leadership – Talent Revolution

Contrarian thoughts on PIPs

Lauren Webber and Chip Cutter of the Wall Street Journal wrote about performance improvement plans (PIPs) the other day — click here for the article. What they found is striking: today, nearly 44 out of every 1,000 workers face formal performance procedures. That’s up significantly from just a few years ago. In their article, they trace how PIPs got their start, how managers respond, and how employees respond. No surprises, nobody likes them — except lawyers protecting their clients.

I don’t believe PIPs effectively manage performance. If a manager must resort to a formal measure of performance management, then what has that manager been doing during the lifetime of the employee? The data backs this up – at Cisco, they found that 90% of employees who received a PIP left within a year, whether they survived the process or not. That’s not performance improvement – that’s a slow-motion exit.

Great leaders actively share feedback that helps employees grow and perform better — in real time if possible. Take Michael Pizzorno’s approach at Salient Medical Solutions: address issues through daily conversations that escalate in intensity when needed. No formal documentation, no bureaucratic process – just direct, honest communication.

I don’t believe PIPs are effective for employee experience. Even as a child, I knew of incident reports, academic success reports, JUG (justice under God – a Jesuit thing), I’ve heard of pink slips, and more. These images are symbols that represent danger. A PIP is no different – it’s a symbol that something is wrong; and your employees know it. The numbers tell the story – only 10-25% of employees survive PIPs. That’s not a development tool; that’s a exit ramp.

The alternative is simple — mutually agree on an end date and give a generous severance. This agreement gives employees the dignity to walk out with their head held high and an opportunity to close work relationships. All around, a much more pleasant and supportive experience. As HR veteran Steve Cadigan puts it, when given the choice between a PIP and a generous severance package, 75% of employees choose to leave – proof that even they know PIPs are usually just window dressing.

Some jobs work out, some don’t. It’s a traumatic experience to lose a job. Why make it worse with a device like a PIP? Remove the bureaucracy, and treat your team with dignity. In today’s world of AI pressures and post-COVID workplace adjustments, we need more humanity in our management approaches, not less.

Unlocking Team Potential: Insights from Conducting

The conductor steps onto the podium, raises their arms, and the orchestra snaps to attention. The role of the conductor is to be a communicator — to use language, gesture, and presence to drive performance from a team in order to bring an experience to life.

To learn how to be this type of communicator, you study and practice. The study of conducting includes:

Instrument study: how instruments are played, their constraints, where they sound best, and how to speak to the performers of those instruments.
Music study: how music is written, elements of music, the function of harmony and form, and the history of music.
Communication: gestures, hand waving patterns, baton technique, how to hold one’s self, and how to run rehearsal.

I want to write you about presence. The conductor’s must project confidence and competence while projecting a certain kind of humility. Simultaneously saying to their orchestra “trust me, I know what I’m doing, and I am here to serve you, our music, and our patrons.” The conductor may stand tall, shoulders back, and with a puffed out chest. They may speak firmly but with a tone that leads with respect. Conductors that project such confidence and yet project so much humility and respect get amazing performances.

People are community animals and we love to follow the leaders we admire. And the same way that musicians perform better for effective conductors, so do teams outside of music.

You, the savvy leader, can practice the skills of great conductors.

Study how your teams work. Understand the constraints of their work, the conditions required for great work to occur, and know how to speak to people about their work.
Study your product. Who does your product serve? What are the mechanisms of action that product value for your customers? How do your teams contribute to the top and bottom lines?
Study communication. What type of communicator are you? How well do you simultaneously project confidence and humility? How likely is it that your team admires you?

Remember — you’re not just managing talent — you’re creating the conditions for talent to flourish. Just like a conductor.

Another thought on listening

I wrote about listening a few days ago. Then yesterday, I came across this paper by way of HBR. The paper studies psychological safety and its correlation to how teams learn and adapt. Unsurprisingly, the study finds many positive correlations between psychological safety and team performance. I list a few below.

Direct relationship with performance. Team psychological safety was positively associated with team learning behavior (seeking feedback, discussing errors, experimenting, adapting, improving).
Reduced friction caused by power and team dynamics. Teams with higher psychological safety give back greater returns to their employers in the form of learning, adaptation, output, and feedback to upward feedback.
Teams that are high in “team learning behavior” have high psychological safety and perform better… in fact, it reshapes our earlier thoughts on efficiency.
Team efficiency may be less important for helping teams learn than we thought. Psychological safety may be the friction reducing mechanism that enables more learning and productivity.

You saw the concept “team learning behavior” a few times. The concept describes how a team works. Seeking feedback, continuous improvement, and shipping work are all hallmarks of high performing teams and teams high in “team learning behavior.” It just happens to follow that teams that demonstrate high team learning behavior also are more likely to be high in psychological safety.

One Useful Thing

As a savvy leader, the best thing you can do is create space and time to get better at interpersonal communication.

Listen more and better.
Wait a beat before decision.
Ask more “what if” and “how might we” and “ooh, that’s interesting, how did that…” style questions.

These behaviors act as signals that communicate your desire for more openness. When your team perceives openness, they’ll begin feeling confidence to be more generative. Generative teams ship work. You only grow if you ship.

I hope I’ve shown that three simple behaviors above can start you on a path to increasing team learning behavior and improving the psychological safety of your team.

Investing in listening, and executive presence.

Talent: I’d like to speak about how we communicate with each other. I’m hoping we can work out something, I feel we’re not communicating well.

Leader: Is this really a good use of our time?

How confident are you at this conversation is not happening within your org?

At work, humans typically work with other humans to create meaningful and valuable outputs. For that work to happen, communication must happen. And communication is both a beautiful, elegant, and simultaneously messy process.

Humans communicate differently from each other. Some more direct than others; others more indirect. Some people are optimistic, others skeptical. The list goes on, and no one way is better than another way.

