The next four chapters focus on the four steps required to put into action the entrepreneurial recruiting mindset covered in the first section of the book. These four steps are mapping your company’s mission and values; testing your perceptions of the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, which may be right or wrong; mapping the candidate’s mission and values; and finally extracting the best candidates for your company.
Before focusing on the first process step in this chapter, understand that the four steps in this section aren’t necessarily in chronological order. In real life, you may take these steps simultaneously; or you may implement parts of each step at different times; or you may be in the middle of a search when you discover this book and decide to use its concepts retroactively.
No doubt, you may think that the first step is to start searching for candidates, given that what you want to do is hire someone, preferably as quickly as possible. But the payoff of taking the time to assess your mission and values is huge. It’s what will enable you to make the right match and hire someone who will contribute greatly to your company for a long time.
Still, when you read this chapter’s title, you may have reacted with one of the following statements:
What does this have to do with hiring a great employee?
I know our mission and values. I can skip this chapter.
How am I supposed to figure out our missions and values?
As an entrepreneur, you’re probably a pragmatist. You largely focus on strategies and tactics, goals and objectives, not the more intangible concepts of mission and values. But even if you recognize the importance of these concepts, you may be operating under certain misconceptions: You may be confusing strategy with mission or best practices with values. It’s possible, too, that you possess a vague or not-altogether-accurate idea of what your mission and values are.
None of this is a problem if you put in the time and effort to assess and define your mission and values properly. That’s the goal of this chapter. But first, I want to make sure we’re clear about our terms.
Mission is how you envision your company a number of years down the road (ten years is a good milepost)—a vision of what you hope your company will achieve. Values are how you’ll go about turning this mission into reality. And there’s a third concept: personal mission statement. The mission you have for your company must synch with the mission you have for yourself. Entrepreneurs are reflections of their organizations, and if a disconnect exists between what you want for yourself and what you hope your company will become, it’s a problem.
To avoid this problem and others when hiring, let’s look at how to identify these three crucial elements, starting with mission.
Admittedly, this isn’t a question that you can necessarily answer off the top of your head. Certainly you know what you want your company to achieve this year in terms of revenue and profits, but mission is larger and longer than that. Think ten years down the road, and think of your company’s best, most idealistic evolution. Then answer the following questions:
How will this vision of your company make the world better (world meaning anything from society at large to the customer base you serve)?
What problem are you solving (i.e., dealing with a serious environmental issue, creating a service that is faster, better, and cheaper)?
How much pain (physical harm, monetary loss, frustration with available products) is associated with that problem?
How much goodness (benefits to various audiences) will solving this problem bring?
How many people can be served with this solution (hundreds, thousands, millions)?
Some of you may be a bit taken aback by this language. You run a grocery store, a small hardware store chain, a management consulting business, a law firm. Perhaps you’ve never considered how you’re making the world better or how you’re taking away people’s pain. But when we talk in the context of mission, that’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re making people’s lives easier by providing them with a place to buy groceries in a food desert; or you’re doing a better job than others of planning people’s estates and taking a load off their minds. Remember, this is a mission, a vision, something that you hope to build in the future. By filling in the details of this mission, you gain a better sense of the people who can help you achieve it.
Now let’s get more specific about that mission. Answer the following:
Do you see your company becoming the leader in the category; a mid-level player; a strong niche operator?
Do you envision your company ten times larger than it is today; five times larger; about the same size?
In the future, will your company be serving essentially the same customer base; a somewhat more diverse base; a significantly broader base, with new demographics?
How will the outside world describe your company; will they talk about it as “fast-growing and committed to social issues”; “solid and conservative”; “a great place to work”?
What will be your point of difference ten years from now, the factor that not only provides you with a competitive edge but that makes you stand out in an increasingly volatile and complex environment?
