July 2024 – Talent Revolution

Two prompt to help frame a talent search

Write what you imagine six months from now looks like.
- Write what the team will accomplish. Use figures and metrics.
- Write how work will be done differently then versus now. Consider how decisions will be made. Consider working styles.
In order to make the future happen, what would people need to know how to do?
- Create a competence map.
- Determine the skills and experience needed.

I coach the leads on my team to use these two questions to shape their talent searches. I use these questions too.

I use this method to hire. And I interview in a way to find talent I need to bring the vision six months from now closer to the present. If you’re at a hyper-growth firm, optimize for agility and broad exposure — those people adapt and bring lots of ideas that support hyper-growth work.

Hiring is inherently an optimistic endeavor. You have to find highly talented people who will bring ideas and ways of operating that will increase your team’s productivity (hopefully by multiples).

Optimizing employee recognition for the person, not the system

Many questions are asked about how to best recognize talent for their achievements. Questions like:

What are the best ways to recognize employees?
To incentivize or not to incentivize?
To shout out publicly or not?

Every person perceives the ROI of their work in a unique way. For some, it’s money. For others, it’s public recognition. Others may just want to build something other use. The list goes on.

Every organization develops channels to recognize employees. Perhaps it’s a public kudos board. Maybe it’s a company recognition program to award employees for their excellent performance — you see this with sales teams.

The challenge many managers face is: how do I find that happy medium between what a person needs and how my organization operates? Which channel do I optimize?

Principle: Find the equilibrium of personal and organizational culture, and if you have to choose, optimize for the personal.

Every person tells themselves a story about themselves. In that story, they want to be the hero. In that story, the way they become the hero is unique to them. Here’s how you discover that:

Ask: What’s important to you about work?
Ask: What do you want to say you accomplished here 3 years from now? What bullet points do you hope to write on your resume?
Ask: What would be the most cringe-inducing form of recognition you might receive?

You don’t have to ask those exact question — simply be curious about the employee and what matters to them. Listen carefully, make notes, and act in a way that optimizes for their preferences.

Are you talking enough about talent?

As a leader, do you have a network of leaders you can discuss talent spotting with? Here are two simple questions I like to ask:

If you looked at 5 (insert position – “nurses”) candidates of comparable skill, experience, and education – what does the truly special candidate exhibit that the others don’t?
Are you scouting talent? If not, how does the firm actively scout talent?
What signals do you, not your recruiters, look for in the market to know that someone highly talented is available?
How are you signaling that you’re open to talking to talent?

If a manager’s products are decisions, then how they decide to spot and scout talent cannot be discounted.

Find a couple of peers, or level ups, and start talkin’.

Work “I Understand” Out of Your Leadership Vocab

When I worked at Carnival Cruise Line, I took part in a training called “Care Team.”

Care Team is a group of volunteers dispatched to emergencies to provide support to people who experienced some form of trauma or crisis. Example: a loved one died on a cruise, the ship caught fire, anything.

The lesson I most remember from “Care Team” training is never to use the phrase “I understand” — it’s an emotional assault. While often intended to comfort, it can invalidate the unique experience of the person needing comfort creating barriers to authentic communication.

Principle: You can’t possibly understand. So don’t.

Talented members of your team will experience ups and downs. On occasion, they may want to open and talk. Perhaps a charismatic and well-loved leader changed. Maybe there are difficulties at home. It’s possible they sense a RIF coming and are anxious. Whatever the reason, how you handle the conversation signals to talent how much you care about them as a person.

Instead of listening and saying “I understand”, I recommend leaders say “I heard (say what you heard)” + “I can’t imagine how hard this is for you” or “That sounds tough, how might I help?” A great response can be, “Thanks for sharing. We can talk more if you want. Just know, I’ve got your back.”

I wish I had a number for how many people tell me they wish they had a boss that listened to them. When talent meets managers that care, talent sticks around and gives their best outputs.

If you want to read more, I made this Perplexity page for you. You’ll find more practical tips and links to sources that can help improve your communication game. I hope it helps.

I like these 4 ways to use AI for coaching and productivity

Taken from Ethan Mollick’s, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. The book is a practical guide for understanding AI, it’s implications, and how to leverage it for personal and professional life. Recommended.

I like the below applications because it forces the user, presumably your team member, to be curious. I’m not an AI expert, but based on what I’ve read it appears that AI’s utility may be a result of the quality of a user’s curiosity.

I’m pushing the Customer Success Managers (CSMs) on my team to use prompts 1, 3, and 4 daily.

