TLDR: A few keys to building world-class teams. Yet another 2x2 framework, plus my thoughts on firing & hiring.
Welcome to the 2,301 readers over the past few weeks. Happy to have you at our Monday Morning Meeting (MMM)!
What’s changed to increase readership?
It seems—and I could be wrong (which happens often)—that writing with more transparency as well as personal examples of applying frameworks and first principles inspires more of you to want to read and share this weekly kickoff. Or, maybe it’s the Atomic Habit compounding. Either way, I’m glad you’re here.
If you love what you’re reading, take a moment to share the MMM.
Ok enough self-promotion.
Let’s talk about firing & hiring.
Most people say “hiring & firing” but I think that’s a misnomer. Rarely do you get the opportunity to build your own team from the ground up unless you are starting your own company or a new business unit. Instead, leaders typically inherit the players on their teams and then are chartered with the responsibility to assess, inspire, coach, and reform. Regardless, the approaches below should hold.
I wrote about The Rule of Three recently, and the specific example of what to focus on in a new job. Let’s assume you’ve already done that. It’s time to start assessing the talent.
These topics below could each be their own short stories, but I’ll try to be comprehensively brief if there is such a thing—nobody likes waiting for a Part II, TikTok!
Skill vs. Will
This is a classic from my time at LinkedIn. It’s a simple 2x2 with “Skill” on one axis, and “Will” on the other.
High Skill, High Will: Star
High Skill, Low Will: Inspire
Low Skill, High Will: Coach
Low Skill, Low Will: Fire
It’s pretty straightforward.
If the player is lacking skill, you need to coach. If lacking will, you need to inspire. If you can’t do either, you need to fire.
We could go deep on coaching and inspiration, but for today’s purposes, the framework should help you begin to assess your team. And to be clear, this is true regardless of reporting structure—it’s everyone’s job to build a world-class team, not just the appointed leader.
Firing
When you know you know. Or as the kids say “IYKYK,” but I think that more commonly pertains to food porn—at least based on my Instagram recommendations. There are three steps you should take before moving into firing mode:
Compassionate Communication. Have an honest conversation, understand what might be true, and seek to learn rather than judge.
Clear Expectations. With change comes a learning curve, and that takes time. Without defining and measuring “what good looks like,” you have no business evaluating an individual’s skill or will. IYKYK refers to an inclination, a reason to explore more serious action, but that’s not to be confused with making great decisions after necessary diligence.
Fair Action Plan. Developing a mutual beneficial plan that is time bound, measurable, and achievable should be required, albeit often a longer process than it should be.
In my experience, when you do this well, the result is most often a rebound. The team member gets their act together and delivers a strong performance, yet often inconsistent over time. The second most common outcome is the individual finding a new role on their own, and rather than being fired the honest conversation enables both team and player to improve in their own ways. And finally of course is the more rare case of the person who hangs on for dear life, neither improving nor leaving, and ultimately gets let go.
You could argue all three shouldn’t take so long if the result is the same, but among other things, there are two material team benefits from this approach. First, an opportunity to demonstrate compassion, and build a culture where failure is given enough acceptance that your top performers feel comfortable taking chances to deliver outsized results (and they often do). The second is an opportunity to begin recruiting.
In an example that was as equally frustrating as it was rewarding, I recently aligned an action plan to a recruiting process that resulted in zero downtime in the business, and the successor delivered a result 5.8X better in 40% less time. Running those processes in parallel is delicate, but can certainly be done, and making an exceptional hire will completely change the game on the path to world-class results.
Hiring
Alright, average Joe(sephine) is out. Now you get to build your squad. Great leaders and entrepreneurs need to be exceptional at hiring. World-class people are one of only a very few set of things that truly matter, and here’s how I would think about it…
You’re solving for three levels of impact in every hire:
What does the role require?
What does the team need?
What will make the company better?
To even make it in the room to interview you must have #1 in spades. To get serious consideration, #2 is invaluable. And, #3 depends on the size of the company, but consider that a situational-nice-to-have, but ideally every hire has the potential to transform your business over time.
With that context you need to move to attributes of this newbie. You’ll hear others talking about hiring for coachability, intrinsic motivation, intelligence, culture fit, x-factor, etc, etc, etc.
Scratch all of that.
You only need three things: 1) Autonomous Actor, 2) Perpetual Learner, 3) Demonstrable Past Successes.
I wrote more about Autonomous Autodidacts here, and if I rewrote it I would add a very high bar for hiring those with demonstrable past successes. Top 10% performers. The best in the world. This is showcased through promotions at prior companies and objectively material results. These people often feel like a risk when you hire them, and that’s because it is. No risk, no reward.
Hope you enjoyed this week’s post.
See you Monday.