Understanding, of any kind, is iterative. We make claims, we test those claims, we are later proven right or wrong. We make Bayesian updates to our worldview and move on.

As systematic and logical as that process sounds, the human element is not always so logical. Enter the paradox of management.

Two people speaking to each other and each with vastly different communication styles and in the process of collaborating with one another towards the same end may experience friction. Friction converts kinetic energy into heat — and heat in this context could be energy, excitement, anger, or abuse.

The management paradox is that human communication is messy and the furthest thing from logical. The talent obsessed manager, like yourself, learns how to convert communication friction into energy, excitement, and joy. Why can’t friction be fun?

Workplaces that are fun are a joy to be in. And if talent is joyfully learning, growing, and iterating upon themselves what incentive might they have to leave?

Underrated

The value of improving your interpersonal communication skills is underrated and therefore undervalued. The returns from becoming a more skilled communicator are great. The Harvard Business Review’s Sylvia Ann Hewlett wrote an article that “listening to learn” is considered the new rule for executive presence replacing “forcefulness” (read the post).

Here’s an excerpt from Sylvia’s post. I removed a paragraph and spaced out the wording to be easier to read. What’s most important to me, and hopefully to you, is how Unilever is cultivating the type of listening I advocate with their leaders. Read on:

“Trait: “Listen to Learn” Orientation.

Although displaying forcefulness was high on the list of most-sought-after communication traits in 2012, it’s less desired today. People now gravitate more toward leaders who listen and learn from others before they make decisions—a trait seen as critical to growing markets and retaining top talent.

Tactic: Go beyond your comfort zone.

Unilever, which makes and markets hundreds of consumer goods in 190 countries, takes listening seriously, asking selected current and future leaders to spend time outside the realm of their normal experiences in a program called GITS (Get Inside the Skin). GITS is designed to teach them how to better empathize with the company’s 3 billion customers, who come from all walks of life…”

One Useful Action

Evolving as a communicator isn’t about metamorphosing into someone else. It’s about having the humility to acknowledge that you can level up your listening skills, get better at seeking clarification, or take that extra beat before jumping to conclusions.

Here’s a simple behavior you can practice now.

Reflect on the question: How might I listen to learn more this week?
Reflect on the question: How might I wait a beat before making a decision?

Final Thought

Job searching is never easy, and there are networks of job seekers discussing their experience with firms and their hiring leaders with other job seekers. Networks give carriage to bad experiences and word travels fast.

Do your firm and your team a favor, and invest the time to not be one of those leaders known for being an awful and exhausting communicator.

Machiavelli’s Quick Take on Credibility

In, “The Prince”, Machiavelli warns leaders not to build on the people. He implies that people hate being managed and ultimately serve their interests first. You can’t build on or trust someone whose interest is themselves.

I like Machiavelli because I believe his work is cautionary — it highlights the costs of tyrannical action. He almost always offers an alternative.

Building on a person, let’s call this “building culture”, is possible when you — the leader — established that you have the ability to lead, behave with good character, advance towards adversity, plan for the unknown, and inspire others. You demonstrate yourself to be a trustworthy and credible person.

I believe there the leadership talent market lacks a supply of leaders who can demonstrate credibility and trustworthiness upfront. And, I believe there’s demand for that type of leader. It’s good that both of these behaviors are learnable.

The Currency of Credibility

Practice these behaviors to create credibility in those you lead and consult.

Willingness to do yourself what you ask others to od.
Make the small things matter.
Help others save face.
Give your attention.
Give credit.
Ask about impediments to action.
Elevate what matters.
Connect your teams with people and resources that will help them improve their outputs.
Always be spotting — talent, good work, and poor execution.

You can find many coaching programs that will help you learn these behaviors well. I enjoy the Admired Leadership program — where I derived inspiration from the list above — and you may know your own. Find what works for you.

One Useful Action

Are you showing up late for one-on-ones? And while you’re in one-on-ones, are you focused on your person?

If you are — great. Pick another behavior from the list above and practice.

If you’re not — start now.

Overthinking collaboration

I have a theory that leaders overthink how to create highly collaborative and productive teams. This article from the Harvard Business Review recommends the new rules include a culture statement, a way to measure performance, and continuous improvement systems. What’s novel? And why is there demand for this knowledge?

I respect HBR’s work, and I value that they’re serving a need. Thank you, HBR. And I believe their output is not new, it’s what we do everyday — culture.

Let’s consider culture a system of transmitted behaviors, norms, values, and status markers that shape our society or organizations. It’s everything we see and can’t see. The system, like any organism, evolves in adaptive and maladaptive ways.

If that definition is true, here are my reasons for why we’re overthinking teams.

Life Finds a Way

Critique: Large teams are composed of people likely organized in sub teams. When people are organized together to create work outputs, they’ll create a system of behaviors, norms, values, and status markers that help them create valuable outputs — Robin Hanson calls these developments “cultural gadgets“.

Alternative: Allow sub cultures to form and thrive. Great work cultures can have contagion effects. Enjoy that. In fact, go out of your way to share subcultural practices with other teams so that they can be adopted. You’re creating your own internal and mini culture market.

Robustness vs Performance

Critique: Establishing key performance indicators is critical. No disagreement. However, as initiatives change your team will need to adapt. You’ll want robust culture systems that evolve to meet the shifting demands and pressures.

Alternative: Employ real time performance management dashboards (recommended by the article) and track how well the team adapts to changing priorities. Keep a history of all of the changing demands your team evolved to meet, productivity levels during those changes, and challenges you all overcame along the way. Share that story with your team constantly!

Maximize for Bottom Up

Critique: It’s common to hear that culture starts at the top. I disagree. I believe, based on my experience, that the inverse is true. Organizational culture statements are often feel good statements defining “who we are”; however, those statements aren’t a system — they’re words. Platitudes ≠ outputs.

