John McDonald on scaling a company from 40 to 400 people without letting politics and silos take over. He hires for respect, keeps the founding team's values front and center, and builds a functional structure that can matrix as the business grows.
What have you had to do to avoid company politics or prevent the silos from occurring? Going from, from 40 employees to 400 in five years is pretty rapid growth.
I think it starts from a values perspective. Who you hire and making sure everybody kind of shares the same set of values. Foremost among them is kind of respect for each other. That sounds kind of trite, but CEO and our founding team, the three co founders, all of them have, I think, a very strong kind of shared set of values. How much the CEO and the founding team, how much their values reflect on the whole company, I really think, you know, that.
The fact that we have avoided politics has a.
Lot.
To do with.
That.
And.
Foremost among them, it's.
Respect for each other.
It's not as if we don't have conflicts, but. But I think underlying it is respect. I think another one is we've had a fairly clear shared vision of where the business is going that might get more contentious in the future. It's been, you know, fairly clear where, where we're heading. And then I would say the third thing is, is so far we've had a. Primarily a functionally based organization. And I think one of the things we're really trying to think through is as we, we have to bring in some type of matrixing, as we, you know, we start to have now these separate lines of business. How do we do that and not bring in politics?
