Why scaling you and your employees is as important as the business

In any high-growth company, there comes a point when the founders, CEOs, and other company leaders are required to scale their own roles to support business growth. This effective “self-scaling” usually comes down to three questions: What does the company need? When is it time to let go? Where to next? Here’s how I saw it play out in my career and what I learned along the way.

What does the company need?

When I started at Lucid over a decade ago, I met with our cofounders, Karl Sun and Ben Dilts, in a basement in Utah and they gave me one job—to help grow the business. 

So I asked myself, “What does the company need?” 

As a tech company, even at the startup level, Lucid was not short on engineers. We were short on everything else—marketing, operations, product, customer success, sales, etc. As the first employee not focused on engineering, I quickly picked up the responsibilities across these departments that I thought would have the biggest impact. Being involved in the startup atmosphere was exciting because the possibilities were endless, but we knew if we didn’t grow, our business opportunities would be stunted. 

As we continued on our journey, it was crucial to identify where our company needed development and which roles to fill. At some point, though, doing anything and everything is no longer what your company needs. Scaling internal teams ensures individual employees continue their own growth and development. This leads to longevity in the company by building a workforce with the support needed to explore and flourish in their passions. This became a necessity for our company’s long-term future. So I asked myself question number two, “When is it time to let go?”

When is it time to let go?

In truth, this is one of the hardest questions to ask and realizations to make with self-scaling, but one that is fundamental to business and employee growth. 

Business growth expert Molly Graham compared starting a company to sitting in front of a table full of Legos. By ourselves, we can start to piece the Legos together and see success. Eventually we notice that to build faster and better, we’ll need others to build with us. Therefore, we hire people. However, for them to be able to build, we have to give them some of our Legos.

The act of letting go requires both trust and humility, at every level. It also means hiring people who are better than you in specific areas. No moment was clearer for me than when we hired our chief marketing officer. I gave him the majority of my Legos and he has since built them into something I could have never imagined, all while helping me learn and develop my own skills. By trusting his skills, I was able to focus on other areas of the business that required my attention and to reinvent my role into something that applied my abilities and passions in a way that better served the company. 

As your company continues growing, you can do the same thing for your employees to help them reinvent themselves and scale. Take the time to help them identify their unique skills and what drives their passion. Have regular check-ins with your teams to uncover a deeper understanding of them, their goals, and professional development within the company. The consequences of not doing this can be significant; a McKinsey report revealed that 41% of employed people surveyed said they left their previous position due to a lack of opportunity for upward mobility, and this was the top reason why they left.

When you hire and develop the right people, support continued learning and development in their areas of strength and interest, and develop the ideal work culture and environment, the company wins. This recipe can create a highly functional team that can solve problems and meet challenges, including product strategy and go-to-market operational issues. Take these stats from Deloitte as an example: 

“Organizations with a strong learning culture are 92% more likely to develop novel products and processes, 52% more productive, 56% more likely to be the first to market with their products and services, and 17% more profitable than their peers. Their engagement and retention rates are also 30–50% higher.”

Where to next?

When I think about growing a team, I go back to what David Atmaram Satterwhite, CEO at Chronus, wrote a while ago, as it really resonated with me. 

He compared scaling a startup to sports, specifically basketball and American football. In basketball, you have only five people on the court. Those five people lean into more generalized skills to win the game together. This was Karl, Ben, and me in the early days. By contrast, in American football you have 11 players on the field, each with a specialized position and specific tasks—blocking target opponents and running particular routes to draw the game in a certain direction. As Lucid started to scale and grow, we changed from basketball to football. The question, “Where to next?” required buy-in and planning from greater numbers of people before we could execute. 

If I’d never asked myself those three questions—What does the company need? When is it time to let go? Where to next?—for the first time over a decade ago, my ability to help Lucid’s growth may have been much more limited. I’ve been given the opportunity to scale into new roles and apply my skills and passions to help product growth, international expansion, and business operations and strategy. Each time I allowed myself to be fully enveloped in that specific role because I knew it would help scale the company, my team, and me.

When deep trust exists between employees and leaders, individuals and teams can scale as the business scales, reinventing their roles along the way.

Dave Grow is CEO of Lucid Software.