As you consider these questions, be visionary but don’t engage in fantasy. You may have a great little soap company, but if your mission is to usurp Procter & Gamble as market leader in ten years, you’re probably not being realistic. Think about what you could become in ten years, given what you’ve built now and your resources for growth in the future.
Given this mission, what sort of people do you need to help you achieve it? If your vision of the company is one that requires 150 percent growth annually and you want to change a category with revolutionary new products, then you require people who are not only innovative and willing to work with great diligence and commitment, but who want to be part of a paradigm-shifting company. Are you hiring someone who is agile and forward-looking or someone who is set in her ways and focused on the present?
At the end of Chapter 3, I suggested an exercise to help you think about what your personal values were. Now let’s focus on organizational values by adapting that same exercise.
First, gather a small group of trusted executives—perhaps three members of your executive team. Once gathered, the members of the group—including you—should close their eyes and think about the people in their professional lives with whom they’ve enjoyed working the most and who were most productive in helping achieve a business mission. Each member of the group should write down the qualities exemplified by each individual they think of. It can be anything from transparency to analytical brilliance to creativity. As you can see, I’m defining values broadly—going beyond personal values such as honesty or loyalty into work-related beliefs and abilities. Be careful to focus on values rather than personality traits or personal competencies. You don’t want to come up with a list with items on it like “good sense of humor” or “tenacity.” Shared values don’t preclude diversity of ideas. Indeed, they should accommodate diversity. As Liza Landsman, president of Jet.com, noted, “Diversity of opinion and points of view is, research- and data-based, confirmed to create better outcomes for business.” Shared values will help you hash out your disagreements constructively and forge better solutions and strategies.
Second, discuss the values each of you has identified in the first step. It’s likely you’re going to have a diverse list, and you want to winnow it down to four to six values. To do so, discuss which values will help the company achieve your identified mission.
Third, exercise your authority as CEO to choose the values if you can’t achieve consensus as a group. It’s quite possible you won’t achieve consensus. Theoretically, any value can be construed as useful for achieving a given mission. If your mission is to create a new healthcare product that provides superior treatment for a disease symptom, you could argue that great integrity is necessary or people might cut corners and violate healthcare regulatory statutes. Someone else might argue that integrity isn’t nearly as important as the ability to innovate—that thinking outside the box will be necessary to create a superior treatment product.
Fourth, rank the values in terms of their ability to achieve the company’s mission. Determine which one is most critical, which one is second, and so on. Rely on your gut as much as your head. As the CEO, you are the person most familiar with your company’s mission and what you need to do to achieve it. If it strikes you that the ability to manage and work on teams is crucial to your particular mission, rank it high. If a value seems useful but dispensable, rank it lower.
Tina founded an environmentally conscious hair care products company and had achieved profitability relatively quickly, selling her products to select retail establishments as well as through online strategies. Tina’s goal was to grow the company into related but distinct personal care product markets—skin care, toothpaste, and so on—with a focus on environmental factors. The mission was to become the leading private company in this space, selling their products directly to consumers. When Tina and her team met to define the values they wanted in people, two of her executives lobbied for creativity, believing that they would need to come up with many ideas in the coming years for new products. Though Tina agreed this was an important quality, she deemed it far less important than other values, such as “gumption.” Tina believed that for the company to realize its mission, they would need people who were willing to take chances, willing to have the courage of their convictions, and willing to fail.
This third element is the one that’s most often overlooked. Yet it’s crucial, given that entrepreneurs are often strong personalities who start businesses for reasons that go beyond wanting to make money. Typically, they possess their own personal drivers that may be aligned with their organizational missions—or may not. For this reason, identifying that personal mission and assessing its alignment is necessary.
Let me give you an example of one well-known entrepreneur’s personal mission. Steve Johnson was the chief revenue officer at Hootsuite, and while there he helped build the social media management company from a valuation of under $100 million to over $1 billion, and from twenty-seven employees to over eight hundred. Steve developed his personal mission at age seventeen when he was working on a farm in Zambia. As Johnson became immersed in daily life in Zambia, he observed that one company had a lock on the shoe market, and that company was charging, per pair, about what the average Zambian worker made in a month.
