Speaker B describes how management changes as you grow from leading a few people to tens of thousands. Direct feedback and clarity matter most with your team, but once you manage managers, you shift to unblocking their work. At scale, personal connection fades, so he sent short video messages to distributed teams to keep things conversational despite distance.
Chapters
So, one of the things that I'm quite fascinated that you've done personally and you've brought people along is, is there some people who, and you're the rare person who can go from managing 3 to 30 to 300 to 3,000 to 30,000 people. So, if you were going to sort of, well, okay, you're not at Microsoft yet, but what are the sort of key 2 or 3 skills that you would encourage people to develop along the way? And maybe what they should ignore that's overrated?
I think that the— I think there's a core set of management skills for my direct team that I've gotten better and better at over time because I've had a lot of practice and I was definitely not as good 25 years ago. But those don't change 'cause you have your direct team and they just happen to be, I mean, you do have to, evolve them for a more senior team. You're doing less, I actually have a section in the book where I talk about when you're starting to manage managers and then manage leaders, it's less about tactically coaching and more about let me help unblock, let me help you figure out the thing you need to do and then help you get unblocked. But I think that the core management skills are just get better, give feedback faster, be more direct, and build the team to be more of a unit. For me, I'm a collaborative leader. I'm like, I need everyone around me to be contributing or else, I don't think we're very good. I think that the thing that starts to change when you get to real scale of numbers is you have to be incredibly intentional about your communication practices as a leader. People are not as connected to you personally. There are people who come up to me even on the street, especially when I'm in California, and say, I was on your team at Google when my team was like, say, 2,000 people. and I don't know all of them. And I say, oh, thank you so much for coming up to me. And they say, you really, like, I learned so much from you. And I think, wow, I'm honored and also, like, how did I do that? Because I wasn't with them. They were a few, 5 layers down in the organization. A lot of these were folks right out of college or business school. And I think it was because I was out speaking and interacting but using a lot of different formats. I even would record, this was by the way before TikTok, now I'm aging myself, but I would record videos and send them to my global team because they were all in different time zones. We could never gather at the same time and I was like, it's weird to write these super long emails. Who wants to read that? Why don't I send short video messages? And at the time that was an innovation. But the point is I think that I spoke consistently and authentically and with specifics in such a way that people felt we were in conversation even when we weren't. That's the scale difference.