Alternative: Allow your cultures to pop up and grow. In fact, allow for cultural drift — the process of a culture system evolving and adapting to new demands. As leaders, create selection pressures that favor more effective team cultures — celebrate the groups (collectively) that are making the most valuable outputs. And be wary of rigid company-wide policies that may stifle cultural evolution.

Do My Ideas Work and Scale?

Yes. My ideas are not novel. Scrum teams and creative groups operate in similar ways. The teams I build need to be high executing and creative problem solvers — adopting ideas from software and collaborative arts makes sense.

Scaling is both easy and hard. It’s easy to allow cultures to form. As a leader, it’s hard to let go. I am comfortable letting go and allowing culture to form. It’s my experience that people want to feel trusted, and when they do, they create good work. Your mileage may vary.

Potential Downsides

My ideas may not be suitable for teams that need to run a certain way to be successful. More rigid teams or organizations may find my ideas too radical — and that’s okay. As a leader, you need to assess your own culture and determine what’s best.

Wrapping it Up

This blog is for people who are obsessed about talent — spotting it, cultivating it, retaining it, and successfully exiting it into better roles internally or externally. If you’re going to be that person, it’s critical that you create environments for talent to do their best work. That means, creating space for micro cultures to take root, evolve, and adapt.

Useful quotes about talent

From Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross’ book, Talent:

“Don’t underestimate how little people, including your employees and applicants, may think of themselves. There is an ongoing crisis of confidence in many human beings, even in the best of times, and that means high returns from nudging talent in the proper direction… Don’t assume that your best and most productive workers actually know what they are capable of, because very often they do not and need nudging in the right direction to realize their full potential… When you raise the aspirations of an individual, in essence, you are bending upward the curve of that person’s achievement for the rest of [their] life.”

And this one:

“If you believe that talent is the greatest asset of your institution, you also ought to believe that your soft network is one of the greatest assets of your institution. Because that is how you will attract your talent in the future; furthermore, those subsequent hires will help you retain your current talent by making your institution more successful and a more attractive and prestigious place to be.”

Being a bad hang; never a good thing.

I’ve been on teams where senior leaders ask me: “David, how do we get people to engage more” or “How, we do we get people to complain more?” Leaders want to create open environments for new ideas to make things better. Sadly, these very same leaders engage in behavior that makes them bad hangs.

Professional musicians sometimes categorize other musicians as “good hangs” or “bad hangs.” People who are considered “bad hangs” rarely get called, “good hangs” always get called. To “hang” well is to engage in behavior that makes someone want to spend time with you.

Showing up on time and sober.
Being kind.
Active listener.
Plays well with others.
Shares.
Show up prepared.

That’s it.

And in the corporate world, why should a hang be any different?

Managers that show up on time, demonstrate kindness, listen well, engage well with others, share their time and space, and show up ready are people that anybody would want to collaborate with — they’re a good hang.

In most cases where a senior leader asks for more open conversation, the challenge has been that the leader doesn’t listen well, doesn’t share the space, and talks over people — they appear impatient. And when teams begin to think that they are causing someone to become impatient, they quickly learn to shut up. Generativeness dies on the vine. Good talent starts looking for other managers.

One Useful Action

Focus on listening. Here’s how to practice the behavior:

(In your off time) learn to play an instrument. I’m not joking. Learning an instrument requires slow and painful repetition and critical listening skills. In addition, you’ll get a fun hobby out of it too!
When a direct report comes to you with an idea, ask a few questions before outputting a decision. Questions could be: What are the ramifications of this idea? What are the implications? What roadblocks do you expect and how might I help clear them? How might I help?
Don’t give the answer. Leave the question/idea with your team member and encourage them to work on it.

Parting Thought

If the returns from the talent you lead matter, the upfront cost of learning to be a good hang — in this case, listening — is worth every effort.

10 Questions You Can Ask Talent Before They Decide to Job Hunt

Since 2015, there’s an increase in poaching vacancies — vacancies intended for employed workers. By implication, firms are becoming more competitive by poaching top talent from their competitors. That insight comes from a working paper by Anton Cheremukhin and Paulina Restrepo-Echavarria. I write about the topic here.

Good firms conduct exit interviews when talent leaves. Admired Leadership via their blog, Field Notes, posted 10 Exit Interview Questions admired leaders ask. “Exit interviews are a best practice for an important reason. The best leaders want to know why people really left and what they can possibly do about it.” I think differently.

Customer success managers (CSMs) obsess over why and how customers make decisions. Decisions to adopt an innovation grow, or churn out. They seek to understand when customers make buying decisions and they seek to understand the factors that go into that decision-making process. The goal is to feed insights back via cross-functional channels and help the organization become more intelligent about their customers. Ideally, customer-centric organizations adapt to meet the needs of their customers and growth occurs. Worst case, customers churn. Just like employees.

Skilled managers, like you, are wise to think like a CSM when it comes to retaining their top talent. What if we took the 10 Exit Interview Questions offered by Admired Leadership and reframe them the way we might use them in customer success? They are:

How does the job deliver on your expectations? Are the challenges and growth you expected before starting here being realized?
Is it your intent to start thinking about your next opportunity soon?
What do you like most and least about the work now?
I would love your thoughts. Am I investing in you and supporting your success? How might I be more supportive?
How do you rate the quality of the recognition you receive for your work and contributions?
What makes it difficult to be productive? What gets in your way to achieve high performance?
If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about our team culture, what would you change and why?
How about the organizational culture? What might you change if you could change one thing?
If we hire in the future, would you recommend a job on our team to a friend or former colleague? Why or why not?
What do you think we need to do to retain our best talent?

Conducting an interview of this kind with an employee is courageous — for you and the employee. Your questions may cause someone to start looking for a new job. You may only receive positive “everything is great” type responses. You may hear some hard truths. There could be other reactions. I’ve been there, here’s how you manage that.

