The Case for Hiring Potential
Fostering an Environment of Growth
I’ve been working in the industry for a while now, and in that time I have had the opportunity to work for and with some amazing people — as well as some that were not so great. I feel most fortunate to have had the chance to experience the process of interviewing, hiring, and growing a team in a dynamic startup environment, so early in my career.
As a founder [at Samsung], I was uniquely positioned to help craft our team culture and create an environment that bred creativity and inspiration. In fact, we all were really excited about the prospect of molding a team and building a culture that fostered innovation at a pace our parent company had never seen. One of our very first team events was to attend the Wisdom Conference session with Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, on Compassionate Management. I am also a huge fan of Simon Sinek and his work on what it means to be a true leader, from a biological and evolutionary perspective.
Reading books and attending seminars do not great leaders make. Synthesizing the principles and the knowledge bequeathed to you, and integrating them into your own personality, is only the first step in becoming a strong leader. You have to actually lead and practice those principles; personalize and apply them to your own life.
How do you find the right people?
As is the case with many startups, we couldn’t hire fast enough. Our quality bar was high, and working on a stealth product didn’t help in attracting candidates. We wanted to create something completely new and revolutionary, something that our industry had never seen. We couldn’t afford to hire solely based on relevant or prior work experience. So we turned to potential and culture as our gold standard.
We didn’t invent the idea, and nor did we perfect it. Many companies have approached hiring in the same way. We interviewed for skills, potential, and cultural fit. Clearly, the latter two factors are highly subjective, so how do you evaluate these? The founders of Stripe developed a pretty good approach when it came to recruiting for their groundbreaking startup. Stripe came out of nowhere and turned the payment processing field on its head, and this could only be achieved thanks to the amazing team behind it. They claim that their make or break factor for hiring was one simple question: “If this person was working on the weekend, would I come in and work with them?” It is questions like this that help to quantify and evaluate candidates against the subjective criteria.
By distributing the hiring principles across multiple interviewers, we were able to establish a measuring stick and keep coming back to this when evaluating each candidate. By asking strategic questions to probe their thought process, and allowing the interviewee to take the conversation forward, we were able to get a glimpse of their potential. By asking some personal questions, and putting them through a short series of ‘stress tests’, we could see what they were made of and if they were a cultural fit for our team. Culture is also a factor that should excite a candidate. Describing how we worked, and how our team bonded together, would either elicit obvious excitement or general apathy.
How does this foster growth?
Before moving forward, I would like to make clear that the above process does not and should not translate into hiring ‘yes men’. It is imperative to bring people with different experiences, backgrounds, and genders into the team, unified by one mission and culture, in order to foster not only growth but creativity.
Hiring friendly people, or those that share your beliefs and attitudes, may not seem to directly correlate to an environment that fosters growth, but looking at it through a sociological lens, it makes all the difference.
When individuals are surrounded by people they can relate to, they feel safe. If they feel safe, then they are willing to share information and ideas. If they can utilize their colleagues to fill in knowledge gaps, they won’t be afraid to get out of their comfort zone and make mistakes. They will learn from those mistakes and share this learning back into the collective pool of group knowledge, which will feedback into the cycle.
This might be an overly simplistic view of the inner workings of a team, but nonetheless, it proves the logic behind the rationale. Hiring people who believe in a common cause and get along with each other creates a culture in which they feel confident to challenge one another and grow from their collective experiences.
How do you help your people grow?
I once watched an interview with Satya Nadella in which he was asked, what were the elements of becoming a CEO that he had not anticipated. His reply was simple: everyone knows what a CEO does — the boring business stuff — but how does a CEO fit in with their employees? He argued that a CEO’s primary obligation to his employees is to curate the culture, sustaining it and giving it direction, and then making sure that the right atmosphere is cultivated.
As a leader, it is your job to curate that culture. Help your people grow by challenging them, and protect them when they fail. Understand what they want to accomplish for themselves, and look for ways to enable them to reach those goals. Ensure that you have created an environment in which they can thrive, and know that they are protected. Let them know that you are only human, and that you also make mistakes, but demonstrate what it looks like to own your mistakes. Be transparent in your decisions, but protect them from anything that might unravel the culture.
Wrapping it all up
You can read all the books and attend all the workshops on being an effective leader, but when it comes down to it, you are a team. You are not as weak as your weakest link, but you are only as strong as the collective group. Finding people who can be not just colleagues, but friends, helps ensure that the environment you work in is a safe one. If you lay that foundation, as a leader, you must then be the catalyst in creating a culture of growth by fostering growth within your team, and by challenging them and protecting them when they need it.
You are not as weak as your weakest link
I wrote this article from the viewpoint as a team founder in my time at Samsung, but have found these experiences are equally true at SalesforceIQ.
