Org charts are more like funhouse mirrors than many people realize, providing a view of the truth but with multiple distortions. If you assume that all leadership is hierarchical, or everyone with the same title has the same influence, or that the number of people you manage is directly correlated with your importance, well, the way it works in Boardrooms, corporate offices, and hallways after hours can be dramatically different. During my days at Google there were multiple examples of “Eric, Larry and Sergey” whisperers who could help bless or kill a project without having a SVP title. There were senior engineers scattered about without any teams but who could look at your proposal and tell you whether the architecture would work or not. And there were culture carriers who served as weathervanes for morale, as well as being weather makers themselves.

These lessons never left me – I experienced them positively and sometimes less productively as a product exec there. Working with startups today via our venture firm Homebrew, they inform the guidance provided to the founders as they build and scale their own companies. And equally I try to remind people within those teams, especially the ones that are so impatient to get to a certain title or headcount responsibility that they can be their own worst enemies making career decisions, that Span of Influence is Not Limited to Span of Control. Don’t run to a worse startup just because you can get a VP role there, or OTOH stay somewhere uninteresting out of concern you’ll have to ‘take a step backwards’ [title/managerial-wise] applying for other positions. Again referencing my Google years, there were a ton of early business and operations team members who despite their seniority, came on in IC or lower-titled management roles after understanding the opportunity. You know what happened? They succeeded wildly and got promoted quickly as we scaled, ultimately with a much more satisfying career arc, and definitely more lucrative, than if they had said, nah, that’s beneath me.

As an aside, Mayor Lurie here in San Francisco has been an excellent positive version of this during his first year on the job compared to what I was experiencing on the ground prior. The Mayor’s office does have structural challenges given the Board of Supervisors governance responsibilities and all the various Commissions. GrowSF has written why this is a negative for our city, especially in light of the work to be done in public safety, housing development, and rezoning. Despite that reality, Lurie seems to be an energetic and present problem-solver, giving off vibes of accountability and effort, even if the solutions aren’t fully under his office’s authority. We’ll see if this hopefully can be precursor to collective action and sustainable progress.