Find Your Dream Job or Hire Your Next Rock Star
An executive joins Company A where he’s excited to leverage his experience to make a huge impact at an important inflection point in the company’s trajectory and his own career.
Meanwhile, the CEO at Company B seeks to up level her team by hiring an executive with perfect experience relative to the current and future needs of the company. This should be a slam dunk.
In both cases it soon begins to feel like something’s off. A short time later, there are alarm bells ringing.
In the parking lot at Company A, the executive's in his car reaching out to his colleagues to commiserate, his headhunter to talk contingencies, and losing steam by the metric ton.
In a small meeting room at Company B, our CEO is meeting her HR leader to commiserate, their headhunter to talk contingencies, and losing sleep by the hour.
Breaking down both situations with my clients, we quickly realize that there are two root causes at play:
A lack of clarity on what they were each looking for
A lack of intentionality in figuring out whether or not the brand or the candidate actually had it
We also identify another common thread; that it had been a while since either had spent any meaningful time thinking about their values, their non-negotiables.
In the case of the executive, when I ask him questions about the job he wants, he’s clear. Ready for the next step to COO or even CEO at the right company. He has a straightforward definition of the role he’s up for so he can compare it to the actual expectations of the job being offered. But when I ask him to tell me what he’s looking for in his next employer, the answer takes some real probing. Being aligned on job functions is crucial but it’s equally important to gain a solid understanding of the culture, the vibe of the leadership team, the relationship with the board and investment partners, the long term vision, as well as the company’s cash position and strategic plan. Understanding how conflicts are resolved between stakeholders, what uphill challenges or threats exist and how the current team feels about the business are key insights for candidates to consider.
In the case of the CEO looking for her next leadership hire, there's a balance to be achieved between hiring for experience and smarts and hiring someone compatible with the team and aligned with the company’s values. So often, the culture piece gets short shrift and the outcome is never good. For my own part leading a brand, the biggest mistakes I ever made were either when I didn’t trust my gut and hired someone whose experience I admired but whose character I questioned or when I hung on to that person for too long thinking I could bring them around.
So, in both scenarios, one might be tempted to say that my clients simply didn’t interview well. One would be right. They weren’t curious enough. But it goes deeper than that. Asking pithy situational questions is a given but being clear on what you’re actually looking to discover about the other person or organization is actually the heart of the matter. In other words, in both experiences, it matters less what we find out to be true about the person or the organization and more about whether the person or organization matches what we’re looking for, a place or person that holds our values. And for that, we need to be clear on what they are. Otherwise, we run the risk of an almost certain bad outcome.
As individuals, when we’ve got our values set, we know that we’ll do our best work when we’re surrounded by others who share them. When the leaders of an organization are clear on the company’s values, they can recruit with confidence knowing that their job is to find people who match them. For both the employer and the candidate, determining those values and then elevating them to operating principles is important work on both sides of the hiring equation. Values can be ethereal concepts open to interpretation. Principles, derived from values, seek to use as few words as possible to add specificity and clarity. To make them understandable and useable for everyone in the organization. Whether it’s starting the list from scratch or dusting off the old one that was created years ago but never fully implemented, the ability of a founder or CEO and their team to get to the heart of what attributes make the company successful and then purposefully infuse them into the organization has an almost alchemical benefit. It provides leadership with new clarity of purpose while also improving the recruiting, hiring, training, development, and decision making functions of the organization. It cuts through any accumulated BS and sets an empowered and empowering path forward.
At first, many of my clients see the values/principles conversation as secondary to resolving the more urgent and pressing issues at hand. It’s hard to justify the time for activities that appear on the surface to be non-mission critical. I understand that perspective. I also know that unless we’re clear on our values and using them as a barometer for our decision making, we’re likely going to continue running into the same forced and unforced errors. The other thing is that mining for values isn’t that deep or time-consuming a process. They’re right there below the surface. You’ve either been using them or ignoring them forever. They’re likely just operating in the background instead of being at the forefront. Together, we make quick work of identifying them and then use a blueprinted process to get them where they need to be.
For founders, CEOs and their teams, this is foundational to scale and, when properly implemented, a two-way and mutually beneficial contract between leadership and the rest of the organization at large.
Update:
For our CEO, this exercise has brought her team closer together and created a greater sense of alignment, commitment and resolve. They’re fired up and the organization feels it. They’ve made some overdue lineup changes and are bringing in some great talent. They’ve also abridged their strategic plan to focus on what really matters to achieving their goals.
Our executive just joined an amazing organization where he’s excited to work with the CEO and where his strategic skills and servant leadership style are just what they need right now. He negotiated a comp package for himself that was better than he had hoped and he’s got the latitude to pursue a board seat or two as well as some advisory work to satisfy his other ambitions.
Click here for a free PDF on Elevating Values to Principles.