Leadership Frameworks for Scaling Organizations and Personal Growth

Key Quotes

"Molly Graham has worked for some of tech’s most effective leaders, including Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Chamath Palihapitiya, and Bret Taylor. Today she leads Glue Club, a community for leaders navigating rapid scale, growth, and change. She’s best known for her “Give away your Legos” framework and her collection of practical mental models for leading through hypergrowth."

This description introduces Molly Graham as a seasoned leader with experience at prominent tech companies and as the founder of Glue Club. It highlights her reputation for developing practical frameworks and mental models, particularly for navigating rapid growth and change, setting the stage for the advice she will share.

"Molly Graham: ...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 i started in tech uh 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 um a year and a half at google which is not very long and google was pretty big when I was there 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"

Graham explains that her frameworks stem from personal experience and a desire to help others avoid similar pitfalls. She recounts her early scaling challenges at Google, where her department rapidly expanded, providing her with foundational insights into managing hypergrowth.

"Molly Graham: ...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 like somebody putting down a giant pile of legos in front of like a bunch of kindergarteners and then just being like build something and that's sort of what it feels like when you start it's like whoa there's so many legos and it's so fun there's a lot of opportunity... but then you're like okay like you know you build something and then you take it apart and then you put it back together and then eventually you started 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 i'm good at building houses like i was put on earth to build houses and almost like assuredly inside of scaling companies as soon as you're like i feel good at this and i like am i should do this forever somebody's going to show up and be like be like okay it's not a house it's a neighborhood like and you need to like 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 you know dog parks and streets and uh other things that are entirely un house like"

Graham introduces her "Give away your Legos" framework using a vivid metaphor. She illustrates how leaders and employees must continuously evolve and delegate their current expertise as companies scale, moving from mastering one task (building a house) to tackling new, larger challenges (building a neighborhood).

"Molly Graham: ...the other rule i have for managing bob is you know a lot of people are like oh you're feeling pissed off or tired or whatever like go to bed and wake up tomorrow morning and you'll feel better and the truth is that you know you like i want to send the rage email at 9 00 pm like you still want to send it at 8 00 am and a lot of these emotions just like do not go away in 24 hours um so my rule of thumb from facebook was give it two weeks and you know these the emotional the sort of bob bob is like these waves and they just roll through so you know 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 typically they go away in a couple of days you get something new you know some new wave but anything that lasts longer than two weeks is actually something you should pay attention to"

Graham discusses her "bob the monster" concept for managing emotions during change. She advises leaders to acknowledge these feelings but not act on them immediately, suggesting a two-week waiting period for persistent emotions to determine if they warrant deeper attention, distinguishing between temporary reactions and significant issues.

"Molly Graham: ...chamath when he pitched me on this job actually drew me a picture on a whiteboard he said you know look you can stay the the the way a lot of people do careers this 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 you know 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 you know the picture he drew had this j curve sort of like basically leading you to places that are way beyond where the stairs could ever get you"

Graham explains the "J-curve vs. Stairs" career growth framework, a concept pitched to her by Chamath Palihapitiya. She contrasts the predictable, linear progression of a "staircase" career with the riskier, yet potentially more rewarding, "J-curve" path of taking significant leaps that involve initial setbacks but lead to greater long-term advancement.

"Molly Graham: ...the waterline model is something that we taught on nols and it's a really really helpful model for understanding how to diagnose when something is not working on a team and so i teach it inside of glue club and um i'll just quickly explain it so 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 where what are we trying to build or ship or um do and 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 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"

Graham introduces the "Waterline Model" for diagnosing team problems, adapted from her time at the National Outdoor Leadership School. She uses the metaphor of a boat on an ocean to explain that team performance is affected by factors below