Realizing this, Johnson got together with some skilled guys he knew on the farm, and they set about figuring out how to make shoes better, faster, and cheaper. He knew he was maneuvering into an important market niche, but more than that, his work was fueled by a sense of purpose, of personal mission.
Many years later, Johnson sums up his philosophy this way: “Purpose drives passion, passion drives engagement and engagement drives productivity.”
As a result, Johnson seeks work that allows him to follow his sense of personal mission; he knows that when his personal and company mission are aligned, he will be highly productive.
Assess your own personal mission and how it aligns with your business purpose and goals by doing the following:
Reflect on what you want to achieve with your life via your career. Be specific and honest. Think about what would provide you with great satisfaction and meaning if you could attain it. Again, be realistic, but at the same time, aim high. Who do you dream of being professionally? What are you attempting to become through learning and growth?
Here are some examples of personal mission statements that might facilitate creating your own:
I want to be the world’s best small business marketer.
I hope to create at least one breakthrough product that revolutionizes our industry.
I am intent on building a business that is sustainable and that my children can take over.
I want to create products that make the world a better place to live.
I am driven to create a company that is more employee-centric, more diverse, and more successful than our competitors.
Assess how your personal mission statement synchs with the organizational mission and accompanying values. For instance, your personal mission statement is: I want to become a successful innovator in the healthcare space. To achieve this personal mission, you will need to take risks and follow a steep learning curve; you will also need to be highly creative in an industry overflowing with innovative minds. Your organizational mission, however, might be to build a successful niche healthcare business; the values you embrace may include loyalty and perseverance.
As you can guess, this personal mission statement isn’t well-aligned with the organizational mission and values. Your personal mission is much more ambitious than the organizational one. You’ll probably be frustrated given the gap between the two. Similarly, values such as ambition and creativity are probably more relevant to your personal mission than loyalty and perseverance.
Because of this misalignment, you’re likely to hire the wrong people, whether you opt to hire based on either mission. You need to rethink and perhaps readjust what it is you want personally and what it is you want organizationally. You may have misidentified one or you may need to pursue a different entrepreneurial endeavor that is more in line with your personal mission.
Many times, all that’s required is tinkering with how you’ve articulated your mission and values. It may be that your organizational mission was stated too narrowly, or it lacks sufficient ambition. It may be that your corresponding values were a bit off. By articulating your personal mission, you have a chance to correct the company’s mission and values and ensure that you hire people who fit with what you really want to achieve down the road.
It may seem like a simple thing, but recording missions and values on paper (or electronically) is essential. Recruiting and hiring can be stressful processes, and in this crucible your resolve to use mission and values as a filter may waver or even be forgotten. It’s also possible that you try to use them but you find it difficult to translate the mission and values you espouse into best hiring practices—you’re fuzzy on whether a given candidate’s mission and values jibe with your own.
Therefore, use the following blueprint on the facing page to facilitate mission/values fit.
As you can see, there’s a space for you to list the mission and values you identified. Below that, you’ll see boxes for core competencies, success factors, and strategic outcomes. Focus on the success factors and see if you can translate the mission and values into candidate traits that will help the organization reach your objectives and that are consistent with the way you want to reach those objectives.
For instance, let’s say that your mission is to be a disruptive innovator in the pharmaceutical business, and the values you’ve targeted include risk-taking and collaboration. You can use the blueprint to link a candidate’s personality traits and expressed beliefs with the values you seek. If you ask a candidate if he’s collaborative, he will probably say yes. But think a bit more deeply about why you want this value and how it will help you achieve your mission. Is it because an executive in this position needs to join high-functioning, fast-moving teams and hit the ground running? Is it because you want someone who can deal with the contentious personalities on the team? Is it because your biggest customer is difficult and you need someone who can work well with her from a position of strength? Is it because you need someone who can interact productively with adversaries—regulators, consumer activist groups—and form viable, ongoing relationships with them?