Listen, and be open.
Actively listen – ask clarifying questions, rephrase what you heard, and ask for the employee to check how well you understood them.
Do not debate. Listen to learn.
Thank them for their time.
Commit to following up so that your employee believes their feedback mattered.

Ultimately, the quality of your answers may be a function of your ability to create open and trusting relationships with your team. It’s the same thing with your customers.

If you find that neither your customers nor your employees will be honest with you, you may have a deeper problem.

Excellence is a process

I like this quote from Brad Stuldberg’s NYT article (NYT).

“Excellence is not perfection or winning at all costs. It is a deeply satisfying process of becoming the best performer — and person — you can be. You pursue goals that challenge you, put forth an honest effort, endure highs, lows and everything in between, and gain respect for yourself and others. This sort of excellence isn’t just for world-class athletes; it is for all of us. We can certainly find it in sports, but also in the creative arts, medicine, teaching, coaching, science and more.” — Brad Stuldberg

I studied music in college, and I made my living as a professional musician for a time. Excellence is the bar.

Imagine being called to work at firm. You are told you’ll have a week to prep for your first day. You spend the week learning all you can about the firm, the industry, and the people you’ll be working alongside. You show up day 1 and you’re put in front of executive leaders and asked to deliver your 90-day strategy, forecasts, and anticipated roadblocks and expected outcomes as your first meeting. Oh, and you are expected to be highly credible and people are supposed to instantly trust you.

That’s not a realistic example for an office, but it’s a realistic example for the type of stress and excellence required of a professional musician.

The way the professional musician makes her mark is her ability to show up. And her ability to show up and perform is a function of hours of careful and focused practice. She practices slow. She criticizes each move of her body and her instrument. She wonders if she can be even more efficient. She records herself. She listens to herself back (a painful exercise). She keeps at it until her execution approaches (or functionally is) flawless.

That professional musician shows up for her job — a rehearsal in the morning for the show she’ll be expected to perform that night. She puts the music on the music stand, takes out her instrument, tunes, and executes — near flawlessly. That’s the standard.

Two Takeaways

As a manager, practice and become excellent at your craft. I obsess about talent, I write about my perspective on talent. I read, I think, I practice, I write, and I share what I learn with you. Get better at the thing that makes you, you.
As a manager, teach your team how to practice like a professional musician. Identify the key behaviors your team needs to execute. Then, step through the behaviors slowly. Practice, give critique, offer best practices, and keep practicing until – finally – you’ve nailed it. There’s no substitute for work.

If anybody can do it, you can

I believe one of the most powerful gifts a leader can give the talent on their team is belief.

Loneliness could be a problem. A Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article reports “58% of Americans are lonely, religion is fading, and work doesn’t love us back.” People are turning to hobbies and the things they love — becoming super fans of the things they love and finding community through fandom. And community might solve for loneliness.

My speculative theory is that community gives us something bigger than ourselves to believe in. Our life begins to take on more meaning — we get a mission. And we get people, fellow community members, to join us.

Great leaders practice fandom towards their teams. They go to their team members and say, “hey, if anybody can do this super hard thing, you can, and I’m here with you the entire way.”

Beyond belief, statements like “if anybody can do it, you can” give talent something more — the sense that you trust them.

Imagine how it might feel to know someone who cares about you believes in your ability to succeed and trusts your judgment. You can be that leader for someone. If anybody can do it, you can.

Teams goals outweighing personal KPIs?

Tyler Cowen’s August 17th Bloomberg column (Bloomberg) highlights a significant shift in how how talent is evaluated and rewarded in modern organizations.

The Question

If the output to be created is a result of team-based functions, how do you determine who to put on the team and how to compensate that person for their inputs?

The Problem

Giving credit where credit is due. Who owns the largest % of meaningful contribution? How does that get measured?
The use of AI. How much was AI leveraged? Do you compensate people for improving the AI database? To reward or not reward for effective prompt engineering?
How do we find the right people to work on the team? Tyler notices that firms are starting to focus on ex ante signals of quality (a degree, signals of status, etc.) vs taking a chance on outsiders that may prove more beneficial.

My Take

Talent Spotters/Hiring Managers: Get better at spotting talent! Talk with other leaders about how they assess and look for talent. Talk with highly talented contributors and learn about their work. Learn about other disciplines and imagine how talent from that discipline may help you in yours. I found that engineering and music professionals are fantastic customer success managers.
Managers: Depending on your business, it’s possible you’ll need to rethink your KPIs. Perhaps team-based KPI and comp plans are best when the ideal outputs are a result of team dynamics.
Talent: Realize that the signals you put up to indicate your availability will need to change. Networks will become more important for people who have and don’t have credentials.
Managers: How do you reward people who improve the use and adoption of AI in the firm? It’s not enough to suggest good prompts. How are people incentivized to use AI as an efficiency and problem solving partner?

One Useful Action

If nothing else, simply ask yourself: do I have the right talent in the right seats? And, how sure am I that I’m not missing out on undervalued talent?

Problem Solving, Creativity, and the Receptionist

People often comment that they wish they could be as creative as me. 100% of the time they are surprised when I say: “you can.”

I see creativity like an input/process/output framework.

A problem presents itself. The problem demands a solution. The problem walks into an office and greets the receptionist and says, “Excuse me, I demand a solution.” Reception replies, “a solution, you say?”

The Problem, aggravated by having to repeat itself, “Yes, of course, a solution. I don’t want to ask again. I want a solution that addresses me, the problem.”

The Reception, “You’re the problem?”

The Problem, “Yes, I’m the Problem.”

And now for something completely different.

Proportionality

Reasons to deploy intensity:

Create urgency.
Communicate importance.
Communicate gravity.

Reasons to deploy aggression:

….

