Entrepreneurs know the value of employees who can cut through the red tape, meet tight deadlines, make the sale, and fix the problem. Small business owners have told me that they can’t afford to hire brilliant people who are not so brilliant at implementation. Unlike big corporations, they can’t afford to carry employees who are smart and talented but not particularly productive.
The challenge, though, is identifying who is a producer and who is not during the search and recruitment process. Job candidates always claim that they are good at getting things done. But separating doers from talkers isn’t simple. It’s actually more complex than you might believe, since the person who is great at executing tasks in one entrepreneurial organization probably won’t be great in another company.
To understand what execution really means—especially what it means to entrepreneurs—we need to look at why people perform so well in certain situations and not others.
Most employees want to get things done. Unfortunately, they’re not always in the right job, environment, or point in their career to be good at executing tasks. It’s a mistake to divide the world into doers and non-doers, to believe that some are great at working hard and productively and others aren’t. It’s a much more complex issue than this.
Consider Laurie. Ten years ago, a small software company hired her as a salesperson. It was Laurie’s second job; she had worked for a startup for little more than a year before it went under. The owner liked Laurie; the company was in an industry dominated by men at the time and the owner was happy to find another woman who seemed to be qualified for the position. The owner and Laurie got along great and became friends, but before the year was up, the owner fired her. Laurie struggled to sell the company’s products, and as much as the owner liked her, it was obvious that she wasn’t producing.
Over the next nine years, Laurie had a series of sales jobs with tech companies, including one of the largest in the field as well as smaller ones. About a year ago, Laurie landed a job with a software company on a fast-growth path because of their highly sophisticated products. Almost from the start, Laurie excelled and quickly became the company’s star salesperson. Her boss remarked that he wouldn’t trade Laurie for any salesperson in the world because she understood their products, knew the best way to sell them, and was especially adept at closing tough-to-close deals.
How had Laurie gone from someone who couldn’t get things done to someone who could? Part of it was experience and expertise—she developed that over the years between these two jobs. Part of it was that her boss at her current job and the company itself were ideally suited to Laurie and she to them: She relished working for a high-growth company and for a boss whose beliefs and values mirrored her own; and she was given the autonomy she craved, allowed to sell the way she wanted.
While I believe that people should have total ownership and accountability for what they take on, sometimes structural deficiencies exist when people fail to execute. They usually aren’t “flawed” in some way—lazy, satisfied with mediocrity, indecisive—but are hampered by one or more of the following:
1. Don’t have the knowledge/skills/experience. They’re not producing because they just don’t know enough to do the job effectively. Obviously, people who are just starting out in their careers are most likely to be affected by this problem, but it can also be an issue for more veteran employees. For instance, you assume that someone knows how to do a given task because they’ve been working in the field for a while, but it’s possible that they’ve never had to do this task before, or they received inadequate training in how to do it. Employees often are embarrassed to admit that they don’t know how to do something that they feel they should know, and this is where they may assume a mask during interviews. But all you see is that they don’t seem to be getting things done, and you assume the problem is laziness or inability. In fact, if employees have strong learning potential, they can probably be trained relatively quickly and change from non-producer to producer.
2. Don’t have the “want to.” It’s not that they’re inherently un-motivated; it’s that they’re working at a company that’s providing them with the wrong motivation. For instance, companies exist where the prime motivation is money. That’s fine; I’m not making a judgment. Some people are primarily motivated by profit, and if they land at this type of company, they’ll probably be motivated to work hard and well. Others, however, are motivated by other things: a chance to make a difference, changing a product category or industry, helping others learn and grow. Some people respond positively when they’re in a culture that mirrors their values; they have a sense of affiliation and that feeling drives them to work harder and better. When you’re in the right place, you’re intrinsically motivated to solve problems, capitalize on opportunities, and do whatever it takes to meet or exceed objectives.
3. Don’t have the authority. Sometimes, employees aren’t in a position to get things done. They aren’t given sufficient responsibility or resources. They are placed in difficult situations where they don’t receive the go-ahead for any ideas that deviate from the norm. They may be doers, but they’re denied the authority or ability to execute in ways that makes sense to them. Consequently, they fall short of expectations, either because they’re lacking the funds or the backing necessary to do something the way they feel is correct.
