm missing something here but just, if you feel like someone else may be doing the thing or feels like it's not just fully your responsibility, there's so much less energy and just mental ... I don't know. You just don't care as much about hitting that goal. And if it's you-
Molly GrahamYeah, accountability.
Lenny RachitskyYeah. If it's like, "Lenny, this goal is your goal and, if you hit it, you've done it. If you don't, you've done a bad job," that'd be a such motivating, so motivating. If it's me and Molly, okay, well, we'll figure it out.
Molly GrahamIt creates a flood of clarity that seeps down from the person too. And to go back to the waterline model, I would say, so often you'll actually find companies that have set goals but no one owns the goals, everyone owns the goals, multiple people own the goal and you didn't actually get all the way to the answer. And I will say that the ownership thing is hard, it can feel painful but it's really important. There's only one owner and that means that that person, come hell or high water, owns that number.
Lenny RachitskyYeah. The way I described it was just someone's ass has to be on the line for this and that just works. That's such a powerful lever to drive things to have one person responsible.
Molly GrahamYeah.
Lenny RachitskyThe other's just this idea of strategy hurting, I love that. I love that phrase, I forgot Claire had that. So true.
Molly GrahamSo good.
Lenny RachitskyBecause the whole idea is you need to not do things, you need to decide what you're not ... The whole strategy, a big part of it is what we are not doing.
Molly GrahamYeah, absolutely. And if you're not making painful choices, then you're not actually doing it.
Lenny RachitskyAnd this idea of three goals, so is it just ... So, do you go into a company and just go through a checklist essentially of here's the six things I look at to tell me where there's opportunity to improve?
Molly GrahamWhen I work with founders and I see their goals, I use it as a way to get to know the business and I'm just going to be literally like, "What is this? What are you trying to explain?" And I can usually, through asking a lot of really dumb questions which, like I said, one of my superpowers, get them to explain to me the one sentence and the one number that they're actually trying to get across but it takes work and that's part of ... It's almost easier to write the 100-line spreadsheet than it is to say, "Wait, what are the three drivers of this business genuinely? What are they and how do they relate to each other?" And there can be things underneath them but there's three at the top that matter. So, yeah, I'm not a scientific person about it but a lot of it is just by asking people to explain their businesses to me, you can basically find the drivers.
Lenny RachitskyAnd the story about Facebook having these same three goals for five years, considering their success, you may think they're not as complicated as your business but I am confident they're just as, if not, more complicated. They're a marketplace, a social network, they're a ad business, just they're ... There's a lot going on and, if they can work with three goals, you can do that too. And to your point, if it's not hurting, then you're doing something wrong.
Molly GrahamYeah, exactly.
Lenny RachitskyI love how ... This is very much what I wanted this chat to be. It feels like every little segment is its own, could be its own podcast where we could talk about this for hours so I'm really excited how this is going. Moving on to another topic, you have not necessarily rules but rules of thumb that you find really helpful for people to have in their head as they're dealing with change and scale and growth and all that kind of stuff so let's just walk through that.
Molly GrahamYeah. So, for leaders that are leading through change and growth, the list is probably long but I always say to people don't come to me for management 101, I'm not the person to ask on how to run the most effective one-on-one with your people. What I think is not talked about enough is what it takes to manage and lead through change and that is a very particular set of feelings. And the first thing I learned, when someone makes you a manager or when you take a job as a leader inside a company, you really do feel like, "Oh, who gave me this job?" and you feel like you're supposed to know the answer to things. People come to you and ask questions and you're like, "I'm supposed to know. I'm a leader, I am supposed to have answers."
And I think, particularly inside of rapid change and scale and growth, it's really important to understand that your job as manager and a leader is not to have all the answers. It is not to have all the answers, it is to get good at finding them, it is to get good at bringing people together to find the answers. And that is hard because it requires saying, "I don't know, let's go figure it out," a whole bunch and it's scary as a leader to say I don't know because you think, "Oh, gosh, people are going to see through me." But again, the more you travel in life, the more you realize that the most experienced leaders are the ones that say, "No, no, no," all the time.
Lenny RachitskyI think this is a good reminder of this Bob the monster concept because, hearing this, okay, I don't need to have all the answers as a leader. In real life, being in a meeting, people are like, "Hey, Molly, what do you think of this?" You're like, "Oh, I should have a good answer." And so, I think that's a good reminder of this idea of this Bob the monster is going to tell you, "Oh, you don't know anything, you're not ready for this. You suck at this, you're going to fail everyone that's ."