And now for something completely different.

And remember, if you find yourself reaching for aggression in the zoom room, perhaps it’s time to reach for a glass of water instead. Or a pen. Or better yet, the door. After all, nothing says ‘I’m a visionary’ quite like strategically excusing yourself to stare at the water cooler.

H/T to Adam Frith via Rohan Rajiv from a Learning a Day

Short and simple way to start an interview

You already know interviews can be stressful for candidates, and the interviewer. You also already know that candidate experience matters. You also know that getting hiring right is key.

You likely know that it’s important to ask the right questions and to allow the candidate a few moments to ask a question.

I bet you don’t realize that the time at the end for being curious is not enough.

3 Simple Promises and 1 Question

Commit that you will make every effort to clarify the candidate’s responses. It is your goal not to let them walk away thinking they weren’t clear or that you didn’t understand them.
Commit you will share your candid feedback at the end of the call. Candidates know exactly where they stand with you.
Share your desire that candidates get as much value from the time as you.

Ask: “What would make this call so valuable that a year from now, you’ll still remember this as the most valuable interview you’ve ever had?

Then: Start with what the candidate wants first.

Gains from Trade

An interview is like a trade. Questions are being given in exchange for ideas. The quality of the trade is a function of the questions and the answers.

if you’re an interviewer, you care very much about getting quality data (answers) to make decisions from. And if you want quality data, then you’ll need to put the candidate in the best position possible to make useful outputs.

If you want useful outputs, then delivering value to the candidate quickly and early makes a difference. When the candidate sees you keeping their promise, in Customer Success we call that “Moment of Truth” or “Moment of Proof”, then they will give you something valuable in return.

After I have given the candidate what they want, I then go into my questions. After each answer, I’ll often clarify what I’m hearing. “Here’s how I’m hearing this (insert recap). Where am I wrong? How might I be misunderstanding?” I ask questions like this to see if the candidate will push back. Since the candidate is clarifying their own thinking, you’ll more easily see how the candidate pushes back on you. That’s a useful skill for someone who is customer-facing or doing a lot of communication (even negotiation).

Sharing the disposition of a candidate at the end of a call is a brave move. I do it, and I know other leaders who do too. Be careful that you’re following any HR guidelines and be make sure you’re basing that decision on the appropriate criteria. If you can master this skill, you’re always several standard deviations away from the average interviewer.

To end the interview, I’ll repeat back the promises I made. I say, “I promised I would take every opportunity to actively listen and clarify, do you believe I did that?” “I promised you would know exactly where you stand at the end of this, do you?” “And, I communicate my hope to make this interview so valuable that a year from now you’ll still be extracting value. What value have you received?” 100% of the time people say they learned something about themselves, they’re even more motivated to interview next steps, and are so happy they invested the time to meet.

Principle-Agent Problem as a Response to Critique

Critics could argue that this process takes time that may not be available. That’s true. I can complete this interview in 30-45 minutes. Since getting the right people is so critical for me, I’ll happily invest the time because the returns are great.

Additionally, traditional interviews are an asymmetrical exchange — economists call this a principle-agent problem. The interviewer and the interviewee each hold lots of knowledge that isn’t shared and makes the deal less optimal. Knowledge like: who they are, how they are to work with, and and what they’ve done in the past. By adopting the approach I’m advocating you reduce the amount of asymmetry by making the interview a more balanced exchange of value which will lead to a more optimal trade.

Coda

My strategy is not “the” strategy. It’s not “the” one way to interview. It’s what works for me and how I want to show up as a leader. Your mileage may vary.

What matters is this: do you care? how do you show you care? and how do you show that you’re worth spending more time with?

Leadership transitions

Charismatic and adored leaders develop a sense about them. The organizational culture reveres that leader. The leader is considered “legend”. High performing talent may have joined your firm simply because of that leader. Some people may believe that the company won’t last without that person.

At the point when that leader must leave, skilled managers recognize they’re at a critical decision point — how they communicate change.

The sub-optimal thing is for the exiting leader to announce their departure on an all hands and for the new leader to join the call and share the new plan forward. That move threatens the established culture and norms of the organization. As much as change may be needed, that is not the moment.

A more optimal strategy would be two steps.

Meeting 1: The exiting leader to share their departure with the team. Share their plans for the future — that gives the team the opportunity to feel hope for their beloved leader. And, use that as an opportunity for the team to share their memories of the leader. Perhaps give an award or a silly gift for the leader to remember the team. This milestone moment gives the team the opportunity to grieve together, separate, and prepare for what’s next.
Meeting 2: The new leader introduces themselves. They acknowledge the legacy the last leader left behind — they pay homage to the past. They share what they observe the team doing now that works. They share their plan to listen, get to know everyone, and in the future share what they learned and how they see things move forward.

What’s happened here?

Meeting 1 is for the team to collectively grieve and progress forward.
Meeting 2 is for the new leader to say they come in peace and promise to listen, thus assuaging concerns that the new leader will threaten the culture.

Why bother?

Because if you hope to seek the gains that result from hiring and cultivate great talent, you need to have an environment for talent to thrive and do its best work.

If you can’t do that, what are you doing then?

Scaling Talent Mass

Things that scale are things that have magnitude — the thing gets bigger or smaller in numerical while retaining its fundamental nature. Mass, energy, temperature, and time all scale. Leaders, like you, often ask how to scale human capital through hiring.

My ideas for hiring center around looking for unseen or skills undervalued by the market thereby increasing the diversity of your teams and you seeing gains from this approach. The quantity that we’re scaling is experience. You’ll see that a simple process, it’s not novel, for identifying experience gaps can help you find talent that increases your team’s ability to create useful outputs.