Go to www.HireSmartFromTheStart.com to download this PDF, instructional videos, and other resources.
Asking these questions helps you tease out how a value might manifest itself in behaviors. One candidate may tell you a story about how well he works with people he likes; another candidate may tell you a story about how well she works with people who have opposing points of view. If you have a company of contrarians and need someone to collaborate on a diverse, contentious team, this latter person may be the best choice.
Even before you begin the recruitment process, it’s worthwhile to speculate about the type of person you’re looking for given the identified values and mission. Brainstorm around each value, speculating on the type of personality that might possess a particular value.
Let’s say transparency is a key value for your company, since your mission is to become an alternative healthcare insurance broker, capitalizing on a post-Affordable Care Act marketplace. To gain credibility in this marketplace as it evolves, you need to be completely honest and transparent in all your communications, both internally and externally. As a result, you want to hire people who believe in openness and honesty, and who have no hidden agendas. But how does that value translate into a candidate’s behaviors?
To make this assessment, think about the various forms transparency can take in workplace behaviors:
•Relentless honesty. This person speaks his mind without a filter, offending some people when he says exactly what he is thinking.
•Truth without considering consequences. Here, transparency is maintained even when potentially sensitive information is disseminated via social or traditional media; this individual admits that the company is considering a merger with a big insurance company when interviewed by a New York Times reporter.
•Selective openness. Recognizes that there are certain times when it’s judicious to be opaque rather than transparent—i.e., in dealing with the media. In a culture of transparency, this person may be criticized for her selective approach.
•Transparent in word but not always in deed. This individual talks honestly and openly to all stakeholders and is willing to admit flaws and failings. Sometimes, however, he’ll take actions designed to satisfy agendas known only to himself or a few key people.
Many behavioral permutations exist around every value. By thinking about these permutations and the ones that align with your culture and mission, you are prepared to assess candidates who will represent a spectrum of traits.
Speaking of culture, many entrepreneurs are well-versed in their cultures, especially if their companies have been around for a while. Articulating values may be a challenge, but talking about the working environment of their companies is often far easier.
If you’re struggling to identify your values, you can use your culture’s norms to help surface them. Culture is all about how things are done in your company; and they reflect what is valued, rewarded, and celebrated and what is not.
In one small, family-owned business—a printing company that’s been in business for eighty years—the culture prizes people who display loyalty, a willingness to work long hours (a frequent occurrence in the printing business where deadline jobs can require late nights), and an egalitarian attitude.
In a Silicon Valley startup, the culture is quite different. Loyalty is not particularly important (it’s assumed many employees will job-hop), while the people who get ahead are those who think out of the box, take risks, and make measurable contributions. In this company’s culture, elitism exists and though people work hard, they do it on their own terms and on their own schedules.
As you can imagine, an arrogant-though-brilliant executive would not fit in the family business, and a friendly, conservative conformist wouldn’t make it at the Silicon Valley startup.
In real life, of course, it’s usually not this black and white. A candidate may mask his arrogance; the friendly conformist may not realize how conservative her decision making is. That’s why it helps if you can think about who will fit into your culture before you start the recruiting process. To facilitate this assessment, consider your company’s reward and recognition system. Why do people receive raises, promotions, bonuses, and favorable assignments? Look at the following list and make a check next to the reasons that apply to your company:
Straight talk
Playing politics
Seniority
Hard work
Consensus building
Loyalty
Teamwork
Individual contributions
Managerial ability/leadership
Risk taking
Building relationships (with customers and other external groups)
Developing people
Use this list not only to assess who will be a good values fit for your culture, but who would be a poor fit. Create a profile of an individual who might meet all the job specs but would be a disaster long term if you were to hire her. To create this profile, answer the following questions:
What particular personality trait would rub people the wrong way in your culture? Arrogance? Fickleness? Anger? Laziness? Game playing?