Molly GrahamThey're regretting hiring you.
Lenny RachitskyYeah, exactly.
Molly GrahamEveryone's going to see through you. Imposter, imposter, imposter.
Lenny RachitskyYeah, yeah.
Molly GrahamYeah, 100%.
Lenny RachitskyBut just remembering, there's going to be this part of your head and that's okay, it's there but it doesn't mean it's true.
Molly GrahamAbsolutely. And these things are muscles. Dealing with Bob as a muscle, learning to not react to all those things that attack you but also learning, oh, in this moment when someone asks me a question and I'm like, "Oh," actually I should be like, "I don't actually know, let's go ... Who should we ask? How can we learn this? How can we explore this together? What do you think?" Those are all actually very powerful questions and they're terrifying to, particularly earlier in your career, as a leader and a manager.
Lenny RachitskyAwesome. So, yeah, so the lesson there is no one expects you to have all the answers as a leader.
Molly GrahamNo.
Lenny RachitskyAwesome.
Molly GrahamAnd particularly in this world, the one that's changing as fast as it is, nobody knows. Nobody knows what the answers are in a lot of cases, the war will be won by the people that are good exploring and figuring it out.
Lenny RachitskyI love that phrase.
Molly GrahamSo, the second one is, and everyone that has learned this has learned it the hard way, do not promise things that you can't control. It's so tempting particularly when you're hiring people to be like, "Oh, yeah, your onboarding will be smooth and calm and everything's clear and we've figured it ... Let us tell you our vision and how obvious and clear and smart and blah, blah, blah." And then they show up and it's like, "Oh, shit," you know what I mean? There's no manual, no one knows what they're doing, it's all ambiguity and chaos. It's so easy when someone says I want to know that I'm going to be your CMO forever to be like, "Sure, you can be my CMO," you don't know that. Do you know what I mean? So, being really careful with promises of things that are out of your control like stability or titles or never hiring over someone is a flashing red light because there is literally no faster way to demoralize high performers than going back on a promise. Everyone that has been through it knows that feeling of like, "They told me this when I joined," and then they don't do it and you're like, "Well, fuck this place." So, no faster way to demoralize people or to hire the wrong people than promising things that are actually out of your control. Being honest and upfront about who you are as a company, about what you're able to promise, all of that is actually ... It's very hard work but it's so important because so much is out of your control and you need to hire people that are cool with that.
Lenny RachitskyLove that. I learned this the hard way once, I had a ... One of my early projects, we were late and the head of product was just so pissed he's like, "Because I've been telling the CEO it's going to be on time because you've been telling me it's going to be on time and then it wasn't and why didn't you tell me that?" And I was just like, "Okay, it'll never happen again," and he's like, "You can't ... Don't tell me that because that's not true, that nay not ... You can't guarantee that." And so, that taught me that lesson of just, yeah, you're right, you want to say that, it feels so good. Okay, this will never happen again but you can't and they know you can't promise things like that.
Molly GrahamYeah. And sorry, I'm going to quote Claire Hughes Johnson again but she has this really fun phrase that she said in a talk at Glue Club that I've now latched onto and stolen from her which is, she was like, "Promises like that are like letter bombs that you mail yourself that are going to explode in your face in a year," and I was like, "That is the perfect metaphor." Because it's short-term pain, you want to make this person feel good right now so you promise them something but, in one year, you're going to make them feel terrible so don't do it.
Lenny RachitskyGreat advice. All right, keep going.
Molly GrahamYeah. So, again, could probably go on the topic of what it takes to manage and lead forever inside this stuff but I'll give you two more that I yell about a lot in Glue Club. The first is that we spend huge amounts of time talking about hiring. How do you get good at hiring? What's the right interview? How do I find the right people? Firing people is as important as hiring people. Getting good at identifying when someone does not belong or someone is not going to work out is actually a skill and being good at it as a company and as a leader is as important as identifying the right talent because, eventually, if you're not good at firing people, what you have is essentially barnacles on a ship. Really going forward with the ship metaphor, anyway.
Lenny RachitskyIt's true.