Step 1 – SWOT

Start by mapping your team’s experience by using a SWOT analysis. High-level and from the perspective of your team’s capabilities, map out your team’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Example:

Strength	Weaknesses	Opportunities	Threats
Creativity	Analytical Rigor	Outbound communication campaigns	Lack of engineering/mathematical/systems thinking

Step 2 – Process Map

Go to the individual level and begin thinking about how each member of your team contributes to your SWOT analysis. What is it about how they take inputs, process them, and convert them into usable outputs that makes your team especially creative, or makes you think the lack of systems thinking is a threat to the team?

Team Member	Strength	Weaknesses	Opportunities	Threats
	Creativity	Analytical Rigor	Outbound communication campaigns	Lack of engineering/mathematical/systems thinking
Person A	Support: Previous experience as a creative.	Risk: Only recently developed complex data experience and statistical thinking.	Support: generates lots of ideas for ways to re-engage clients.	Support: Previous experience working with systems and designing systems.
Person B	Risk: Skeptical by nature, not as strong at generating new ideas. Great at preventing the creatives from running wild.	Support: Tons of experience analyzing complex data sets and creating statistical models.	Support: Previous experience running A/B tests on digital marketing campaigns.	Risk: As good as they are at analyzing data, often misses the big picture. Myopic in their thinking.

Step 3 – GAP Analysis

Step back and look at the developing matrix. Ask yourself these questions:

What risks could be turned into strengths with the right addition to the team?
What opportunities are you unable to capitalize on due to missing skills or experience?
Where are you already strong and likely have a hiring bias?

Step 4 – Start the Journey

Instead of looking for “good fits” seek out candidates with experiences and product functions that complement your existing team and address specific gaps.

When interviewing candidates, ask how they process problems. Maybe, in the call, give them a problem to solve with you. See what it’s like to collaborate in real time. Look for talent that can make outputs that convert your team’s weaknesses into strengths thus scaling up experience.

Real Life Story

A firm hired me to build out a scaled customer success team from scratch. I completed steps 1 and 2 and concluded that our team was high on process, high on drive, and low on creativity. The generative people on the team were skilled at taking what already exists and making something from that. We didn’t have truly generative people.

In my network, I knew someone skilled at designing and building large experiences. Their process for converting inputs into usable products was a function of creating customer journey maps for cruise vacations. How is that like scaled customer success?

The same steps required to develop a customer journey are the same steps involved in designing a cruise journey. And, the cruise journey has to be written and executed in a way that anybody from around the world could execute it — that means it must be simple and scalable.

That person is now the manager of the Digital and Scaled program. They built on an office hours program that grew to becoming hugely popular. They developed email onboarding campaigns that increased adoption. On paper this person would have been passed over — the market undervalued them. My firm was smart to hire them, and now they’re a significant contributor.

The strength to restrain

Imagine a scenario where a customer satisfaction rep drops the ball on an account. The sales person, who worked tirelessly to secure the deal, needs to backtrack to save the deal. The customer is frustrated, they want to pay less. A group message is started with all of the parties (except the customer) in copy. The Leader says “customer satisfaction rep, I think it’s best you don’t engage with this customer anymore, and here’s why…” It’s stressful, people are mad, and someone needs to be held accountable.

It’s important for leaders to demonstrate decisiveness and strength at times. They must be able to create and hold accountabilities, and be perceived to be able to punish as well as reward. That said, a skilled leader never publicly humiliates — causing someone to lose face in front of others.

Nothing erodes the trust, morale, or psychological safety of a team more than a leader who publicly humiliates. And, a leader who engages in that way may believe they’re sticking up for the sales person. I argue no.

The sales person, who may have worked hard and may be frustrated, is on the same team as your customer satisfaction rep. They don’t want to see people hurt. They don’t benefit from seeing someone shamed on their account. In fact, it may cause the sales person to think twice before making a mistake — thus eroding morale, trust, and psychological safety.

The better path is to strategically leverage “negativity” and re-affirm the mission. Here’s how it might play out.

(In a Direct Message) Leader: Customer Satisfaction Rep A (Person A), when you did (insert behavior) the customer became upset and distrustful of our product. Don’t do that. Next time, you’re in this scenario, use (insert approach) instead. If you do that, you’ll be able to produce (insert benefit) here.

(In a Direct Message) Leader: Sales Person A (Person B). I am so sorry that I dropped the ball on your deal. I identified the mishap, addressed the issue in our process, and it won’t happen again. I know you work hard on these deals, and it’s important to me, and all of us, that our sales team is successful. Thanks for you partnership.

(In a Group Message) Leader: Person A, Person B, and I spoke. Thank you for the quick connects. I identified the issues in our process. We fixed (insert what you fixed). Here’s what’s happening next… Also, Person A and I discussed our account management strategy going forward and here’s how we’re going to pivot.

This approach is more collaborative, positive, and seeks to build people up. It places the go-forward first. The leaders real strength is realized — the strength to take the hit personally and not publicly shame their team.

Special Note

If you’re working with teams that may be locally in countries where losing face is a major offense, it’s even more important for leaders to demonstrates restraint.
The space between stimulus and response is the space where you get to decide who and how you are. Don’t discount that time.

Forming impressions, the scientific method, and feedback

A simple way to share feedback is to invite conversation into forming thoughts.

Here’s an example:

“I’m forming an impression that your work is becoming delayed. I think I’m 80% misunderstanding the situation, and I want to check in with you for your thoughts. Have a few minutes to help me?”

The person you’re talking to will appreciate your humility and the invitation for them to participate.

On the call, here’s how you frame it:

“Thanks for helping me through this. Here’s the impression I’m forming – and I think I’m likely wrong – (layout your impression).

I am forming that impression because I’ve noticed (layout your observations).

Where am I misunderstanding things? Where am I wrong? What are your thoughts?