As a coach.
- Prompt: I was thinking of sending an email to a client, but I am busy and I’m scared of the outcome and I don’t think I want to send the email until I have….. Can you reframe my failure to send an email as a loss rather than a default option? Make the framing vivid.
Ask the AI to impersonate people. Famous public figures are best:
- Prompt: “Act as Bill Gates” and then ask for business advice.
- Prompt: “Act as a witty comedian and generate some subject lines for my email that get people to laugh”
- Prompt: “You are an expert and consultant at performance marketing. How would you present these performance insights to your clients in a way they would understand and feel secure in their investments?”
As a teacher.
- Prompt: “You will be my negotiation teacher. You will simulate a detailed scenario in which I have to engage in a negotiation. You will fill the role of one party, I will fill the role of the other party. You will ask for my response in each step of the scenario and wait until you receive it. After getting my response, you will give me details of what the other party does and says. You will grade my response and give me detailed feedback about what to do better using the science of negotiation. You will give me a harder scenario if I do ell, and an easier one if I fail.”
As a data analyst partner:
- Prompt: “Adopt the persona of a data scientist. Here is a spreadsheet I’ve uploaded. (define the data). How would you answer these questions…. using the data given?”

As AI rises, so to must creativity

Culture and music critic Ted Gioia, the Honest Broker, writes:

“The rapid rise of AI is actually the most profound evidence yet of cultural stagnation.” – Ted Gioia, gated source

I like culture, and Ted’s work, because culture is a factor in production and Ted blends culture + economics beautifully.

Culture influences ideas, human capital development, organizational design, work habits and norms, the preferences around customer consumption behavior, and the preferences around what firms people choose to work at. Culture influences everything!

Principle: To get the most from talent, deeply embed yourself in the culture.

Now you have my thoughts and why I like Ted, let’s consider:

Why does Ted think the culture is stagnating?

New and innovative music is not being introduced into the market.
Consumption habits are regressing to the past versus consuming at the margin.
Firms are optimizing for the formula that works. Look at the various remakes of old franchises: Marvel, Ghostbusters, and how much music sounds like hit music from days gone by.

What are some reasons Ted believes AI doesn’t help?

AI is fundamentally backward-looking relying on analyzing and re-combinating existing data rather than generating truly novel ideas or content;
AI recommendations biases existing preferences; and
AI-generated content imitates rather than innovates.

Why does this matter?

Growth happens at the margin.
Growth happens when people become more curious about the unknown and under-explored. Ideas are good!
Ideas gets the most utility when it’s tied to production. Talent needs to leverage their curiosity to make and ship new things.

What can you do about it?

Ask talent: What have you been curious about lately? What ideas are you exploring? What ideas do you think are under-explored?
Ask Talent: What do you think we’re missing here? Where do you think we need to spend more time and attention?
Challenge Talent: What’s one thing you could do today to leverage that curiosity and produce something valuable for the business? How can I help?

Want an example?

I work in Customer Success. I asked a new hire two questions:

Based on what you’ve experienced so far, what are we missing?
Where are we going wrong? I want your gut reaction.

The new hire introduced ideas from their previous role — they took an idea from their last culture and suggested our culture adopt the idea. Good thing the ideas are implementable.

We’re we stagnating before I asked this question? No, we’re in hyper-growth mode and moving fast. However, like Galileo’s ship, having an outsider give you their perspective gives you insight into what you might be missing.

How does this connect to my principle?

By actively engaging with a new hire and seeking their fresh perspective, I wasn’t just observing our culture from afar – I was deeply embedding myself in it. This approach manifests the principle in several ways:

I acknowledged that culture is not static, even in a fast-growing company.
My openness demonstrates valuing diverse perspectives, including those from outside our immediate cultural bubble.
I showed a willingness to question and potentially improve our current practices.
I facilitated the cross-pollination of ideas between different corporate cultures, which can drive innovation.

If you deeply embed yourself in the culture this way, you can create an environment where talent can thrive, new ideas can emerge, and you can actively combat the kind of corporate cultural stagnation.

Building teams like picking stocks

If you asked the median economist for investment advice, they’ll likely tell you to buy an index fund. It performs well over time, across many market scenarios, and spreads out the risk.

If you asked me my philosophy for building teams,I would tell you to build teams that produce consistent measured progress rather than erratic performance swings or complete stagnation.

I think of work like an input/process/output (IPO) model. The team is the process. Inputs come in, the team processes those inputs, and the outputs are business progressing products. If you want your team to make better outputs, you need to carefully select for a few factors.

Perspectives and approaches.
Raising the team’s equilibrium of agreeableness by maximizing hiring undervalued people with extreme talent at the margins of human capital distribution for a given function.
Optimize healthy creative abrasion.

