David Cummings on Startups

Tag: business

  • Highlight an Employee Failure at the Town Hall

    Last week, I attended an entrepreneur event where the speaker shared some of his best practices for growing a successful startup. One thing he said really stuck with me: if you want to promote a culture where failure is accepted and independent thinking is encouraged, you must work to share stories internally in a public context that reinforce this message. 

    In this context, it’s not failure for the sake of failure, but failure in the pursuit of thoughtful risk-taking. At this particular startup, during their regular all-hands town halls, they would feature a team member as one of the speakers. That team member would be interviewed about a specific failure. The conversation would cover what the goals were, what the expectations were, why the initiative was pursued, why it didn’t work, and most importantly, what was learned from the experience.

    At the end of the conversation, they would emphasize that this type of scenario—failure through thoughtful risk-taking—is encouraged at the company. The message was clear: failure for the sake of failure is not good, but failure in the context of thoughtful risk-taking is valuable. 

    Most companies and most people, by default, avoid admitting failure. As entrepreneurs and leaders, it’s important to acknowledge when things don’t work out and to set a standard that encourages thoughtful risk-taking, rather than discouraging it, as is common in many businesses.

    For entrepreneurs, I recommend incorporating a failure segment into your regular all-hands meetings. This way, employees consistently hear the message that thoughtful risk-taking is encouraged. Celebrate the fact that the more you experiment and learn, the faster you grow, both as an individual and as a business.

  • Align Interview Questions with Core Values

    Last week, I was talking to an entrepreneur, and the topic of corporate culture and core values came up. We spent some time diving deep into lessons learned, and I shared one of my favorite best practices around the interview component of the hiring process. Of course, there are numerous great books and blog posts on hiring well, including Geoff Smart’s book Who (more notes on Topgrading) and First Round Review’s post titled 6 Must Reads for Hiring Tactics that Break the Mold. 

    In a startup, it’s assumed you’ve already defined your core values, as outlined in books like Good to Great. Once you’ve defined these values, an important element is aligning interview questions with them. Naturally, if a core value is something general, you can’t simply ask, “Do you have integrity?” during an interview. Yes or no questions don’t work. The key is to create stories and scenarios that allow candidates to share their experiences, and then listen for how well those experiences align with your core values.

    For example, one core value I highly appreciate is positivity. Some call it being “glass half full,” others call it an optimistic outlook. Regardless, does the person have a positive attitude? Again, during the interview process, you can’t simply ask, “Are you a positive person?” Instead, take this core value and design a series of interview questions around it. Here’s how we do it:

    Question 1: For your current employer, what are two or three things they do well? What are two or three things they don’t do well and could improve upon?

    Question 2: For your current manager, what are two or three things they do well? What are two or three things you don’t like?

    In this example, we’re looking for thoughtful answers about the current employer and manager. The first question—”What do you like?”—is meant to warm up the conversation and gauge how the candidate presents positive qualities. The real test, however, comes from the second question. Everyone has issues or things they don’t like about their employer, especially with their manager. What we’re listening for here is how they present those issues. 

    Do they make statements like, “This is terrible, they’re not good at their job, and I really don’t like working for them”? Or do they say, “Here are some areas where we don’t see eye to eye” or “Here are some areas where I would appreciate more give-and-take”? The big idea is to assess how they present negative aspects—do they do it in a way that feels constructive or destructive?

    In this example of aligning interview questions with core values, we took one value I care about and organized a series of common questions around it to assess how the candidate responds and presents their answers. Entrepreneurs would do well to enumerate their core values and ensure that, during the interview process, they have a series of questions for each core value and a rubric to score responses accordingly.