Molly GrahamIt's drag people that are sitting around not pushing the team forward. So, it's painful and it's horrible because it is humans but, when someone doesn't fit, you ... No one is right all the time when it comes to hiring, I actually say most people are wrong half the time. The best people in the world in hiring will tell you they have about a 50% average in terms of being right. That means half the hires don't work out. That means, half the time, you're going to need to fire the person. So, it's such an important skill to get good at particularly when you're going through a lot of change. And the last one is humans are messy and it's very emotional. And when you're a leader, particularly if you have any kind of anagram too or just if you like to make people happy and you want to be liked, it can be so hard to lead teams because you get tangled in the people. Firing people is a painful experience, reorganizing things, layering people, all these things are emotionally painful for the people and they're emotionally painful for you as a manager.
But my mantra that almost always leads in the best direction is serve the business, not the people meaning everyone is better off if this company is wildly successful. Everyone looks smart and makes lots of money or whatever if this company grows and does what we all dream it can. So, at the end of the day, the best decisions, the ones that are always going to be right are the ones that are like, "How do we do the right thing for this business?" And it also helps in political situations. Someone's acting weird or their Bob is raging all over the company, technically, everyone has the same goal. The goal is to build the biggest business possible, that's the answer. The answer is always what's the right thing for the business. And the people stuff can fall away when you actually focus on what's the right thing for the business.
Lenny RachitskyA really useful tool to do that that I learned from my manager is to think about, when you're trying to decide whether to fire someone or change a project even though it's going to upset someone, is to say, "Okay, if there were no emotions involved, if this person had no negative reaction to this, what would I do?"
Molly GrahamTotally.
Lenny RachitskyAnd then that's the thing you should do and then you just do it. And then the question is how do I communicate this to them where their pain is lowest essentially.
Molly GrahamIn the kindest way possible.
Lenny RachitskyIn the kindest way possible. And because, to your point, if you optimize for the other thing of making people feel good, everything just falls apart, they're going to suffer even more down the road.
Molly GrahamYeah, absolutely. Direct is kind. And it feels kind or, really, honestly, easy to avoid these things or to work around them or to not but, at the end of the day, it's basically just a drag, the barnacle thing. It drags on your company, on your time, on your energy, et cetera.
Lenny RachitskyYeah. But again, very hard to do in real life to do the thing that's hard and cause someone to be sad and upset and frustrated and maybe leave.
Molly GrahamIt is so hard and all these things are muscles, you get better at ... They don't become easy, it's not like anybody who's like, "Oh, it's so ... I enjoy firing people," no, but you recognize it faster and you are like, "Oh, I need to go do this." And that is actually ... It's a practice and something that you need to practice to become the kind of leader that leads these long-enduring companies.
Lenny RachitskyYeah. And this tool of thinking, asking what would I do if there were no emotions involved and this person wouldn't be upset, it helps you realize, okay, I see, this actually doesn't make sense to just do it the easy way right now because it doesn't make sense.
Molly GrahamYeah, it strips away. It strips away the emotions.
Lenny RachitskySomething else I wanted to make sure we spent a little time on is you have another tidbit along these lines which is around putting most of your energy into high performers versus spending all your time people that need help, talk about that.
Molly GrahamAs a leader, as a manager, you're running these teams and someone's struggling and it's very easy to get dragged into that and to end up spending a huge amount of energy on it but high performers are actually the future of your company. And if you think about it and if you've spent time on it, those are the folks where, if you invest your time and energy in them, you're going to get the 10x return that people talk about all the time in Silicon Valley. But what I've witnessed is that most people have a high performer and they just leave them alone, they're like, "That person's doing well so I'm just going to let them do their thing." And what I do when I have a high performer that's my favorite thing in the world is invest time and energy in them and basically build a whole system of working with them that is designed to draw out potential. And I would say there's two things here, one is it's really important to realize that our tendency-
There's two things here. One is it's really important to realize that our tendency is to actually spend time on low performers and it is not a good use of your time. See the point about firing people. But the other thing is that actively investing in and developing high performers is something that's important to get good at as a leader because that is how you create these little rocket ships that end up... You'll manage someone who's just like a project manager and all of a sudden they're running a whole function inside the company eventually, but it's because you took time and energy to invest in them. And my basic way of doing that, not to... I could spend a long time on this, but I would just say is I run experiments. I basically develop a theory about someone, "I think this person is capable of this kind of thing." And then piece by piece, it doesn't have to be a whole job or whole project. It can just be an incremental experiment, "I'm going to see if they can do this with less guidance or support from me."