Perspectives and Approaches

I don’t know that true uniformity exists in an absolute sense in nature. Variation is part of the game and part of what makes a healthy ecosystem.

For teams to make consistent progress amidst whiplash and erratic changes to the business, you must have variation in perspective and approach on the team. Like an index fund – a wise manager spreads out the risk by having a diverse stock of human capital on the team. Bet the market vs betting an equity.

Raising the Equilibrium of Agreeableness

In Gridlock, a paper by Scott Baker and Michael Gilbert, suggests that a designer of an institution (read: team builder) would get better outcomes by picking with polarized views and creating incentives and structures to find compromise. I’m oversimplifying the ideas.

Practically, the wise manager seeks to introduce new ideas and approaches to the team in order to for the competing views to compromise and create steady forward progress.

Additionally, the varied perspectives insure the manager and the firm against poor decision making processes.

Optimizing for Healthy Creative Abrasion

Multiple perspectives and styles are useful if a manager can foster a team spirit that celebrates healthy creative abrasion — the act of debating ideas and presenting competing alternatives for the purposes of finding the right answer.

Managers create an environment for this magic to emerge by keeping themselves open to new ideas. Asking team members to prove the manager wrong. Celebrate when individual contributors actively contribute to the work of others. I’ll write more on team dynamics in later posts.

Principle: Cover your weaknesses, build for steady progress, and spread your risk.

The timeliness wisdom to not have all your eggs in one basket, diversify your portfolio, invest in the market (as a whole), and to build a team of rivals is seen across subjects, cultures, and time.

Improvising like jazz musicians, but as an interviewer

Jazz is an improvisation-based genre of music. It has a language — sort of. It has constraints — sort of. It has traditions – sort of. What’s firm of about jazz is the requirement to listen. All musicians desiring to engage in the improvisation-based genre that is jazz must listen.

Musician A hears a musical idea played by Musician B. Musician A wants to contribute to Musician B’s work. They pull from their knowledge base and their own ideas about music and output an idea that furthers Musician B’s expression.

Principle: Listen to how people respond.

A skilled interviewer (Musician A) takes to the answers of the interviewee (Musician B) as an input. The interviewer runs the input through a process — connecting ideas to other ideas, figuring out how to be more curious, deciding to challenge the interviewee, or perhaps something else. The interviewer outputs a follow up question or prompt. The interviewee rewards the interviewer with more insights.

What emerges from this input/process/output (IPO) approach is “jazz”. An artful exchange of questions, challenges, and insights.

Don’t overthink what to ask. There are no “right” questions. Their is only your curiosity and how you deploy it.

Adapting a non-traditional interview across cultures

Different groups of people have different interview norms. In the United States, you may see all kinds of interviewee styles. In the Philippines, it tends to be formal.

Scaling the non-traditional interview formats I use globally is easy.

Principle: Be the candidate’s biggest fan.

Who doesn’t like having a fan? Admired Leadership writes about fanness. When I lead large teams I would always say I’m my team’s #1 fan before I said I was their boss. Desiring people to believe in you is a quality of human nature that transcends time and space.

I wish I had a multi-step process for how to become a fan. I don’t. I see it as a mindset. People who have this mindset deploy the following four characteristics in spades towards their candidates:

Curiosity
Ethics
Drive
Conscientiousness

Don’t believe you are high on any of these traits? You likely are because you’ve read this far. Click here to find out how you can develop curiosity through listening.

Finding Don Quixote

Don Quixote is the famous knight errant from Cervantes’ book of the same name.

Quixote is a man enamored with tales of chivalry and heroism. He reads books on the topic to the point that he becomes delusional – choosing to think of himself as one of those fairy tale knights. He goes on quests and, the author makes this immediately apparent to the reader, it is only he who knows he’s on the quest.

Principle: look for your knight errant.

Look for people obsessed with a topic — especially one that benefits your firm. In interviews simply ask: What are you interested in? What are you reading about or listening to obsessively? Make it easy for your candidate to answer, give an example from your life.

I obsess over talent and how talent is spotted, cultivated, and exited from firms. I consume nonfiction and fiction alike to better understand people. It’s no surprise why firms find me valuable for people-oriented challenges.

I look for people obsessed with things. I met someone who was obsessed with space science. Specifically, they read peer-reviewed scientific journals on the search for microbial life on other planets. The person shared the details and depth of their research. I asked how their thoughts stack rank against prevailing trends. I received a ton of insight into how the person thinks: empirically, analytically, creatively, and doesn’t shy away from rigor. I see immediate business applications.

