Skates: CEOs must force executives to resolve peer conflicts directly
Spenser Skates · Hitting Hypergrowth with Amplitude's CEO, Spenser Skates: Take Your SaaS Company from $25M to $100M+ · Nov 15, 2023 · at 31:12
Amplitude CEO Spenser Skates outlines a management rule for scaling companies where executive peers attempt to complain to the CEO rather than confronting each other.
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“One of the things that is absolutely wild to me as you grow as an organization is people won't give the feedback to each other directly. They'll have one-on-ones with lots of, with you, with lots of other people complaining about, well, this person didn't do this, and you've got to be able to stamp that out by saying, hey, it's your responsibility to have the conflict and communicate with the CFO and have it out with them. And after that, if you can't do that, then both of you come to me and I'll resolve it and I'll tie break it and I'll make a call. But you have to be able to give them that feedback, and even very large organization, very mature executives that have, you know, spent 20, 3040 years building their careers still get this wrong, because it's so much, it's harder to have that conflict, it's uncomfortable, but you gotta hold that line, because it doesn't scale otherwise.”
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