Stop hiring leaders. Start growing them.

Photo by Stephen Mayes on Unsplash

We’ve been hiring at River Island (we’re always hiring in River Island) my department’s been hiring ‘tech leads’ to be precise. We forgive ourselves though, because we usually grow them. Since I got here, 1.5 Covid years ago, we’ve promoted at least 5 people into leadership positions. I realise it’s hypocritical to say don’t do what we do, but don’t worry about River Island we were in a pinch and we‘re really good at hiring really good tech leads :-)

The two we brought in are already shining bright. I want to make it clear to anyone reading this just how difficult it is to be as good as River Island are at hiring tech leads, and why it therefore shouldn’t be the default. And so:

1/ Being good at your people’s jobs does not de facto make you a good leader of those people

The Peter Principle whereby in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. […] You will see that in every hierarchy the cream rises until it sours has been proven again and again and again. So when we — as an industry of nerds — review CVs why why why WHY do we so often require someone to have previously experience working in the role for which we’re hiring? Having done the role elsewhere is no guarantee they were any good at it, and even if it is, which it most definitely is not, it’s no guarantee that they’ll be good at it in your company.
Every hour someone awful is hired into a role because of someone bad at hiring using the ass-covering reason of “It’s OK, they’ve done this before, it’s on their CV”. This has to stop. Just stop, and think how many people have you worked with yourself in roles for which they are not suited? Don’t throw away the CVs of good people for this reason.

2/ You have to know what type of leader you need, but…

Given that over half of all leaders are bad (see reason #1 above), it’s likely that those hiring leaders within your org are poor at hiring leaders; they’re not actively looking to spot traits that betray the candidate’s leadership styles. Nor indeed aware of which style is needed. Not making this of primary concern is a big mistake. Different styles are needed at different times, generally speaking this is what you’re looking at in a leader:

• Autocratic : do as I say
  Dinosaurs. Don’t hire them.
• Authoritative: follow me!
  Visionaries, waving their hands and going out of their way to colour in the picture for you. I do this a fair bit.
• Pacesetting: keep up!
  These are constructive bulls in china shops… more like elves on RedBull in shoe shops; sometimes causing panic to the steadier minded villagers nearby, while the elves move like banshees. I sometimes do this, and hope that I’m forgiven by those that understand the goals I’m pursuing. The less communicative of these run too far ahead and find themselves peddling great ideas, but… alone.
• Democratic: what does everyone think?
  Although changes from this style can take a while to happen, they’re guaranteed to stick. When I’m in charge of people I don’t trust, I ask that all decisions are made this way simply because it’s the safest option. Obviously it’s not the best option because it takes so long to get anything done.
• Coaching: OK, have you considered…?
  Patient people do this, and it’s a great way to grow people. I encourage this. I should do this more. This relies heavily upon those you wish to grow to embrace growth.
• Laissez-Faire: I trust you
  Can be affective, can be absent. You’d need to talk to their reports to know the truth.
• Affiliative: People first
  I do other styles, but this is my default. People are your most valuable asset. Leaders should put people first. I will not stop saying that. Unless you want me to go deeper, and say “Value first, people always”. It’s not easy to nutshell this style of leadership; maybe ‘many hidden nuances’ sums it up best.

3/ ‘The way I did this in my last place…’ syndrome

If you’re thinking “sometimes it’s good to have fresh blood” I stand before you, dead pan, and I despair. Fresh blood enters departments via the ‘individual contributor door’ each year, multiple times. We all have access to the same blogs as each other. Good people continuously read and listen to those fresh blood ideas all the time. We run Communities of Practices (fortnightly meetings where anyone’s welcome, with a shared interest, specifically in X [Go, micro services, security, BI, etc]). If you want ‘fresh blood’ ideas run CoPs and literally ask for ‘fresh ideas please’. You’ll get them from individual contributors aplenty.

“Oh but when you promote from within the person won’t understand the politics of the role”. Yup. That’s why their ideas will be fresh. If you hire someone in that does know the nuances of the role they’ll be tainted blood, not fresh blood. They’ll bring as many bad habits as good, but because they‘ll all be presented as ‘fresh ideas’ they’ll be ‘given a go’, just as they were ‘given a go’ at the leader’s last place. Maybe they’re an awful fit for you… the hired leader won’t know, but they’ll implement them all the same, under the ‘fresh blood’ banner.