In any high-growth company, there comes a point when the founders, CEOs, and other company leaders are required to scale their own roles to support business growth. This effective “self-scaling” usually comes down to three questions: What does the company need? When is it time to let go? Where to next? Here’s how I saw it play out in my career and what I learned along the way.

What does the company need?

When I started at Lucid over a decade ago, I met with our cofounders, Karl Sun and Ben Dilts, in a basement in Utah and they gave me one job—to help grow the business. 

So I asked myself, “What does the company need?” 

As a tech company, even at the startup level, Lucid was not short on engineers. We were short on everything else—marketing, operations, product, customer success, sales, etc. As the first employee not focused on engineering, I quickly picked up the responsibilities across these departments that I thought would have the biggest impact. Being involved in the startup atmosphere was exciting because the possibilities were endless, but we knew if we didn’t grow, our business opportunities would be stunted. 

As we continued on our journey, it was crucial to identify where our company needed development and which roles to fill. At some point, though, doing anything and everything is no longer what your company needs. Scaling internal teams ensures individual employees continue their own growth and development. This leads to longevity in the company by building a workforce with the support needed to explore and flourish in their passions. This became a necessity for our company’s long-term future. So I asked myself question number two, “When is it time to let go?”

When is it time to let go?

In truth, this is one of the hardest questions to ask and realizations to make with self-scaling, but one that is fundamental to business and employee growth. 

Business growth expert Molly Graham compared starting a company to sitting in front of a table full of Legos. By ourselves, we can start to piece the Legos together and see success. Eventually we notice that to build faster and better, we’ll need others to build with us. Therefore, we hire people. However, for them to be able to build, we have to give them some of our Legos.

The act of letting go requires both trust and humility, at every level. It also means hiring people who are better than you in specific areas. No moment was clearer for me than when we hired our chief marketing officer. I gave him the majority of my Legos and he has since built them into something I could have never imagined, all while helping me learn and develop my own skills. By trusting his skills, I was able to focus on other areas of the business that required my attention and to reinvent my role into something that applied my abilities and passions in a way that better served the company. 

As your company continues growing, you can do the same thing for your employees to help them reinvent themselves and scale. Take the time to help them identify their unique skills and what drives their passion. Have regular check-ins with your teams to uncover a deeper understanding of them, their goals, and professional development within the company. The consequences of not doing this can be significant; a McKinsey report revealed that 41% of employed people surveyed said they left their previous position due to a lack of opportunity for upward mobility, and this was the top reason why they left.

When you hire and develop the right people, support continued learning and development in their areas of strength and interest, and develop the ideal work culture and environment, the company wins. This recipe can create a highly functional team that can solve problems and meet challenges, including product strategy and go-to-market operational issues. Take these stats from Deloitte as an example: 

“Organizations with a strong learning culture are 92% more likely to develop novel products and processes, 52% more productive, 56% more likely to be the first to market with their products and services, and 17% more profitable than their peers. Their engagement and retention rates are also 30–50% higher.”

Where to next?

When I think about growing a team, I go back to what David Atmaram Satterwhite, CEO at Chronus, wrote a while ago, as it really resonated with me. 

He compared scaling a startup to sports, specifically basketball and American football. In basketball, you have only five people on the court. Those five people lean into more generalized skills to win the game together. This was Karl, Ben, and me in the early days. By contrast, in American football you have 11 players on the field, each with a specialized position and specific tasks—blocking target opponents and running particular routes to draw the game in a certain direction. As Lucid started to scale and grow, we changed from basketball to football. The question, “Where to next?” required buy-in and planning from greater numbers of people before we could execute. 

If I’d never asked myself those three questions—What does the company need? When is it time to let go? Where to next?—for the first time over a decade ago, my ability to help Lucid’s growth may have been much more limited. I’ve been given the opportunity to scale into new roles and apply my skills and passions to help product growth, international expansion, and business operations and strategy. Each time I allowed myself to be fully enveloped in that specific role because I knew it would help scale the company, my team, and me.

When deep trust exists between employees and leaders, individuals and teams can scale as the business scales, reinventing their roles along the way.

Dave Grow is CEO of Lucid Software.