Finding talent with an obsession that complements your business needs improves your firms advantage over another. You can be assured that your talent will look to solve problems in a style and manner of thinking similar to what they obsess about. You’ll enjoy the returns of high and useful productivity with little need to motivate or performance manage — management efficiencies.

Work smarter, not harder.

Lensrental.com’s packaging via Rohan

Rohan writes the “A Learning A Day” blog. In a recent blog post he writes about lensrentals.com’s packaging. I’ll let Rohan speak for himself — read his blog.

My question: What kind of manager allows his teams to create such wild and engaging messaging?

My answer is a principle.

Principle: Create an environment for talent to be as creative as possible given x constraints.

I write about spotting, retaining, cultivating, and exiting talent. When looking for creative individuals, look for people who notice the un-obvious.

Is it obvious to write a long message on package tape? No. In fact, some firms may want to advertising on their packaging tape. Not lensrentals.com.

Is it obvious to write “We’re the best, but we’re not perfect”? No. A firm would always want to represent themselves in the best way possible. Not lensrentals.com.

Somewhere within lensrentals.com, there’s a person with ideas about how to make un-obvious interesting and engaging. And somewhere in that firm there is a manager that thinks: “How might I create an environment where this person can be as creative as they can be?”

My process for a non-traditional interview

My interviews are not always traditional. I’m often hiring talent for B2B tech customer strategy/revops orgs. The talent I need acts with high initiative, creativity, and makes good decisions.

You can identify these people using behavioral-based interview methods. “Tell me about a time when…” style prompts. My issue is that these questions are often testing for prep and not for talent… unless you need someone talented at prepping for interviews.

Principle: Human behavior is paradoxical except when it comes to interview prep. Therefore, as the interviewer, be the paradox.

To get around the prep, I use a non-traditional interview format. I start off by setting ground rules.

I promise to let you know my thoughts on moving forward at the end of the call.
I promise you will walk away believing I made every effort to develop an accurate understanding of your work and capabilities.
I promise you will extract value from this interview that you can use outside of a job search.

Already, I’m making promises and claims that many hiring managers don’t make. Candidates consistently demonstrate appreciation.

Next, I ask about them. I ask about their interests. I ask about what they’re reading, writing, listening to, watching. If a candidate is really into billiards, I may ask how they would change the game to make it more exciting. If someone is into food, I might ask why avocado toast is expensive given the ingredients are quite simple. Anything! I simply want to learn about the person.

At this point in the interview, the candidate is relaxed. They are happy to be talking about themselves. They appreciate the interesting questions and the opportunity to think and be creative — Note: I need that kind of talent.

I then dive into questions about work. I might ask what did executives get right/wrong at their last/current employer about the product’s direction. I share a business problem and I ask if we’re missing anything in our problem statement. I even ask for their suggestions.

All of this takes 30-45 minutes. Candidates consistently express how much they enjoy the experience. They demonstrate visible excitement to join the team. They are often happily willing to engage in more interviews.

When things have gone wrong, it’s been because the talent wasn’t a great listener and not a great fit. I argue that my process more quickly filtered out the talent I didn’t need.

Listen like a musician.

How many professional bloggers write about listening skills? While I may be one of the many, I come with a unique perspective — I’m a trained musician. And as a trained musician, I can give you insights about listening that others might not.

Principle: Listen to how people respond.

To learn how to listen like a musician, consider learning to play an instrument. You’ll pick up an enriching fun hobby, and you’ll learn how to critically listen to how an instrument responds to you.

In your music practice you’ll learn how your actions influence the timbre and tone of an instrument. You’ll learn the upper and lower limits of the instrument’s capability. And if you’re playing with other musicians, you’ll learn how your sound (or voice) interacts and blends with the voices of others.

No instrument? No problem. In interviews, practice curiosity. When you ask a question – watch how someone responds and what they say. How do they respond when you ask about their interests? How do they respond when you become more curious about the things they’re interested in? How can you connect those interests to a concept at work? Are the answers you’re receiving more insightful than the (likely) prepared answers you receive from candidates?

Think this is poppycock? Perhaps I’m bridging too big a gap. But I’m not. I practice these ideas daily. My teams report that they value that I’m a good listener. Candidates are quick to tell me that they wish all interviews could be the way they had it. Allegorically, this method works.

Exactly how the instruments responds to the artist, so to do people respond to people. If you want to become skilled at interviewing or managing, you need to understand how things respond to you — you need to listen.

Certainty and confidence.