If most leaders are bad, why has River Island hired tech leads today?

Well statistically I’m probably a bad leader, right…?
<Noticeable heart palpitation>
I jest…
</Noticeable heart palpitation>
We hired tech leads for two reasons: we’re expanding our tech capability to boost lesser tended to areas of the River Island machine, and at the same time we’re waving goodbye to people that have out-grown their RI pots, but that didn’t want or weren’t ready for the tech lead roles. The perfect storm had formed for many organisations, not least thanks to normal churn having paused for the previous 2 (Covid) years.

Regarding people having outgrown their River Island pots: that’s not to say we have small pots. We have a pretty large greenhouse of over 200 people in tech, and we have sizeable pots to fill to keep almost £1Bn turning over annually. For example, we run our entire estate from Amazon, most of it using the services properly! Serverless, GoLang, Node, React, Agile… great big pots! However, it’s not a FAANG sized greenhouse (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google).

Also, we’ve not yet found the perfect angle from which to embarrass ourselves by shoehorning in blockchains, metaverses or NFTs into our roadmaps. We use cool tech, we just don’t use the silly stuff yet. The year is young; perhaps I’ll use the T-shirt gun tomorrow to fire wodges of cash into a terrifyingly expensive tornado of blue sky PoC augmented NFT hackathons. Perhaps not.

We offer plenty of opportunities and ability to learn new things. We don’t sit still; very busy building new things, adding value to every area of the business each year. But stay here long enough and you’ll eventually have to slow your learning pace down to that of the team you’re in, and if that’s not fast enough for you at that point, I fully accept that people pick up and repot themselves some place new. You’ll miss us when you do though. Seriously, people cry.

In fact, I’m proud of how quickly we’ve grown people to the point that they’ve cracked their RI pots. I perfectly understand those that need to see the world a bit more before settling down. But when they go… and when we don’t have fresh leaders within our ranks to promote up, we must hire. Given that we’d already promoted people before furlough, and we carefully backfilled those people with — effectively — contractors, we simply didn’t have likely candidates to lead our autonomous teams.

Why is home-grown better than shop-bought?

Think of everything hiring managers need to identify correctly in leadership candidates to not swap longterm problems for their short-term one:

1. Will they successfully mesh with the people they need to have meaningful relationships with?
2. How quickly will they understand the estate they will preside over, and how thorough will they be before they start to simply relax and default to ‘learning on the job’?
3. Is everything in place to best explain the politics and processes they need to grasp?
4. Do they really share the same values and align with where you want to take things?
5. etc

It can take a new leader a year to absorb all that intel and flourish. Homegrown leaders don’t have to suffer that ramp.

A homegrown leader often has that glorious sense of imposter syndrome, causing them to worry about being found out so much that they think ahead and outperform their colleagues.

(How to) Grow leaders yourself

It’s simple, but even I sometimes forget to monitor, reward and factor into my day-to-day actions the following sensible decrees:

• Hire smart, likeable people with good attitudes and the ambition to grow. If you’re hiring for experience, god help you.
• Use the affiliative leadership style (the one that cares about people). The chances are that you’re in a leadership position because someone saw some good in you and nurtured it. It’s your duty to pay that forward.
• Identify leadership traits in your reports and encourage those traits
  Basically, try with every sinew of your soul to be the opposite of ‘autocratic’.

Next steps

1. Look to introduce leadership performance indicators into your organisation such as ‘how quickly do people move from positions of lesser to greater influence’ and ‘when they get there are they doing a good job?’. Recognise the people that positively affect those PIs and acknowledge them.
2. Know how many leaders vs individual contributors you need to be hiring to keep up with future demand. Individual contributors largely get hired on grounds of ability, likability, and drive. You need to know how many people to hire that demonstrate additional (leadership) traits of high integrity and low narcissism.
3. While letting individual contributors know they are valued, obviously let those on the leadership path know they’re on it, and also what they must do to move forward. Personal growth plans are essential.

Of course, if you’re as good at this stuff as we are in River Island, and you‘re expanding your greenhouse faster than you propagate your existing talent, go ahead and hire. If however you’re unsure you have all the above bases covered… well you’ll hire anyway but at least you’ll now be better prepared!