Category: Corp Culture

One of the most important responsibilities for an entrepreneur is recruiting great people. Only, most entrepreneurs exclusively focus on recruiting people for open positions (e.g. ones that have a job listing on the site). Instead, entrepreneurs would do well about being more proactive with opportunistic hires. Yes, financial considerations are incredibly important, but so is getting the best people possible, even if the order of hiring differs from the current plan.

Here are a few thoughts on opportunistic hiring:

• Let team members know that the company is open to opportunistic hiring (most people don’t even consider it yet referrals from employees are often the best candidates)
• Hold the potential opportunistic hires to an even higher standard, and ensure that they’re great culture fits
• Evaluate how bringing on an opportunistic hire now affects the hiring plan and communicate how it would change things to team members
• If the timing doesn’t work, let the candidate know and work hard to maintain a good relationship in the event of a future opportunity

Opportunistic hiring is the most challenging in the seed and early stages. As the company grows, and there are more resources, opportunistic hiring becomes easier and more commonplace. Regardless, entrepreneurs would do well to be proactive about opportunistic hiring.

What else? What are some more thoughts on opportunistic hiring?

Whenever I give a talk, highlighting many of the topics from the Mercer University Commencement Address, one of the most common questions I hear is “How do you interview for culture fit?” This is a tough one. Culture fit is so important, yet often not given the appropriate attention.

Here are a few ideas for developing an interview process around culture fit:

• For each core value, create a series of questions and rank the answers 1-10, with 10 being the best, so that you can compare the answers amongst the interviewers as well as in the future if the person is hired
• Implement a culture check team that purely assesses the candidate for culture fit in addition to everyone else in the interview process assessing culture fit
• Make the interview process required unanimous consent so that anyone can veto the candidate
• Ensure the person passes the canoe test (e.g. would you look forward to spending half a day in a canoe with this person and no one else)
• When performing reference checks, ask the reference how well they’d rate the person against each of the company’s core values
• Spend time going through the full Topgrading process, especially for any candidate in a management or leadership position

Company success and strong cultures are highly correlated. Companies that develop an interview process around culture fit help strengthen the culture and reinforce the values.

What else? What are some more ideas for an interview process around culture fit?

Back in the fall of 2007 we headed to our first Pardot tradeshow in Las Vegas. Not having any money, we got the cheapest place we could find at the Sahara Hotel on the old Vegas strip (it has since closed). After a long flight across the country, we were excited to be there and headed up to the reception desk in a dark, rundown lobby. After giving our names, the front-desk clerk said, “Wow! Four nights. No one ever stays here four nights.” We didn’t think anything of it as we thought the $40/night room was a bargain. And, for every trip of the five-and-half-years of the Pardot journey, including our last trip where we flew to Indianapolis to pitch ExactTarget, we shared rooms to save money.

Here are a few scrappy ideas for startups:

• Invest in the important items and save money on the nice-to-haves (see Nice Chairs and Cheap Desks)
• Remember that wasting money happens even when scrappy
• Play the real estate roulette game and find subleases (see #1 Startup Tip for Negotiating Office Space)
• Ted Turner would re-use postage stamps

After raising a huge amount of money or having a very successful exit, being scrappy is much harder. Regardless, scrappy is a virtue startup founders should embrace. More money available for the right things and fewer frivolous expenses goes a long ways when building a company.

What else? What are some thoughts on scrappy as a virtue for startups?

With corporate culture being the only sustainable competitive advantage completely in the control of the founders, it’s critical to be proactive about nurturing and enhancing it. Only, as the startup grows, scaling culture can be a real challenge. More people. More personalities. More challenges.

Here are a few thoughts on scaling culture:

• Implement a culture check team to interview every potential hire
• Run a culture-oriented hiring process
• Reinforce the core values with each quarterly check-in
• Design career paths for every team member
• Put the culture front and center with the Simplified One Page Strategic Plan

Scaling culture is hard. With the necessary time and attention, the culture at 100 employees can be even stronger, and more sustainable, than at 10 employees.

What else? What are some other ideas for scaling culture in a high growth startup?

Back in 2008 I attended a new member forum training class for the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO). Being a little arrogant, and completely clueless, I thought it was crazy to go to a six hour training event just to join a group of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are smart. Entrepreneurs are fearless. Entrepreneurs don’t need training. Naturally, I was wrong.