Given these three factors, don’t set people up to fail inadvertently by the way you recruit. If, like many entrepreneurs, you’re focused on hiring employees who seem like doers, then you probably will recruit looking for qualities such as:
Assertiveness
Drive
Self-starter
Ambitious
Goal-oriented
Take-charge personality
There’s nothing wrong with any of these qualities, except they may fool you into believing you hired a doer when you have not. Of much greater importance is answering the following questions during the recruiting process:
Does the candidate possess the technical chops and more? This is the most obvious question and the one you are most likely to ask. But go beyond the usual assumptions—he had a job before as a CFO so he should be able to handle your CFO job—and think about what the job really requires. Is it the ability to negotiate with tough-minded people? Is it a keen analytical sense? There are the technical specs, and then there are the traits that really help people accomplish a lot in a given position.
Does the candidate have high learning, growth, and expansion potential? People with the hunger to learn and the ability to soak up expertise will become doers. They just won’t always hit the ground running. Entrepreneurs may seek this learning potential in young people applying for their first or second jobs, but it’s equally important in more veteran employees. Entrepreneurial companies vary widely; they are reflections of their founders, and each founder has certain idiosyncrasies and visions that are distinct. As a result, any new employee will have a lot to learn. Liza Landsman, executive vice president of Jet.com, said, “I really like people who are insatiably intellectually curious. To me that’s the signal of people who are lifelong learners and who will be open to learning from each other and from their own teams.” Steve Johnson, the recent chief revenue officer of Hootsuite, would deliver similar advice to his younger self if he could: “I would be much more aware that you don’t have to know it all and that it’s completely fine to ask lots and lots of questions and get advice early.” To assess learning potential, see if candidates are naturally inquisitive during interviews. Do they ask you a lot of good questions? Are they eager to discuss new techniques, theories, and ideas they’ve heard about?
Is the candidate likely to be motivated by our mission and values? If there’s a match (between the candidate’s beliefs, goals, and work-style and those of the company), then it’s likely that this individual will be driven to accomplish tasks at a high level. During the interview process, focus on what really makes the candidate tick; what gets her excited and engaged about her work; why she worked so hard on a project in the past and the satisfaction she derived from this experience. Does the candidate get most excited when she talks about her record-setting commission or how she helped the company achieve record-setting growth? Does she relish the synergy of great teams or individual accomplishment?
Is the candidate intrinsically or extrinsically motivated? In school, some students try to get great grades to please parents, meet teachers’ expectations, or to get into good colleges; others try to get excellent marks because they are driven to do so for their own sake—they hold themselves to a high standard. Similarly, some employees are motivated by bonuses, titles, and approval of the boss. Others are focused on doing the best they possibly can. It’s not that they don’t want to be rewarded, but that they can’t tolerate giving anything less than their best effort; they feel good knowing that they tried as hard as they could.
Will the candidate have sufficient influence and authority to achieve ambitious goals? When you’re talking to candidates about what the position requires and how you’ll measure performance, are you being realistic? Entrepreneurs, often out of necessity, try to squeeze as much performance out of their people as possible. But are you willing to provide a given candidate the clout to do what you’re asking? Are you willing to allow her to take certain risks and make decisions with autonomy? Maybe you feel comfortable providing this support to more senior candidates, but not to others?
Are you willing and able to supply a given candidate with the resources necessary to execute effectively? Essentially, this means people and budgets. Can you provide your candidate with the human resources and dollars necessary to accomplish the tasks you set forth? As you know better than anyone, entrepreneurial businesses can be volatile. In good times, you can answer this question affirmatively. In tough times, it’s more difficult to do so. You may have the best of intentions, but when you hire the candidate and business conditions become worse, you may have to cut back on the resources you provide.
