ScalingUp Playbook - Scaling your Human Capital: The Science & the Art of going from Seed to Series A to Series E & beyond

A frequent query that I come across from many Founders & CXO's, how do we scale up human capital smoothly from Seed to Series A to Series E (& beyond)? Each stage has its nuances with multiple areas to focus on. Imperative that it takes a significant quantum of Leadership's bandwidth, one has to manage the pace to suit to today's context + tomorrow's realities, plying progressively towards the next one.

Is there a playbook outlining critical things one can focus on in the journey from 0 - 100? Infact, more often than not Founders / CXOs have come back expressing that I wish I had focussed on this part much earlier & with more focus. While that realization is absolutely authentic, but more often than not scaling up can be one of the reasons why high-growth setups underachieve.

Having served at the helm of multiple high-growth setups, scaling their human capital to the next level in their respective journeys, I must admit that scaling up human capital is a mix of science & art, where one is always balancing between delivering today's priorities & building for tomorrow's realities, and hence as a Scaleup HR specialist, I have tried to create a playbook (of sorts), rendering scaling up as a process & practice - something which can be replicated to ensure all 3 critical aspects:

a) creating incremental business value with minimal friction,

b) driving sustainability & scalability to value creation &

c) lastly, unlocking the potential of human capital.

In addition to this playbook, there is a Scaleup Meter, a tool to enable Founders / CXO's, in identifying their current stage & gaps to work on, to get smoothly to the next stage.

Yes, I can relate with the growth journey & pain points mentioned in the Scaling Up playbook, but what next?

a) Take the ScaleUp Meter to understand how your organization is shaped on critical areas

b) Basis the score, the ScaleUp meter would recommend improvement areas for the gaps + Focus areas referenced in the Playbook are action items for deployment. Execution is the key here. Go ahead & start building things accordingly.

c) Given the unique context & situation one is in, the priority of execution always changes - If you want to put a prioritizations & roadmap to executing the improvement areas, we can chat here: Connect over Chat

d) If you want additional help with execution as well, we can chat here: Connect over Chat

Few things to keep in mind are:

a) Cos my experiences have been heavy on Product - tech & SaaS setups, a lot of taxonomy comes from that side of the world, however, scaling up human capital is fairly domain-agnostic, as long as one wants to strike a good balance between all 3 parameters highlighted above.

b) The playbook consists of 4 Stages (0 - 1 Seed, 1 - 10 Traction, 10 - 50 Growth & 50-100 Scale up). These stages are not reflective of either the funding stages (Preseed, Seed, Series A to E etc), nor of the size of the company. As one would notice post going through them, the Stages are more indicative of the operational state & few key characteristics are definitive of respective stages.

c) The playbook is purely anecdotal, drawn from personal success stories (& lot of learnings & realizations), not prescriptive, but at the same time, have seen tremendous value getting created while executing as per it.

d) The playbook assumes that 0 - 1 of the journey has happened, meaning the Product market fit has been figured out & now, it's all about scaling up the delivery with an evolutionary path to follow.

e) The points listed are not in specific order of ranking/importance (& not limited to it). The priority of execution of Focus areas depends on context, Org priorities & envisaged end state.

f) The Scaleup playbook attempts to cover all the critical areas - Getting noticed by Right & Best candidates, Onboarding, Retention, Alignment, Goal Setting & Performance Management, Capability & Workforce planning, Productivity & Performance, Growth & Development, Organizational Effectiveness (Structure, RnRs, Role Clarity, Automation & Systems etc), Best Practices & Competitor Mapping.

Stage 1 - 10, Seed

Critical Features of this stage

• Getting from 0-1 & 1-10 is the key focus on most of things (Feature building). Firefighting might equally entail a good amount of bandwidth
• Critical changes in scope happening frequently
• Resources are perpetually in scarcity.
• Core Team is getting identified & build.
• New Joiner Onboarding is no longer automatic - Letting new people find their own way does not work anymore.