Turns out, the training class was really a leadership and communication program, and was worth every bit of the six hours. One of my favorite takeaways was the Gestalt Protocol. With Gestalt, relevant first-hand experiences are shared in an effort to offer what worked, and didn’t work, in a manner that’s fact-based, as opposed to opinion-based.

Often, entrepreneurs, when working with team members, provide advice and direction, regardless of whether or not it’s based on prior experience. From there, the team members, wanting to be supportive, run off and do it, even if they don’t have buy-in or context. Over time, the team members become less likely to offer their own suggestions, and rely more and more on the entrepreneur to make decisions. Not good.

Instead, with Gestalt Protocol, the entrepreneur shares experiences, including what worked, and didn’t work, about a similar situation in the past. If no relevant experience is available, the entrepreneur simply says, “I don’t have any relevant experience. What do you think we should do?” Now, the team member will provide ideas and suggestions, thereby increasing buy-in and creating a culture of independent thinkers.

If, when providing advice, the word “you” is used instead of “I”, think twice, and ask if that’s the best way to give the advice. Statements like “I found x when I did y” are much more powerful compared to “You should do x.” Gestalt Protocol works and is effective.

What else? What are some more thoughts on the Gestalt Protocol?

As a continuation of last week’s posts on 360 Degree Review Improvements Question for Job Interviews and The ‘Why’ Around Job Changes in Interviews, there’s another interview question I really like: what did you do to prepare for this interview? Much like Louis Pasteur’s quote that “Fortune favors the prepared mind”, the goal is to better understand how the candidate thinks and acts. Here are a few questions to think through when asking candidates about their preparation:

• How detailed and thoughtful is the candidate’s response?
• How comprehensive was the interviewee’s preparation? How does it compare to other candidates?
• How does the amount and type of preparation work compare to what’s necessary to be successful in the desired job?
• What did they do that was new or different compared to other responses heard in the past?

Just like a written assessment in the hiring process helps companies understand a candidate, so too does drilling into how a candidate prepared for an interview. Too often, candidates don’t prepare well enough for interviews and should do a better job. What else? What are some other thoughts on asking about meeting preparation as part of an interview?

This past month I’ve had a number of CEOs reach out asking for help attracting talent. With a shortage of talented software engineers, digital marketing managers, and SaaS sales reps, competition is strong to attract the best and brightest. Many CEOs have a hard time owning this but a failure to attract talent starts with them.

Here are a few thoughts on CEOs and attracting talent:

• Talent is attracted to environments that promote autonomy, mastery, and purpose (see Dan Pink’s book Drive)
• Corporate culture starts at the top and strong cultures attract strong talent
• Absent a strong culture and interesting work, companies that can afford it resort to paying well above market salaries
• Best practices for retaining employees also apply to recruiting employees
• Recruiting and attracting talent should be viewed as first-class initiatives, and not ignored

Attracting talent is one of the top five priorities of a CEO, and most CEOs neglect it. When a startup is having a hard time recruiting talent, know that it starts with the CEO.

What else? What are some other thoughts on the idea that the failure to attract talent starts with the CEO?

Early on in the life of a startup things are pretty straightforward: everyone in the company either builds stuff or sells stuff. As the business grows and starts to scale there’s an interesting push and pull that occurs between the sales team and the engineering team. On the sales front, there’s always a desire for more features and functionality with which to show prospects and close more deals. On the engineering front, as the customer base grows, so too does the desire to refactor code and re-architect subsystems of the product to accommodate new use cases as well as enhance scalability.

Inevitability, the end result is a few months of what appears to be little to no new customer-facing features followed by a couple months of what appears to be heightened engineering activity with a variety of new customer-facing features. The engineering effort is the same but the areas of focus can make it seem like productive times and non-productive times. Sales continues asking for new functionality and engineering continues balancing time between new functionality and reworking existing functionality. It never ends.

Entrepreneurs would do well to recognize the push and pull between sales and engineering and know that each team means well. Healthy discourse is required as there’s a tendency for each party to feel that the other group doesn’t understand what they do and how hard they work. This tension is normal and part of life in a tech company.

What else? What are some more thoughts on the push and pull between sales and engineering?