These questions are all designed to help you not only hire candidates who can get things done, but to be realistic about the standards to which they’re held. Employees need to be in the right situations to get things done at high levels. Therefore, make sure you’re finding candidates who can thrive in your company and who have all the power and support they need to produce great results.
There are different ways to get things done. Tailoring your candidate search to the particular kind of doer you need is crucial. Here’s a simple analogy that gets this point across. One company needs to hire a carpenter who is brilliant at hammering all types of nails straight and true. Another company is looking for a manager who can run a team that is charged with finding a better way to hammer nails. A third company is searching for a leader who can inspire others to hammer nails faster and better than other companies in their category.
Before beginning your search, consider which of the following doer types you want to hire:
An individual contributor who has the knowledge and skills to handle specific job tasks
An individual contributor who can get things done very quickly
An individual contributor who is able to accomplish tasks with a high degree of quality
An individual contributor who is willing to work as many hours as it takes to meet objectives
A manager who knows how to run teams that accomplish objectives
A manager who gets things done as both an individual contributor and a supervisor
A leader who delivers results indirectly by coming up with great ideas and strategies that others implement
A leader who creates a sense of mission and camaraderie that motivates people to work hard and well
Speaking of leaders, if you’re hiring for a senior managerial position, recognize that your own doing style will impact the type of doer you hire. Mark is the head of a family-owned retail chain, and he is the quintessential roll-up-your-sleeves, do-it-yourself leader. He pitches in inspecting inventory and even stocking the shelves. If needed, he’ll even work the cash registers at one of the company’s five stores. Nancy, on the other hand, is the founder of an alternative health products company, and she focuses almost all her time on research into cutting-edge products and selecting the ones the company will offer on its website. She rarely participates in the daily activities of running the company.
The lesson: Know your doer style as a leader and seek a complementary leader or manager. When I was at Ladders, there were two leadership teams. On one, there were Alex and Leslie. Alex was a creative visionary, and Leslie was terrific at nuts-and-bolts implementation of ideas. The other team was headed by myself and Angela. I was the innovative headhunter and she the operational human resources executive. Together as leaders, our two teams helped grow the business to $85 million in revenues in five years. To create that growth, we were constantly getting things done—executing great strategies with astonishing, complementary effectiveness.
The key was what authors Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winters refer to as “ying and yang” in their book, Rocket Fuel. They believe that the critical combination of one leader who is a Visionary and another who is an Integrator helps accomplish highly ambitious business goals. As talented as these individuals might be, it’s only when they start working together that they produce tremendous results.
Most of you know this principle intuitively. In your company, you possess front stage and back stage employees. The former people are the face of the organization, meeting with customers and suppliers, blogging, making speeches, setting the strategy. The latter individuals work behind the scenes, balancing the books, creating the software, analyzing the data. Without one group, the other would be ineffective.
The same holds true for your leadership team. Unfortunately, during the hiring process many entrepreneurs seek people who they like and get along with—whose personalities mesh with theirs. Typically, these individuals share similarities when it comes to how they get things done—they both are aggressive, idea-spouting risk-takers who love to push the boundaries. Yet odds are, they probably won’t get a lot done together. They probably will have great lunches and conversations, but they won’t do the research, planning, and follow-up that helps put their brilliant ideas into action.
Consider the stereotypical entrepreneur. This is someone who has ADD, who has a million thoughts bouncing around in his head. He doesn’t have much patience for long meetings and drawn-out testing phases; he hates all the talk and loves all the action. If this entrepreneur hires a “crony” as his number two person, he will lack a counterpart who can make sense of his ideas, who can raise objections and tell him no, who can help the entrepreneur figure out what’s worth pursuing and how to pursue it efficiently.
The simple rule of hiring another leader who can help you implement your ideas: Seek your complementary counterpart, not your clone.
Yes, to find someone who can get things done, you want to focus on experience—has a candidate done what you want her to do? It’s wise, too, to assess whether she possesses other qualities—agility, an eagerness to learn, and so on—that facilitate achievement in entrepreneurial settings.
The most important factor, though, is values. While you may buy the need for a values fit as a recruiting tool, you may wonder if it really applies when it comes to productivity. After all, your most productive people may be individuals whose values don’t fit with yours, but who work hard, meet every deadline, and do quality work.
