For this post, I’d intended to shift the focus from team member selection to operational alignment. Then coincidentally, I had three conversations in three days last week that drove home the real costs – in time, money, and energy – of personnel selection missteps. Hopefully, the lessons learned from these founders’ experiences will help you avoid some of the all-too-common selection traps.
To give you some context, here’s an overview of the three situations that came up last week using Jim Collins’ bus metaphor.
- Founding Partner mismatch – “wrong bus” –Three years down the road, two academic Founders were dissolving their partnership because they could never get strategically aligned about where they were going or how to get there.
- Counterproductive Advisor – “wrong person” – The founder was frustrated because an advisory board member assigned by the accelerator was condescending and consistently wasted her time.
- Underperforming Executive – “right person, wrong seat” – One year after tripling the size of their team, including some new Exec Team members, the Founders were frustrated because one of the new execs had “never stepped up.” He’d done some great work but hadn’t demonstrated the “leadership” the Founders expected.
These are the stories of the week. As I write, there are hundreds more like them happening in startups around the globe. The reality is that personnel selection is challenging, time-consuming, and risky, so it shouldn’t be surprising that it sometimes goes wrong. As the old saying goes, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Here are a few steps that can help you minimize the risk of a bad hire.
1.Get clear about your own mission, vision, values, and expectations – before hiring.
In all three of the cases noted above, the Founders only became clear about their real purpose, priorities, and expectations when they were frustrated by those expectations going unmet.
Getting clear about your expectations can be hard to do because expectations are often really just assumptions based on our own experiences. Founders may assume “anyone who’s not an idiot knows that…” [yes, I have heard those exact words spoken!] Guess what? People with different experiences – education, professional affiliation, work experiences – have different expectations. Getting clear about your own expectations – for the company, for a particular role, for the pace and quantity of work – will help you to more quickly and more accurately assess whether a particular person is or isn’t a good fit.
2. Stay in the driver’s seat.
For time-pressed Founders juggling a dozen other risks, it’s easy to see why shortcuts get taken. Incubator staff recommending partners or mentors or an investor recommending an executive hire saves the hassle of pinging your own network or posting a position and sorting through a small mountain of responses.
But here’s the thing. No matter how explicit you are about your expectations, there will be some intangibles you won’t be able to articulate – may not even recognize – until you encounter the person. Founders can’t micro-manage every hire, but they must be in charge of every addition to the Executive Team and have final veto authority on any of the first 20 or so Director and Staff-level hires. It’s also important that they play an active role in onboarding, but that’s a topic for a different post.
3. Be curious – ask tough questions with an open mind.
Founders new to the leadership and hiring game may be reluctant to appear too confrontational or intrusive. On the other hand, seasoned Founders who’ve been burned by previous hires may come across as defensive or accusatory. It is important to ask probing questions to better understand a candidate’s vision of how they can contribute to the organizational mission, to assess their values, and to determine whether both their skills and work style will address your needs. The key is to asking them with a curious mindset. It doesn’t take any longer than an interrogation-style interview and will help to create a safe space that lets both the Founders and the candidate assess fit. And even if the candidate isn’t a good fit, you will learn a bit about how your company is being perceived in the relevant ecosystem.
4. Trust yourself.
It doesn’t matter if the person is amazing or if your IP attorney or investor likes them. If you also think they’re a good fit, great. Those other things are icing on the cake. If the person is not a good fit with yourself and your co-founders, however, they’re not a good fit. Period. End of Report. There will be some people you would prefer not to have lunch with on a daily basis but who nonetheless have something to offer. Those people can be engaged as ad hoc advisors. They don’t have to be on the Founding Team to contribute.
Shortcuts are great when hiring a contract programmer for a short-term project – “I know a guy who can do this for us at a great price!.” In contrast, the Founding Team constitutes the organizational DNA – the “seed” that contains the pattern for the organizational “tree” that will emerge. Just as a maple seed will not produce an oak tree, a conflicted, transactional executive team will not produce a cohesive, relational organizational culture. Neither is right or wrong, just destined to produce different results. It’s worth the time and effort to get the Executive Team and Advisory Board right to build the company you want.
Despite your best efforts, you’re bound to make an occasional hire that doesn’t work out. In the next post, I’ll talk about recovering from a hire that turns out to be a bad fit.
As always, feel free to reach out for a free 30- or 60- min consultation to discuss your own team challenges: Calendar | [email protected] | +1 512-497-9097
