ESSENTIALS MANAGEMENT why we built a different onboarding program for new leaders, to make sure they really understand the different way in which Stripe operates based on our principles.” This is an all too common failure mode: A startup’s founding team uses a set of unwritten beliefs they all implicitly know and agree with to make hiring decisions and product decisions — but they never get said out loud or documented somewhere central. “So much happens organically when you’re on a small team always working in the same room,” says Johnson. “You have a lot of informal ability to get things done because you all have an immediate understanding of what kind of decision is being made and how you want to handle it. But when you scale, you can’t easily teach that to someone new in a way that they’ll immediately understand. They have to be conditioned to understand it.” If you’re a leader at a company, do you know what these unspoken, unwritten things are? Have you categorized the common types of decisions you need to make? Have you documented the beliefs that guide how you make those decisions? If not, pause, and do that now. 2. What structure is going to help us achieve our goals? Along with growth comes the need for formal management. Even if you’re committed to staying pretty lfat, you need make responsibilities and escalation pathways clear. “Flatness is really a state of mind,” says Johnson. “You can make your org feel lfat while still having a good chain of authority in place so people don’t have too many direct reports, and there’s a clear way way escalate issues. We do it by not having a lot of titles or signals of seniority, because we want all people to speak up and contribute. Whether or not you get included in a meeting is always about how much you know about a given issue or problem, not about hierarchy. But everyone still explicitly knows who their manager is.” This is what works for Stripe. But every company needs to decide on a structure that ifts their speciifc goals. Maybe you need more hierarchy to execute on very complex processes with a lot of hand-offs. Maybe you need less because you want all employees to be immediately responsive to customers’ questions without having to double-check with someone else. 68