I’ve been on a journey for the last year and a half. If I were to summarize that journey, I’d say that I have been focused on trying to marry my work with one word: Joy.I think for the previous 15 years, I was focused on words like Accomplishment or Useful or Valuable. I wanted to feel those things. Something shifted about 5 years ago, and since then, I’ve been on a journey to find a different relationship with work. At some point, I settled on the word Joy as a north star. It sounds k...| mollyg.substack.com
What if your career choices were being made by the wrong part of yourself? In this essay, I share a powerful metaphor from my coach: picturing your inner voices as passengers in a car. By moving my Creative Self out of the trunk and asking my Achiever Self to loosen its grip on the wheel, I found a new way to navigate career transitions with clarity and meaning.| Lessons
We’ve all been tempted to promise a title or guarantee someone they’ll always be the most senior person -- just to close the candidate. But those shortcuts are letter bombs: they feel fine now, then explode a year later. The better move is to sell what doesn’t change -- the mission, vision, and opportunity -- and be clear about everything else you can’t control.| Lessons
Great communication is simple if you think about it as “connect the dots”. It isn’t about talking more—it’s about creating clarity and alignment. Your job as a leader is to make it as easy as possible for each team—and ultimately each person—to draw their part of the elephant.| Lessons
When you're stuck—when you're agonizing over a decision, or when it feels like there’s no obvious answer—I have a simple tool I use with founders and operators inside Glue Club: 10x the problem.| Lessons
Generalists vs. specialists — which is better and why? You’ve probably come across at least one think-piece or thread on this topic. It’s everywhere, and people have very strong opinions about it. I reject the premise entirely. In my experience, there is no such thing as a generalist because everyone is a specialist in something.| Lessons
Applications are now open for the next cohort of Glue Club! Glue Club is a leadership development community that helps you be better and feel better at work. We built Glue Club to give startup leaders a space to learn what good looks like and help them skip some of the mistakes others have made.| Lessons
One of the hardest things to do as a manager is decide to fire someone. Particularly if you're a new manager, you tend to spend a lot of time blaming other things -- blaming yourself, blaming the goals, the business, other people. One of the things you realize after you've managed a lot of people is that if you get that feeling in your gut, then something is wrong. It doesn't automatically mean the person needs to be fired, but it does mean that you need to do the work — do the work to figu...| Lessons
I started a thread this month inside our Glue Club slack about work regrets. As always, the Glue Club crew really showed up with self-awareness, personal reflection, and vulnerability. It has made me think a bit about regret and some of the things that I wish I could tell myself at the beginning of my career. I’m grateful for all these experiences because they’ve gotten me to where I am, so for me regret is simply defined as “knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t do that again...” I...| Lessons
Captains is an ownership model that we implemented at Lambda School that is much simpler than models like RAPID or RACI. It is an elegant and simple model with an obvious implication -- there can only be one Captain for a given project or goal.| Lessons
I’m trying a new format to share, once a month, some things I’m reading and listening to, people I admire and you should know about, and things that have made me stop and think this month.| Lessons
I’m trying a new format to share, once a month, some things I’m reading and listening to, people I admire and you should know about, and things that have made me stop and think this month.| Lessons
Bringing on an early executive means you’re placing a bet. Every leader comes with biases about what to focus on and who to hire, and also blind spots. Your early leadership team is the blueprint for your company’s functional bias and the strategies you will try as you grow. Before you build your leadership team, determine which functions your company needs to be most extraordinary at. Then, design power centers around them and use this to guide who you hire and in what order.| Lessons
Useful. It’s my favorite word and a word that can change the trajectory of your career.To be honest, useful has been a north star for me — it was the word I organized my energy around when I was working inside of companies. AND I have seen over and over again that if you’re inside a growing company, being useful is like finding a jet pack for your career.| Lessons
We were talking about why some roles don't work out — why people get fired or quit quickly or whatever — and Don said, “At some point in your career — when you know what you're exceptional at — if things don't work out, it's not about you, it's about fit.” I recently wrote about this a bit in my post about Joy: the idea that finding a role has two sides to the equation — the jobs you want and the jobs that want you. Fit is about where (and whether) those two sides meet.| mollyg.substack.com
Things I've learned from years inside startups and scaling companies. Click to read Lessons, by Molly Graham, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.| mollyg.substack.com
As an executive, everything flows from how you spend your time. You set a meeting, everyone rearranges their schedule. Time is emphasis, and your calendar very directly affects what gets done in the company and how you spend the dollars of the people who work for you.| mollyg.substack.com
Happy friction is like a speed bump. It’s something you add on purpose to make people pause. Ideally, not because you’re afraid to delegate, but because the cost of getting it wrong is higher than the cost of going slow. It’s friction that sends a message: this matters.| mollyg.substack.com
There are a handful of recurring, company-wide activities that influence how everyone spends their time, including board meetings, business reviews, goals, budgeting, headcount planning, and performance reviews.Good sequencing saves time. One of the things that pains me the most is when I see startups invest weeks of energy prepping for their Board meetings. While Board meetings can be invaluable, it simply should not take weeks to build materials for a meeting that is primarily for your bene...| mollyg.substack.com
I hate OKRs. Let me explain... I believe strongly in having a goal-setting process. The purpose of goal setting in my mind is to ensure that everyone is aligned on what success looks like for the next period of time and how we know if we got there. A good goal setting process is important for two reasons: 1) it creates clarity so that your team knows what to prioritize and can make aligned choices day-to-day and 2) it is an essential learning process for discovering how to govern and run your...| mollyg.substack.com
My work-life right now is casually titled “experiments with friends.” I’ve been exploring what I want to do next by (a) focusing on finding joy at work and (b) creating experiments that feel impactful to me with people that I love working with every day.| mollyg.substack.com
“Organizations are horrible at subtraction.” Someone said that to me a couple of months ago, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. It is so true. Organizations are so much better at adding things than they are at taking things away. We’re better at setting goals and talking about what we’re going to do than we are at talking about what we’re NOT going to do. It's easier to add process than it is to ask why we're still doing that thing that worked great two yea...| mollyg.substack.com
First of all let me say, I seem to only take jobs that I feel super unqualified for, and the number one thing it has taught me is that it is actually an extraordinarily powerful skill to ask the “stupid” questions that everyone else is afraid to ask. Stupid questions have the ability to create clarity in places where people didn’t even know there was confusion.| mollyg.substack.com