I'm going to give them a bigger project. I'm going to give them something with more visibility. I'm going to manage them less, oversee them less, whatever. All of those are experiments to basically test your theory and deepen your theory in terms of this person's potential and their ability to help the company. And you're basically, for me, what I'm doing is deeply getting to know that person and then trying to pair them with company needs. What do we need? This person is great at zebra farming. Where do we need zebra farming? So how do I get them working on bigger and bigger and more and more critical things?
And to be honest, this is what people have done for me. At Facebook in particular, I've benefited from people being like, "Ooh, come help me with this thing." They saw potential in me and they asked me to help with something and it unlocked a huge amount for me. And so, it is such a powerful tool for getting more out of people that might be a little bit stuck if you leave them in this box. But if you start to expand the box, you can really unlock people.
Lenny RachitskySo speaking of high performers, you've worked with many very high performing founder-CEOs. He worked really closely with Zuck, with Cheryl Sandberg, with Larry and Sergei at Google, with Brett Taylor, who I just... Just like you trying to read his resume, it takes three lines of things he's done over the course of his career. And so I just want to spend a little time on what are some things you've learned, maybe a few things you've learned from them, that group that you find yourself sharing with other people most.
Molly GrahamThat list is very long, but I'll give you a couple. The first one that I think is kind of counterintuitive is... So I said I worked at Facebook. I worked on culture, which is one of those words that doesn't really mean anything. So I define it as the way we do things around here. And I thought my job was to shape the culture. I thought it was to push the culture. And the most humbling lesson I learned is 80% of the culture of a company is literally defined by the personality of the founder. Facebook is Mark. Google is Larry and Sergei. Google, when I was there, it felt like a university. It's where ideas are more important in a lot of ways than what's shipped. And there's a campus and they basically wanted people to live there when I was there. It was designed to basically be a two PhD students' paradise.
Facebook felt like a 19-year-old hacker's dorm room when I was there. And it was shipping above all and all else. And it seeped with Mark's DNA. And I spent ages trying to create various changes inside the company or trying to push a point. And Mark would say literally one thing in an all hands, and it was like somebody threw a boulder into the pond. So our job as operators or as leaders around founders is to help articulate the culture that they're creating and to help extend it. My version of founder mode, which I know you've spent some time on on this podcast is your job is to build a company that would make a decision the way the founder would when they're not in the room. That is the work of building a company around a founder, but your job is not to shape culture.
That is mostly defined by the literal personality strengths and weaknesses of the person at the top. And that's been true of Mark and it's been true of Brett. Everywhere I go, that's who it is. You don't need a consulting firm to tell you, just go do a personality diagnosis on your founder. And the weaknesses thing is real. I've seen and watched friends try to shape a set of values at a company and it just doesn't match who the founder is. You say, "Move fast and break things," or whatever your version of that is. And your founder loves ambiguity and is perfectly happy with not making decisions. All that leads to is cultural dissonance. It leads to people being like, "Wait, what? I thought we said we care about moving fast and making aggressive decisions and it turns out..." So being really careful about what you say, because what people actually feel when it comes to culture is what you do and how you act every day.
You can never write anything down and you will still have a culture. It will be created through the actions and the decisions that you make and that your founder makes. So that would be a huge one.
Lenny RachitskyLet me spend a little more time on this because this is so good. So all this advice on culture and it feels so true based on everything I've seen. So tip one there is just you can't really change the culture. Maybe there's a little bit on the edges you could adjust. It will come down and trickle down from the founder, CEO probably mostly, but just the founders in general.
Molly GrahamAnd founder-CEO is probably the single biggest.
Lenny RachitskyFounder-CEO.
Molly GrahamCo-founders, it depends a lot on the company.
Lenny RachitskyAwesome.
Molly GrahamI think Stripe is probably very much like Patrick and John, but it's not every co-founder that has that level of power .
Lenny RachitskyAwesome. And then the way you describe culture, I think it's the way Seth Godin talks about it too, who's also been on the podcast. How cool is that?
Molly GrahamSo cool.