When you are enabling your talent on a new skill, they may express a lack of execution confidence. They may use words like “I’m confused about…” or “I don’t know about…” Your temptation might be to ask, “why didn’t you ask more questions in the training,” but that might be premature.

Principle: slow and methodical practice yields greater long-run returns.

I studied piano in college — music education and music composition. At a collegiate level, music students are taught that slow and methodical practice will lead to faster and more accurate execution. In the music world, near-perfect execution is the bar.

To create a practice similar to how a music student would practice, consider these steps.

Before training:

Identify the outcome/output required of the process being trained.
Identify why that outcome is important.
Break the process down into bite-sized fragments.
Identify a catchy metaphor that simplifies the process. “It’s like baking an apple pie,” or “it’s like sky diving,” or anything that gives the trainee a framework to understand the process.

Training:

Explain the outcome and why it matters — steps 1 and 2 above.
Explain the metaphor.
Teach each step in the process from beginning to end.
Teach the process from the end back to the beginning.
Reiterate the metaphor.
Ask your talent to teach it back to you.
Look for the gaps in what they teach.
Practice the gaps.
Practice the whole process.

Finally, pick real-world low hanging fruit and push your talent out of the nest.

Identifying Hidden Talents

I realize the topic is quite broad. I’m going to focus on one behavior leaders can practice to identify hidden talents.

Hidden talents are exactly that, and skilled leaders know that spotting and capitalizing hidden talent likely leaders to better returns. The reason is that most leaders aren’t skilled at spotting.

Principle: Human behavior is paradoxical except when it comes to interview prep. Therefore, as the interviewer, be the paradox.

To find what’s hidden leaders must listen. Deceptively simple because listening in this context requires you to:

Deploy massive amounts of empathy.
Be an active listener.
Be genuinely curious.

Empathy is required to place yourself in the shoes of the candidate. What’s their worldview like? What’s life been like for them? What stories might the tell of personal challenges they’ve overcome? You get to this spot by asking questions.

What are you reading/watching/listening to these days? Tell me more. Why? What is it about this topic that interests you? If you could rewrite/deploy a new content strategy, what would you do?
What factors contributed to your successes to date? Who do you credit as an influential teacher? What did you learn from them? If you met a student that was inspired by your story and wanted to be like you, what advice would you give them?

Unconventional, these questions open the door to learn more about the candidate. Most candidates aren’t prepared for you to be interested in what they’re interested about, and many will jump at the chance to share their interests. You’ll learn the capabilities of the person and you may be shocked that the candidate hasn’t gotten employed sooner. You could argue that it’s telling on a negative and positive side — why can’t it be both?

You can develop these skills by listening to skilled interviewers. Lex Fridman, Tyler Cowen, and Shane Parrish are all skilled interviewers. As you listen, listen to the phrasing of questions and how the interviewer engages the interviewee — Cowen is especially good at that.

Thoughts on Teaching Interviewing

Principle: Organizations want to hire the best talent at the best practice with hopes for the best returns.

If that principle is true, then I recommend focusing on the processes related to spotting talent — interviews. And better still, maximize for identifying talent that is likely undervalued by the market. You can expect better returns from labor outputs and enhance your future recruitment effectiveness because you found the gem that everyone passed over.

Skilled leaders teach their leads how to interview. They invite them to shadow interviews, they mock, and they learn how to ask questions that reveal a candidates hidden talents. Here’s my method.

Teach how to visualize talent capital. I use a recipe metaphor. What ingredients do we have more than enough? What do we need?
Use the visualization to write a job description and recruitment req.
Find models of candidates with ideal skills and traits.
Shadow interviews. Ask the leads to summarize what they learned and teach back.
Mock interview. Invite leads to mock interview each other and myself. I intentionally create scenarios where the lead will need to decline the candidate to their face.
Lead an interview with me shadowing.
Manage their own interviews.

I believe in the process because getting good at spotting and assessing talent ties to better returns. And, helping leaders get better at this skill makes them more valuable to the market.

Key Metrics

% Involuntary/Voluntary attrition at 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year.
% Business outcomes achieved on target.
# of candidate referrals from existing employees

What is Talent Revolution

I intend to share my perspective about talent and practical tips you can use to improve the attraction, retention, development, and promotion of talent.

I obsess about talent. I read about what leaders can do to better activate talent, I spent a chunk of my profession as a talent spotter, and firms like to hire me because they want to turn around the outputs of talent on their teams.

I prefer simple principles and practical approaches. I am not always an adopter of conventional wisdom, and often, I play the contrarian. People don’t always operate the way you expect them to, they’re paradoxical like that. I find it best to embrace the paradox.