The Curse of Credentials
Fortunately, most tech companies have accepted that you don’t need to make hiring decisions based on Ivy League degrees or a history of working at FAANG.
But the dismissal of these basics can fool us into believing that we’ve conquered the credential — we no longer apply prestige-related bias at work. Even if we‘ve made strides, we have to remain vigilant for the other ways that credentials can bias our thinking, and lead us down the wrong path for who we hire, how we lead our teams, and how we build our product.
Hire ‘Top-Tier’ Consultants
When you hit an intimidating roadblock or a skill gap on the team, it can be extremely tempting to augment with “top talent”… which too often translates to a specific kind of credentialed talent. Engineers from Google, Designers from IDEO. It seems like a safe choice on paper, but it’s easy to forget that these teams had success in a very specific kind of environment, which is frequently a different stage, industry, or fundraising environment from where you are today. Equally relevant, some of these brands are big and diffuse. Having brushed shoulders with Facebook doesn’t mean that a given individual will be able to rescue your social media strategy.
Choose consultants for their demonstrable skill and relevant experience for your use case. Not for their stamps.
Create a Culture of Feedback… for those who qualify
The next most common credential stumbling block is the all-important job title.
People are sensitive to power dynamics and their impact on how we work. They notice who gets invited to meetings, who speaks, who listens, who makes decisions. As a shortcut for efficiency, I often see the mic go to the highest paid person, not only to speak for their team in a larger meeting… but to weigh in on issues of process, strategy, or culture that sit outside of their day-to-day. We assume that this individual can be all-encompassing.
Individual contributors, middle managers, newer team members — everyone has an important perspective that may not be represented by a single department leader. A tendency to defer purely on title rather than area of expertise or personal contribution can create an environment where feedback is no longer given, because people don’t believe it will be heard.
Chase Credentialed Business Strategies
I’ve been confronted with the “but it worked for Amazon…” speech at three different companies.
Whether it manifests as an insistence on writing ‘press releases,’ or a less-than-technical fixation on microservices, pattern matching without context can often hurt more than it helps. Your team has to spend time explaining why this solution is a poor match for the problem at hand (or worse — spend time trying this solution-searching-for-a-problem), instead of starting from first principles and then leaning on strategies from people who have truly faced a similar challenge.
Most businesses are not Amazon, or Salesforce, or Stripe. In addition to admiring the strategy they applied, it’s worth asking why it worked for them, why it might work for you, and how stage, industry, company priorities, market conditions, talent, culture, … fit together.
Of those three companies I mentioned, none adopted the Amazon press release! The suggestion was a symptom of different problems— lack of process around project initiation, poor problem-we’re-solving definition, absent product marketing…
Startups often view themselves as the David (vs. Goliath); the underdog, the anti-credential. But I see these mistakes unfold in early-stage contexts all the time. You’re nervous, you want support, you want to make the right decisions. People look for security to balance all the risk they’re taking on, and they often find their answer in a credentialed solution.
Credentials are there for a reason! But we should critically evaluate what they can offer, and provide our own framing for what we need. Any person or process that lives up to the credentialed reputation should be delighted to engage with a customer or colleague who knows what they need, and why.