Caveats:

Communication culture matters. This method works if your team members are direct or indirect communicators. Why? Because we’re using the scientific method to share our feedback. The scientific method starts with a hypothesis based on observations. In science, hypothesis are crafted so that they can be dis-proven, that’s when we learn. As a result, indirect people appreciate that you’re not rushing to judgment and direct people appreciate that you’re being fact-based.
Performance Issues. Don’t use this method when there are clear performance issues or violations of codes of conduct. Those must be addressed head on.

Personal Prerequisites

Perspective Taking. It is imperative that you develop the see the worldview of your employee. You likely already have this skill if you’re skilled at negotiating or as a strategist. Leverage that skill towards your team.
Curiosity Your ability to actively listen, repeat back what you heard, and ask thoughtful questions before rushing to judgment are important. You should be curious and desire to learn as much as you can.
Vulnerable. I observe leaders struggle to demonstrate intellectual humility. The ability to admit you might be wrong and ask to be taught strengthens bonds with team members and gives you insights into how they work.

How do I teach my team to do this?

In your next 1on1 with a manager on your team:

Ask the manager to pick a team member they want to give feedback to and tell you the feedback they want to give.
Be Curious and Challenge the manager: How certain are you that the basis for your feedback is 100% accurate?
Be Curious and Challenge the manager to provide evidence and question the quality of the evidence.
Share with the manager your forming thoughts on their feedback. Invite the manager to give you their thoughts on your forming impression.
Go meta and ask the manager what just happened. “What did we just do and how did I do it?”
Ask the manager “How might you do this with your team members on your next 1on1?”

Doesn’t this make me less decisive?

No. The perceived quality of your decision making is improved by your ability to collect data inputs, analyze that data, and then make a data-driven decision. Your teams will trust you because you are a thoughtful decision maker.

In addition to your improving your leadership brand, you’ll also improve your talent retention. People on my team have declined offers that are 2x their current salary to stay because of the quality of coaching they receive from me. I know this is true because the team member shared the offer letter with me.

The collaborative approach I am pitching to you works. I know it works because I use it; employees tell me that they appreciate my collaborative nature and how it pushes them to grow in their roles and as people. There’s no magic. You can do it.

What is generativeness?

Simply: An expression of drive and curiosity that helps others.

Generativeness is a function social skills, depth and breadth of knowledge and interests, connectiveness, and social awareness. Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross discuss it at length in their book, Talent.

Social skills and depth and breadth of knowledge are self-explanatory factors. Connectiveness is the ability to connect ideas — even ideas that are seemingly unrelated. And social/group awareness is the ability to see how those ideas benefit the culture/group.

Steve Jobs is a generative person. When he spoke about the iPhone he spoke about the idea almost as if it was real now. Stuart Koffman calls this The Adjacent Possible.

The reason a manager would talent high in generativeness is because they need to design and build a thing. It could be a product, a service, or a success plan. I’ve hired people to design and (now) lead a Digital Customer Success program. Generative people on my team now built CS Operations teams and functions. Generative people identify, refine, design, and execute implementable ideas that benefit a firm and its customers.

If a manager, like yourself, desired generative talent and want to interview for it here’s how.

Ask a candidate what they’re really into outside of work. (Let them know it’s an optional question).
Ask what they would change about the thing they’re into.
Challenge their reasons for change. Ask “Why” and “What Else”.

What the person is into doesn’t matter. And, you should be aware that you’re not biasing for that. Instead, what you care about is:

Frequency a candidate brings up potential real-world applications or impacts of their ideas.
Frequency a candidates tries to engage me in the ideation process.
Quality of how the candidate handles the limit of their knowledge.

If you feel more comfortable asking a work-related question, then have a generous discussion around a business problem you’re trying to solve and ask the candidate how they might address the problem. Challenge and ask “Why”, “What do you base your ideas on”, and “What else”.

A generative discussion does not feel like an interview question+answer session. A generative discussion feels engaging, fun, and judgment-free… it’s an exploration.

And if that’s not enough consider that generative talent is often overlooked talent. Firms may pass over this talent because they might be just a bit “out there” or they don’t represent the “mean” candidate. That’s good for you! Because that means the market has made a mistake and it’s your opportunity to seize a great investment opportunity.

Imagine a world where you find great talent that others pass over. You create an environment where they can make real impact. They grow your business, they grow their career — and you were the one known for spotting and cultivate that talent.

Cultural Stagnation = f(AI, and Creative Output)? And why team managers should care.

I’m thinking about the connection between AI and human creativity. The question is: what’s the connection creativity stagnation and AI’s transformative potential? And what can managers do about it?

I observe two things.

Scott Buchanan of Economists Writing Every Day writes that investors had high hopes for AI-related investments. The thinking is that AI would revolutionize the world. Recently, analysts wonder if they’ll see an ROI.
Ted Gioia of The Honest Broker writes that the entertainment industry is stagnating creatively. Music preferences are regressing to the past, the New York Times 100 best books of the 21st century contained writers who were mainly known in the 20th century.

Here’s what I think I know.

AI is built on human knowledge.
Human knowledge is an output of humans — largely from some creative/scientific (they can be the same) production function.

Is it possible that we’re realizing that AI is not as revolutionary as we thought because we’re not as revolutionary as we hoped?

This is not the blog for people to learn how to adopt AI into their workflows. Plenty of smarter people are writing about that.

This is the blog for people who obsess about talent and want a (often contrarian) perspective. And because you’re a person who cares about talent, here’s how I believe like us act.

We do all we can to find generative talent. We open our minds to people who are different or don’t have the “perfect” resume and look for people with skills we can use. We increase the breadth and depth of our human capital!
We adopt management styles that promote creativity. We engage in brain storming, ask for talent to give us inputs into decisions, we give inputs, we let people experiment, and we help coach decision-making versus coaching outcomes.
We stop talking and listen more. We let talent give their ideas and we engage with their ideas. We say, “I think you’re trying to accomplish z, and you got outcome y, and and if you take path x your process may get you closer to z.”