Lenny RachitskyHe said, "Culture is..." And what you said, "Culture is the way we do things around here. That's what culture is, is how we..." That's how people describe your culture is, "The way we do things around here."
Molly GrahamI ran culture, whatever the hell that means, at Facebook for a hot second. I literally haven't done a values exercise since. And it sounds crazy, right? Because in theory, I know how to do this stuff. I don't really know how to do this stuff. But for me, the point is process and systems and how do we make decisions? That's where culture actually lives. It is what you do. It's how you hire. It's how you fire. It's who you don't hire. It's all of those decisions. That is culture. So whenever I'm working with a company or building a company, that's what I'm focused on, not on what's the shiny word that we're putting on the wall. You know what I mean?
Lenny RachitskyYeah. So the way you're describing is, as you said, it's what you do. It's not what you say?
Molly GrahamYeah.
Lenny RachitskyAwesome. Keep going.
Molly GrahamI'll give you two more that are helpful. This one is a Mark Zuckerberg classic, but he has this very strong feeling that people don't escalate enough. And he was very adamant about it at Facebook. And he brought it to CZI too where he was like, "Escalation is a tool." And he's like, "People get stuck. They get stuck with two people with equal power trying to solve a problem. You can spend so much time bashing heads, going back and forth. And actually what you just need to do is go up. You need to go." The problem is that we think of escalation as, "I'm A and B and I are disagreeing. And so, I'm going to go up to C and tell on B. I'm going to go tattle to the teacher." That is not what escalation is. What escalation is, "We disagree. Neither one of us has enough power to make this decision. Let's go to someone who does." My boss, my boss's boss, whoever it is.
As soon as you are stuck, escalate. Go together, go make your case to whoever it is, go together up. That is unlocking. It's saving you a whole bunch of time. And it's something that I've found as I've worked with companies and leaders in Glue Club. It's not a muscle that's very comfortable for people, but it's so smart. And Mark has a lot of these, but that one I really took away because again, I think so many people think of escalation as bad, a failure, like, "I failed, so I had to escalate." No, it's a tool. It's what management is for. They're there to unblock you. Let them unblock you. Stop arguing over something you can't decide.
Lenny RachitskyAnd they'll be so happy knowing you did not waste a week debating this and then just arguing and just looking at data. It's like, "Okay, I can just tell you exactly what we should do. Let's go do that."
Molly GrahamExactly. You lack context or you lack power. And then the last one actually is from Cheryl Sandberg, who I learned an enormous amount from, huge, was like going to business school without going to business school working with her. But I say it a lot right now, so I'm going to say it on your podcast so maybe some people will hear me. Growing more than 100% every year is a bad idea. The happiest growth rate is 50%, 100% is manageable. Anything more than doubling and you are signing yourself up for a world of pain. And I have seen this over and over and over again. I had to scream way louder about it five years ago than I do now because we've been through collectively a lot of pain and a lot of layoffs. And obviously the combination of 2021 and then AI has led us to talk about unit economics and scaling with tools, not people.
But I still see companies and I'm still talking to founders that are like, "Yeah, we're 50 people and we're going to be 150 people next year." And I'm like, "Could you possibly do that with 100 people?" But here's what basically happens if you grow at more than 100%, which is you're growing too fast to de-dupe all the issues. So somebody posts this role, it actually turns out that that role is also being hired for on this other team. So you're hiring two people who more or less have the same job description and are assigned to the same number or the same problem, but nobody talked to each other. And those two people both show up and they're like, "I am doing this." And the person's like, "Wait, I thought I was doing that." Anyway, so then you've got all this... And think about all the time and all the energy and all the money that goes into de-duping that.
If you slow down, if you hire for quality and for real need versus the panic hiring, whatever your sales model spits out or whatever, you'll actually find leverage. You find, "Oh, I didn't need that person," or, "I didn't need this whole team," or, "I didn't need this whole function," or, "I can wait for that." So slow down. And again, these are all just guidelines in terms of the 50% is happy and 100% is manageable. But having seen enough of this, I can tell you these are good rules and you should pay attention to them. And sometimes you're like, "I have to double or I have to more than double or I have to triple," or whatever. I'm like, "Okay, just ask a whole lot of questions as you open roles. Ask a whole lot of questions as you hire because you will find duplication, you will find chaos coming in the front door."