Focus on:

• Building clear fundamental frameworks - Vision, Mission, Purpose, Problem statement focused on, The Why of the Company/Product. The Core team should have this completely embedded to it
• Driving clarity with core members & key people on strategy, roles & responsibilities, structure & possibly, operational metrics - all of it aligning with critical business constructs
• Ensuring the operational structure, metrics & performance expectations (or at least a Northstar metric) are clear at a functional level
• Setting up a strong cohesive bond within the Core team with all the above pointers.
• Defining the business criticals (value proposition, target market, strategy etc. even though it might be experimentative or work in progress), visualizing key functions to drive effectiveness & mapping core people to key functions
• Building clarity on constructs of recruitment for inducting core team, key people & others are clear. (For example, For Core team, it can be trust, alignment to Vision & Problem statement, similarly for Key people, it can be Capability driven etc.),
• Critical - Check on Speed of Decision making, Speed of Execution, Speed of Information Sharing, Rate of Collaboration & Quality of Output

Stage 10 - 50, Traction

Critical elements:

• Changing priorities, and duplication of work are highly evident. Employees are changing focus, and their expectations are shifting. The strategy and purpose are interpreted differently and this creates asymmetries & anomalies.
• Too many processes depend on the Founder / CXO
• Teams are decently staffed but goals/timelines get slipped with occasional burnouts from people
• Firefighting takes a good amount of bandwidth

Focus on:

• Ensuring that the overall strategy, operational expectation and Northstar / Functional metrics are absolutely clear across all levels.
• Ensuring roles & responsibilities, and performance expectations are clear to everybody & how it impacts the overall Northstar & Functional metrics - this would create alignment across all levels & all the roles.
• Building regular feedback loops, 1 0n 1's between team members & Managers / Mentors* with an objective on unblocking any bottlenecks, creating more value & bonding, & fixing accountability, while driving ownership at all levels. This needs to happen across all levels. At a micro level, Ownership + Accountability, Problem-solving, Collaboration & Going above and beyond are key to creating value.
• Reinforcing the organizational structure (this can equally change in this stage basis organizational priorities), capturing information & sharing it smoothly, and collaboration - these things need to be constantly worked upon as much as possible.
• Highlighting the organization’s core values (generally these are mostly aligned with Founder's Traits) - Making the culture and core values explicit and shaping the Core team & Managers/Mentors around these shared values.
• Identifying the Managerial talent & developing them, both the pools are different from High performers driving the performance spikes. Assigning them to progressive roles to ensure Managerial bandwidth keeps driving execution to effectiveness
• Seeing to it that all of the basic HR processes, such as benefits and remuneration, are in place
• An onboarding process with clear expectations, shortens the time someone needs to be productive.
• Core team is empowered & Key decisions are delegated, not resting in calls to be taken by Founder (s)
• Continuously reinforcing of Vision, Strategy, Northstar & It's importance & recognition at all times needs to happen across all levels.
• Developing a Talent code of what kind of critical behaviors are required to be exhibited (Customer Centricity, Ownership + Accountability, Going above & beyond, Team player etc) for Doer levels, Managers & Leadership levels. Talent Code is basically setting an expectation of behaviors that need to be exhibited by everybody across the Organization
• Developing robust recruitment philosophy, aligned with Talent Code with elaborate mechanisms (structured interviews, behavioral assessments, multiple panels, quality & standards calibration, culture fit) to ensure manpower addition results into incremental value creation
• Along with recruitment, Performance management, Promotions, Rewards & Recognitions, New Joiner Onboarding, Continuous Feedbacks should be strong embedded & institutionalized in the DNA.
• Critical - Check on Speed of Decision making, Speed of Execution, Speed of Information Sharing, Rate of Collaboration & Quality of Output (& rate of innovation). The Speed of Execution would have come down a notch lower (with more people getting added), however, rest of the parameters need to worked on, to be kept at similar levels as earlier stage, and improved quality of output

*Managers / Mentors would basically mean the reporting line or hierarchy.