Happy generating.

Feedback 101 – Engage vs Tell

Instead of thinking about how to give feedback, what feedback to give, or when to give it; consider engaging in your team’s work.

When team members first join my team, they typically ask how I handle feedback. I typically answer, I don’t give feedback. I get a puzzled look.

Many managers, perhaps you, engage with their teams by sharing their feedback on their work. They will offer balanced critique of what they like and then offer areas for improvement. Skilled managers help their teams grow by engaging in their development. That method works, but it positions the manager (in my opinion) more like a professor vs a fan.

I share that I am their biggest fan. And as their biggest fan I want to engage with them in their work. I want to help them strategize, be a second pair of eyes as they make interpretations of data, and be their negotiating sparring partner. I share that I’m happy to play the role of editor if they need. When they’re ready to pitch, I often ask if I can play the customer so that I can give them ideas at the end that will help them prepare. After their pitch, I’ll ask how it went — what did they expect to happen, what happened, and what learnings can we pull forward for the next pitch.

In that process I shared, where is the feedback? Where is the point where I ask, “may I share feedback?”

People want to tell themselves a story about themselves. In that story, they are doing work that matters. The best way to show someone that their work matters is to engage as a fan.

Is unconventional risky?

I’ve written about approaches to finding talent that work. But they work in a specific context — when you’re looking for creative talent and preferably for a start up team. Being founding members of a team usually requires a combination of knowledge, skill, initiative, motivation, humility, ethic, and creativity. My approach works for me in my quest for that talent.

If you wanted to adapt my approach for your team, I caution you to consider the following:

Are you trained to detect your biases? We all have them. It’s okay, biases exist for a reason. They can also cause you to miss out on great talent — you don’t want that. Get training on how to identify your biases and how to mitigate them.
Be curious, not personal. My approach involves inviting people to talk about the things they’re interested in — what they read, topics they care about, etc. I’m not asking for protected information. I am inviting candidates to opt-in to share more about their outside-of-work interests. Why? What people do outside of work usually centers around their interests — and when you can make your work catered to people’s interest, they’ll find more motivation to work harder.
Be open, not pushy. This process only works if the interview feels open. It can’t feel like an interview. Consider taking a walk, a phone call instead of a Zoom, interview over coffee (if possible), anything else that’s professional — just something to break up the experience and open the possibility to a great conversation.

It’s important to acknowledge that this approach isn’t without its critics. Other hiring professionals, like you and I, raise valid concerns about the potential for unconscious bias and the risk of creating an uneven playing field. These critics advocate for a more standardized, competency-based approach that strictly adheres to job-related criteria. I believe my method can coexist with and enhance traditional hiring practices, and I respect these concerns and continuously work to address them in my process. Constantly reflect, review, and revise as you learn.

At the heart of my approach is the desire to see people as they want to be seen. I desire to see the hidden talents that the system closes off to others. We are so much more than the words on our resume or our prepared answers to standard questions.

The paradox of grand change management

Why do change management projects often fail? I attended a seminar led by Diana Hong of Admired Leadership/CRA Inc to to help me answer that question. I took notes for you. Here are the takeaways:

Principle: Don’t overlook human nature and psychology.

Understand the adoption curve.
- 16% will eagerly adopt change.
- 16% will resist fiercely.
- Focus on the 68% in the middle seeking social proof.
- Map your organization to this curve.
Connect change to identity Use language like “We’ve done this before” and “You’re skilled at changing.” Reference past successes. People need to see themselves as capable of change.
Manage expectations ruthlessly Don’t oversell. Be optimistic about outcomes, pragmatic about the journey. Repeat: “We can’t predict everything. We’ll get smarter as we go. This is the right thing to do.”
Start small, scale fast Begin with early adopters as change champions. Use peer networks to spread adoption. Give managers clear talking points.
Make it the new normal Success is when change becomes habitual. Don’t declare victory too soon. Aim for small wins that compound over time.

If I had to to boil it down to a simple behavior, it would be for more leaders to say what Diana recommends:

Here’s the best case scenario;
Here’s the worst case scenario; and
Reality will fall somewhere in the middle.

The paradox is as much as managers believe a grand, over optimistic, well-built change management strategy will excite and energize their employee, the opposite is likely true.

Embrace the paradox and manage for the mundane.

Effective change is habit change.

Who is your vacancy for?

A recent working paper by Anton Cheremukhin and Paulina Restrepo-Echavarria proposes splitting job vacancies into two categories.

Job vacancies that firms intend to fill with unemployed workers; and,
Vacancies firms intend to fill by poaching employees from other companies.

The dual approach, known in the paper as “dual vacancy”, offers a compelling explanation for the puzzling behavior of the Beveridge curve in recent years.

The puzzling behavior:

Historically, when unemployment went down, job vacancies went up, and vice versa.
Recently, the pattern changed. More job vacancies than expect given the unemployment rate.
That means that even with lots of job openings, unemployment isn’t decreasing as much as it used to in similar situations. Hence, some job openings may be for poaching already employed people.

The findings align with point 3 above. There’s been a significant surge in “poaching” vacancies compared to earlier periods.

In a complex job market, what does this mean for us as leaders?

Consider the vacancies you’re creating — who are they for? The poached or the unemployed.
Are we adapting our recruitment strategies accordingly?

The paper finds implications for monetary policy, but I’m more interested in what this means for our day-to-day talent management strategies. Are we clear on which of our openings are aimed at bringing in fresh talent versus attracting experienced hires from competitors? How does this impact our approach to retention?

My personal philosophy: talent is everywhere and there are opportunity costs of hiring employed vs unemployed talent. Consider that the unemployed person may be more generative and more driven than the person currently employed. For the teams I build, drive and generativeness are attractive qualities.

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.

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.

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.

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?”

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