More people does not actually make you faster. Do you know what I mean? We think it does. It does not. It makes it harder. It makes it harder to get work done. It makes it slower. So you should be scared of adding people, not like, "Oh, this is the answer to all my problems."
Lenny RachitskyAmazing. And just to be clear, you're talking about the growth of the company. So doubling in a year, bad idea. It's possible, but you're saying it's going to be very hard and painful and probably a really bad idea.
Molly GrahamYeah. More than doubling head count growth.
Lenny RachitskyMore than doubling.
Molly GrahamGreat point.
Lenny RachitskyHead count?
Molly GrahamYes, exactly.
Lenny RachitskyAwesome. It's-
Molly GrahamPlease feel free to do whatever you want with your business.
Lenny RachitskyJust advice. This is top of mind because I just had the interview with Matt McGinnis, but so much of what he talked about is this resonates with what you're talking about. He talked a lot about under-resourcing your team-
Molly GrahamTotally.
Lenny RachitskyLeads to much better outcomes because people don't work on the low priority stuff. They focus on only high priority stuff. And the other is this idea of escalating. He talked a lot about that. Just like, "Escalation is good. Tell me when there's something I can help with, please. I'm here waiting constantly-
Molly GrahamThere you go.
Lenny Rachitsky"To help."
Molly GrahamYeah, 100%.
Lenny RachitskyAmazing. So maybe for a final question, one of your former colleagues, Eric Antonow, who's just this epic dude that few people know about-
Molly GrahamTotally.
Lenny RachitskyThat I've chatted with over the last few months because he knows so many people that come on this podcast. He's a former Facebook person, now at OpenAI. I asked him what I should ask you about and he told me something really insightful about you. He said that you had this really massive growth spurt at Facebook, which you shared and talked about. And then after you leaving, you had this huge ambition to become COO, CEO, become this huge big deal boss person, just take over the world. And then he noticed your ambitions significantly pivot to working on community building and helping people with their careers. And you turned down really big C-level role opportunities. And the way he described it is you were a dog that once thought you were cat. And the other metaphor he used is you change from AC current to DC current, which I don't know exactly what that means. So does this resonate? And if so, just what happened there?
Molly GrahamEric is actually better at metaphors than I am, and I regularly rip his metaphors. But yes, Eric Antonow, the least well-known, but most brilliant person in my life. So I gave a talk at a company recently and somebody asked the question, "What's something you've changed your mind about?" And I was like, "Woof." But I actually talked about this because... So my brain is developing this model that is not done yet, but it's basically this idea that everybody has a proving phase to their career where you're proving to yourself and probably to your parents and some other people that you're good at stuff. You're like, "I'm going to prove." And it's an important phase because you need to learn. All the stuff we talked about. You need to learn what you're good at. You need to learn that you are good at things and that people should hire you for things and what are those things?
But part of that phase is also doing what you think matters, what you think you should do. Family programming or career books tell you this is what you should do, titles and all that stuff. And then, I think everybody has a moment and I think this moment varies wildly in terms of when it hits people, where you hit some sort of wall or I don't know what it is, speed bump, something, and the world forces you to say, "Okay, I've proven myself and I'm good at this thing. What do I want to do with it?" And for me, I spent 10 or 15 years proving to myself and to others that I was really good at this thing, basically working with brilliant founders to help bring their vision to life, "That's what you should hire me to do." That's what I was known for.
And it turned out that that wasn't what I love doing anymore. And it was really, really hard to walk away from because there was a lot of shoulds. It was like, "You should take this job with this fancy title. People are going to think you're so cool." And you get to... I call it a LinkedIn crush where you're really excited to post the job on LinkedIn, but you're deeply unexcited about doing the job. So you have all these LinkedIn crushes and you're like... And I vividly remember this one job that I turned down where I had to go for many walks. And what I was repeating over and over again to myself was, "What does this get you that you don't already have? What does this get you that you don't already have?" And I think, for me, it was this realization that these things that fed me early in my career just didn't feed me anymore, that I didn't get joy and excitement out of doing these jobs anymore, and I wasn't scared.