Additional Reading: Scaling up Principles, 10-100

Stage 50 - 100, Growth

Critical elements:

• As performance standards pick up, moderate performance, non-performance & non - competence equally becomes noticeable
• Frequent burnouts & Constant firefighting on similar issues.
• Employees expect growth opportunities
• The operational processes are either not in order or not followed

Focus on:

• Ensuring roles & responsibilities, and performance expectations are clear to everybody & how it impacts the overall Northstar & Functional metrics - this would create alignment across all levels & all the roles.
• Reinforcing the organizational structure (this can equally change again in this stage basis organizational priorities), capturing information & sharing it smoothly, and collaboration - these things need to be constantly worked upon as much as possible.
• Building Leadership & Managerial talent pools, creating developmental paths for both respective pools
• Ensure that performance thresholds are identified across High, Medium & Low across all levels & mechanism/nudge to incentivize employees to move from lower brackets to higher ones.
• Ensuring growth paths/careers paths are created across all the functions, stitched with developmental paths & capabilities/skills mapped to get to these levels.
• High focus on culture, with strong alignment & reflection of it coming from Leadership, Management, Team leaders, Coaches & Mentors, High Performers, Critical employees etc
• Continuously reinforcing of Vision, Strategy, Northstar & It's importance & recognition at all times needs to happen across all levels.
• End-to-end to employee journeys are well designed & metrics are measured basis quality & experience. For example - eNPS, Quality of Hire, Recruiting ROI, High Performers %, High Potential % etc
• Ensuring that processes & practices are clear, have a universal buy-in & and are not affecting the speed of execution, speed of decision making & speed of information sharing.
• Focus needs to be on both, Optimizations & Innovations. Largely, optimization takes the front seat at this stage, however, the amount of cognitive surplus in high growth setups is huge. Hence, the innovation streak should as well ideally be continuously stoked.
• Larger constructs like Employer Value Proposition, OKRs, Talent Management etc should be deployed to drive larger value creation
• Critical - Check on Speed of Decision making, Speed of Execution, Speed of Information Sharing, Rate of Collaboration & Quality of Output. The Speed of Execution would have come down a notch lower (with more people getting added - this is where OKRs, Knowledge Sharing would help to mitigate the deceleration to speed of execution), however, the rest of the parameters need to worked on, to be kept at similar levels as an earlier stage, and an improved quality of output

Additional Reading: Scaling up Principles, 10-100

Stage 100+, Scale Up

Critical elements:

• Can the organization continue to grow without the Founder(s)? Tackling the Founder(s)'s Paradox - High Dependency, Strong glue or beacon of Purpose?
• The leadership team is unable to successfully move the organization forward into the next growth phase
• Corporatization of the setup, with bureaucratic processes, redundancies
• Multiple layers of Management, without adding value to execution, transformation or value creation

Focus on:

• Ensuring roles & responsibilities, and performance expectations are clear to everybody & how it impacts the overall Northstar & Functional metrics - this would create alignment across all levels & all the roles.
• With more certainty, predictability setting in the business model & organizational structure, developing key frameworks of Competencies, Career Paths is the key. The objective should now be to move from Generalists & Specialists, getting in to specialization of skills effectively to creating value
• Checking in with most of the points mentioned to focus on in Growth stage
• Driving continuous improvements, best practices, along with standardizing & streamlining processes, and practices across Operations, End to End Employee lifecycles across all functions
• Creating multiple feedback loops within the organization with data-driven decision-making. Data collecting can only happen when processes & practices are standardized and scaled up over a period of time to identify patterns & projections.
• On the strategic side, identifying key capabilities that are required (to grow to next level) & whether these capabilities can be built organically or have to be procured from outside would be critical for next level of growth
• Critical - Check on Speed of Decision making, Speed of Execution, Speed of Information Sharing, Rate of Collaboration & Quality of Output. To ensure that every level added is contributing to value creation, consumer experience & differentiation, instead of being information filters, creating information asymmetry and/or driving things in a misaligned way.