Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

by Patty McCord

“The downside of experts is that they are all too aware of the current constraints. Someone with fresh eyes can sometimes find their way around constraints, almost out of ignorance.”

If the discussion digresses, or if someone is stubbornly digging in, you can always interject, “What problem are we trying to solve here?” or “What leads you to believe that’s true?”

In the Culture Deck we wrote that one of the core qualities we looked for in those we hired and promoted was good judgment, defined, in essence, as the ability to make good decisions in ambiguous conditions, to dig deeply into the causes of problems, and to think strategically and articulate that thinking.

Intense, open debate over business decisions is thrilling for teams, and they will respond to the opportunity to engage in it by offering the very best of their analytical powers.

Be selfless in debating. That means being genuinely prepared to lose your case and openly admitting when you have.

Relentlessly Focus on the Future

“You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”

You’ve got to hire now the team you wish to have in the future.

“Are you sure you don’t want seventy-five people who you pay twice as much because they have twice as much experience and can be higher performers?”

Building the muscle to hire great people is a huge competitive advantage.

This is an especially acute problem for start-ups, because founders often feel a strong sense of loyalty to their early team.

“Are we limited by the team we have not being the team we should have?”

You’ll be more cognizant of what they don’t know how to do, or don’t do well, and you’ll see where you need to bring in top performers in areas where you don’t have them or don’t have enough of them.

Identify the problem you want to solve, the time frame in which you want to solve it, the kinds of people who will be successful at that, and what they need to know how to do, then ask yourself, What do we need to do to be ready and able, and whom do we need to bring in?

believe the best advice for all working people today is to stay limber, to keep learning new skills and considering new opportunities, regularly taking on new challenges so that work stays fresh and stretches them.

To stay agile and move at the speed of change, hire the people you need for the future

On a regular basis, take the time to envision what your business must look like six months from now in order to be high-performing. Make a movie of it in your head, imagining how people are working and the tools and skills they have. Then start immediately making the changes necessary to create that future.

Successful sports teams are the best model for managers; they are constantly scouting for new talent and culling their current roster. You’re building a team, not raising a family.

Develop and promote from within when that’s the best option for performance; when it’s better to hire from outside, be proactive in doing so.

If you are not great at hiring high-talent people, then you cannot truly be comfortable letting good people go.

The most competitive companies are able to stay limber, always innovating and growing, largely because they are always proactively bringing in the new talent they need.

The measure should be not simply how many people you are keeping but how many great people you have with the skills and experience you need. How many of them you are keeping?

How many new people with the skills and experience you need are you hiring?

True and abiding happiness in work comes from being deeply engaged in solving a problem with talented people you know are also deeply engaged in solving it, and from knowing that the customer loves the product or service you all have worked so hard to make.

Motivation Is About Talent Density and Appealing Challenges

Retention is not a good measure of team-building success; having a great person in every single position on the team is the best measure.

prowess.

I found that market demand is still not adequate as a guide to the compensation you should offer, because it is of the current moment, while hiring should be about the future.

Consider the well-known 80/20 rule regarding sales teams, that 20 percent of your company’s salespeople will generate 80 percent of your sales revenue. That rule might apply much more widely to other types of employees. I know I’ve seen a comparable effect in team after team.

In my experience, if you focus intently on hiring the best people you can find and pay top dollar, you will almost always find that they make up much more in business growth than the difference in compensation.

Being open allows you to explain to people why others are being paid as they are. Having a good rationale for the discrepancy reinforces that you’re a performance culture.

I am arguing for tying pay to performance, full stop, and the way reviews are generally carried out, there is a big, big difference between those two.

The skills and talents for any given job will not match a template job description, and salaries should not be predetermined according to templates.

Rather than paying at some percentile of top of market, consider paying top of market, if not for all roles, then for those that are most important to your growth.

We needed a brilliant person in the job who really wanted to lead a team to do that job.

One of the benefits of the leadership communicating clearly to everyone in the company about where you’re heading and the challenges and opportunities that future will bring is that it better equips people to evaluate how well their skills fit into that future.

“Well, we have an eighty-game season, and every ten games I would sit down with them individually. I’d bring all their stats and I would I ask other people—the other coaches, the other team members—for feedback also, and the player would bring a self-evaluation.

When performance issues arise, the sooner you address them with people, the better they will be able to see what they’re not doing well enough and make corrections.

“Do you have any proof of the value of the annual review process to your business?”

I also came to realize that when you hire someone and it turns out that they can’t do the job, the problem is with the hiring process, not the individual. You simply hired the wrong person. It’s not their fault! So you shouldn’t make them feel like it is.

I came to understand that sometimes it’s in everyone’s interest for people to move on to a new job quickly rather than keep trying to improve their performance.

If there is a clear way to assist a person in getting up to speed with a skill or set of skills in a reasonable period of time, I say, wonderful, do that.

In my experience, high performers are, in fact, often somewhat frustrated with how their teams are performing rather than satisfied that everything is going swimmingly and life is all good. They are pushing for great results, and achieving those often requires some pain and a degree of discontent.

I tell them, “You want to be a lifelong learner; you want to always be acquiring new skills and having new experiences, and that doesn’t have to be at the same company.

is what this person loves to do, that they’re extraordinarily good at doing, something we need someone to be great at?

Instilling belief in the practice gets easier as managers come on board. The greater the density of great team builders you achieve, the more you can spread the practice organically.

Managers don’t do best by their people by sugarcoating difficult truths, waiting until the last moment to let them go, or shunting them into roles they don’t truly want or the company doesn’t really need. The effects of all of these are disempowering, dispiriting, and corrosive, both for the individuals in question and for entire teams.

Employees need to be able to see whether their talents and passions are a good match for the future you are heading to, in order to determine whether they may be a better fit at another firm.

Use my algorithm in making personnel decisions: Is what this person loves to do, that they’re extraordinarily good at doing, something we need someone to be great at?

Can you say that every person on your team is doing a job they’re passionate about and great at and that you need them to be doing? If not, can you have a conversation with those who aren’t about other opportunities in the company they could consider or about the landscape of opportunity they can consider outside?