So it led me actually on a very long, windy journey, a founder journey, even though I have trouble with that title, just like the influencer title, to figure out what I wanted to build. And what I would've told you I wanted to build three years ago is actually not what I'm doing today, but through a lot of really fun experiments and a journey that never ends, what I've discovered is that what I love doing is building safe spaces for leaders to learn and grow, but also to find sanity and connection in a world that's kind of insane, whether it's working in a startup or some other kind of insanity, but that feeds me and there's nothing I love more than that, and I could not have told you that three years ago, but, to Eric's point, it really took a lot of work to switch currents or switch myself from a dog to a cat or whatever his metaphor is. And I think it's the work of it's ongoing work, but it's that thing of what do I want versus what do I think people expect of me?
Lenny RachitskyThere's so much depth there. This could be another entire podcast conversation talking through this journey, but I'm going to close with a note from your partner, Sarah. She told me that she has this sticker on her notebook with three pieces of advice that you gave her when she started at OpenAI. Get to know your customer, they have the answer; be patient because everything is going to change; and just keep trying. So just as a final question, is there anything along those lines that you think might be helpful for people to hear or is there anything else you want to share or leave listeners with?
Molly GrahamPart of what I think is so important to realize inside of scaling and changing companies and the world is some things will always be true. And part of what I was saying to Sarah in the "get to know the customer, they have the answer" is, whatever bullshit is going on around you and whatever walls and ceiling are being rearranged this week, the customer is never going to change. That's a thing that will never change. And I think finding those immovable objects, those compasses in the face of a storm, which being inside of a scaling company in a startup feels like a tornado. And I think OpenAI is extra special on that front. You have to find these guiding lights that get you through that storm. And I think it's sort of the same thing as "Serve the business, not the people." What are the things that will always be true? We are here to do this. We are here to serve the customer.
And then the other piece of the three things that she wrote down is, I think that we, as humans, we seek stability. Our brains would like things to stop changing. We would like things to stay the same. And that is just not a reality inside of companies that are growing and changing as fast as OpenAI or a lot of the companies today that are being built. So actually, you need to start to expect instability. You need to start to just assume things are going to change. Assume you're going to have a new boss in six months. I talk about this a lot when I talk to folks at OpenAI, "You need to stop expecting that anything's going to be the same in six months or a year. You will have a different job. You will have a different boss."
How do you prepare for that? Do you know what I mean? How do you almost see the instability as stability because it's the only thing that is definitely going to be true. And part of that is to just keep going. You know what I mean? To just find these lights and these compasses or whatever metaphor sticks with you and focus on those because whatever is happening around you, you just got to keep moving forward and keep learning as much as you can because that's the real opportunity. Whatever happens to the company, however successful it is, all that you take away from it... I always say all that you take away from it is people that like working with you and want to work with you again and what you learned. That's it. You might hopefully take a bunch of money, but you might not. So people and what you learned, that's it. Focus on that.
Lenny RachitskyIt's all about the friends you made along the way. That old line is true. Oh, man. Molly, I feel like we've gone for so long and we've just scratched the surface. I'd love to have you back to go deeper on a lot of this stuff. I'm going to skip the lightning round because we've gone long and I want to keep people from having to listen to more. So I'm just going to end with, what should people know about what you're working on? Where can people go find you online? And how can listeners be useful to you?
Molly GrahamYou can find me on LinkedIn and you can find me on Substack. I have a Substack called Lessons that I'm slowly trying to turn into a community where we can talk about things, the real stuff. And you can find me at Glue Club, which, if you're a leader inside of one of these crazy companies that's changing all the time, we can be a great home for you.
Lenny RachitskyWhat's the URL there just for folks to check out?
Molly GrahamIt's glueclub.com.
Lenny RachitskyGlue, G-L-U-E?
Molly GrahamG-L-U-E.
Lenny RachitskyC-L-U-B.com. Great.
Molly GrahamYeah, exactly. And in terms of people, what people can do to be useful to me, I love helping leaders with problems. I really get a lot of energy out of unsticking people and helping people feel supported and seen and helping them grow. I do that through Glue Club. So if you're a leader that feels like you want some sanity and some support in the face of whatever tornado you're in, that's a great place to come. But the same is true of Substack. So if Glue Club isn't for you, come on over to Substack. I've opened up a bunch of channels to just talk about stuff, listen to people's problems, answer questions because I love helping people. And I think it's a complicated moment right now to be a leader and to figure out which way is up. So come on over.
Lenny RachitskyAmazing. Molly, thank you so much for being here.
Molly GrahamThank you, Lenny. This was really fun.
Lenny RachitskyBye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.