Think of an employee you hired in the past who was a poor fit; why didn’t he work out; what particular things did he do or say that hampered rather than helped achieve your mission?
Entrepreneurs like to replicate themselves. This is a natural if unconscious reflex; small businesses are frequently tight-knit communities and colleagues become friends. It’s not unusual for entrepreneurs to select people who went to the same schools, grew up in the same neighborhoods, and even enjoy the same hobbies. It feels like hiring someone who is the polar opposite (from a personality standpoint) of the CEO is a mistake.
As you know by this point, I believe in shared mission and values. But I also believe in diversity in every sense of that word. People who share values such as authenticity, integrity, and ambition may have wildly different personalities. Distinguish between a considered and articulated culture versus an unspoken cult of personality. In the absence of a clearly defined culture, organizations may default to hiring people who seem reflections of their leaders and will never challenge their policies and strategies.
This is as opposed to people like Steve and Tom who radiate authenticity, but Steve is authentically proud bordering on arrogant, while Tom is genuinely humble and soft-spoken. They both never put on an act, but their authenticity manifests itself in very different ways. Diverse personalities can create positive friction. Diverse backgrounds can create synergistic perspectives. As long as values are shared and aligned with the company’s mission, entrepreneurial enterprises can and should accommodate this diversity.
To guard against the cloning reflex, therefore, here are techniques that might prove useful:
Make a distinction between what a candidate believes (values) versus how she expresses these values (behaviors).
Create a list of your own personality traits and compare it with those of a candidate. If, for instance, you list your own characteristics as “good sense of humor, decisive, quick thinking,” assess how close a candidate’s traits are to your own.
Assess your team of employees and determine what you’re missing in terms of race, gender, and personality type. Be alert for candidates who possess backgrounds, perspectives, or qualities that your team is missing.
This is a common question entrepreneurs ask, and understandably so. After all, entrepreneurial businesses can be volatile. The business can take off in hyper-growth mode or stall. You can find yourself adding or subtracting products and services. Unexpected opportunities can take you in new directions.
Given the probability of change, why take the time to create mission and values for a business at a given moment in time?
Because it doesn’t matter what changes. Mission and values are constant. Yes, you may need to hire someone for a position that didn’t exist a few years ago—director of analytics, for instance. You may have to hire more employees with global experience as you expand beyond the United States. But even though these new people may have different expertise and experience than your current employees, they should share values and a sense of mission.
Use the roadmap analogy to remind yourself to focus on values and mission and not just on competencies when hiring. The mission is your destination. If your mission is to get to a beautiful vacation spot with sunshine and beaches, your way of getting there won’t change much (unless you’re the rare company that does a complete pivot—then your destination becomes a snow-covered mountain). You may slow down or speed up on your journey or take some detours, but you’re still moving in the same direction guided by the same values.
Remind yourself, too, that problems will arise if you ignore mission and values in the recruiting process. As you’re traveling to your destination, you need to agree how you’re getting there (car, plane, train, boat) and if you’re driving, how often you stop for breaks or if you want to take the scenic or most direct route. Without shared values, these decisions can create acrimony, high turnover, and failure.
With a shared commitment to the same mission and values, something magical happens. When employees are aligned at these deeper levels, they can move far more quickly and effectively. When problems develop, they produce debate and solutions rather than debate and dissension. When people feel connected, they work harder, smarter, and more innovatively. They are all motivated to get to the same destination, to fulfill an ambitious mission. Albert Einstein is known to have said “everything is vibration” and when core values among people unite, they vibrate at a higher frequency and achieve greatness together.
Keep your mission and values in your consciousness, since you’ll need them as you begin examining candidates and assessing whether they embody your work beliefs—or if you just think they do.