Let me suggest, though, that entrepreneurs sometimes set the productivity bar too low. More accurately, they measure the wrong things.
It’s not what you get done that counts: it’s getting the right things done. Entrepreneur Mark Suster wrote a terrific and widely read blog titled, Doing the Right Thing > Doing Things Right. He has a great analogy in the blog: “It’s the parable of the tree-chopping team that is so focused on efficiency of how fast it can fell a tree that it doesn’t bother to make sure it is clearing the forest in the right direction when one person actually stops the constant cutting to climb a tree and make sure they’re cutting in the right direction. On the surface this person is losing efficiency but in the long run the gains for direction setting are huge.”
Employees exist in your company who always seem to be doing things, but have you ever considered if they are doing things that are furthering your company’s mission and goals? Or are they accomplishing tasks that may be necessary but are more quotidian than mission-focused? Yes, it’s important to fill out the financial spreadsheets, but it’s much more important to devise a financial strategy that will help the company achieve its five-year plan.
When you’re recruiting, you can’t always tell if a candidate will be capable of doing the right things just by looking at his resume or even through extensive interviewing. You may have a good sense and make a good hire based on these factors alone, but you should take one more step. The only way to know for sure is by assessing his values and mission. If they’re in synch with yours, then it’s highly likely that he’ll focus reflexively on tasks that are integral to what you want to achieve in the long run. If, for instance, you’re driven to attain a market leadership position in your category in five years, you need employees who possess that same vision. In that way, they will automatically tailor their work to fit the ultimate goal rather than a less essential (though more easily achievable) one. Similarly, if you value creating a company where learning and innovation thrive, you need to hire someone who also embodies these qualities. These values will guide their actions; they will be most productive in areas related to learning and innovation. You can count on them to put forth all their effort and ingenuity to achieve objectives related to these values.
The most practical entrepreneurs may wonder if they can afford to assess candidates for mission and values, since they are more concerned about getting work done today than realizing their future vision for the company. They feel pressure to pay back investors, and so they want to hire people who will help them do so immediately. But if you bring in employees who share your mission and values, they will not only provide this immediate productivity on basic and essential tasks but also work toward achieving bigger objectives.
This is a serious question, and one that pertains to your culture. Answering it will help you determine the odds a new employee has of being productive, no matter what her skills might be.
In cultures where learning, experimentation, and a focus on excellence predominate, new hires tend to be productive faster than in other companies. In these companies, people feel comfortable asking questions when they don’t know the answers or taking their time to figure out the solution to a problem instead of pretending to know what to do. They also are encouraged to test new ideas and approaches rather than “do things the way we do them around here.” And they recognize that aiming high and being conscientious about work are key values; they know that excellence isn’t just a word given lip service, but a living, breathing reality of the company.
This is opposed to a culture of what I term, “false harmony.” Here, entrepreneurs try to build “kumbaya” enterprises where conflict is absent and employees are coddled. Obviously, this isn’t the old-school entrepreneurial company. But it is a culture I’ve seen in some startups where idealistic founders are heavily focused on creating camaraderie and consensus, assuming this will lead to results.
It doesn’t. Instead, data and deadlines often go by the wayside. No one wants to get bogged down by metrics or stress-inducing short time frames. No one wants to impose their structures or ideas on others. It’s all very egalitarian, and it may create a false harmony where no one is angry and everyone enjoys working at the company. But it’s tough to generate results when metrics aren’t enforced and where people don’t debate, sometimes acrimoniously, to arrive at a solution.
Disruptive innovation isn’t always nice or pretty. It can get messy when someone ventures a provocative idea that shakes up everyone. People don’t like to let go of cherished notions or treasured ways of conducting business. But disruptive ideas can pave the way for great results; they give doers a chance to shine.
Therefore, before making a hire based on who will fit into your culture, you need to think long and hard—and talk with your top people—about whether your culture will allow the great implementer you’re thinking of hiring to get stuff done.