GCR Problem 7: Leader as hiring bottleneck because of unwritten standards
Talent searches in this field can run 9-12 months. At the end of these protracted searches, new hires often fail. With so much diligence and stronger-than-average epistemics from the hiring team, what gives?
This tends to happen in GCR organizations because they source from a thin market, have a strong values filter, and, maybe most of all, the leader’s take on what makes a standout hire has never been written down as criteria others can apply.
If you’re the leader and your hiring judgments are tacit, you’re the bottleneck. Write down your criteria. Turn “I know it when I see it” into a short, explicit bar: the three or four things a great version of this person actually does, described concretely enough that someone who isn’t you could observe and screen for them. This enables others on your team to run the front of your process. You stop being the rate-limiter on the team’s growth.
Once you’ve written your criteria, test for those things in your process. Build a true-to-life exercise around the criteria you just wrote down: put the candidate in a realistic slice of the job, watch them work, and grade them against the pre-written criteria, not (solely) vibes. Paired with this more falsifiable work trial, it’s critical to tell candidates the hard truths about the role before they accept, so the ones who’d hate it self-select out during the hiring process instead of 5 months into the job.
Finally, my informal survey of the sector has revealed that leaders here systematically over-value impressive outside senior hires and under-values internal promotions. Insiders have already passed your values filter and built meaningful context; the outsider is a bet on a résumé from a different world. As a default, it’s worth biasing toward the person you’ve already watched.
-ben
Related: hiring and managing an expert ; setting people up for direct feedback during the hiring process
Using third person for personal takes
If you have a difficult thing to say to a teammate, either because it’s challenging for you or challenging to hear, don’t hedge and soften it. Instead, give a forthright version of the claim in the third person, attributed to the part of you the take comes from.
Some examples:
The most emotional version of me right now wants to say x.
If you forced me to give you my instinctive opinion, it’d be this.
My most intense opinion on this right now is the following.
With my own reports, I’d say something like “In my least confident moments, I think this about you.” This was a hard thing to say and a surprisingly easy thing to hear, because I cabined the claim. This is a vulnerable thought I’m sharing, rather than a verdict I’ve reached. But it’s important enough that I’m telling you.
This attribution indicates you’re aware there could be flaws in the argument or in the basis for your take. But you haven’t sacrificed the intensity of the statement or the degree of your conviction. You’re making a full strength claim with an implicit invitation to rebut it.
This doesn’t dilute your claim the way hedging does. You genuinely do have a most intense opinion that is distinct from your most measured, considered one. Saying which is which gives your teammate more information, not less. Notice the difference between this and a manufactured probability estimate, which, to speak bluntly here, is often a way of appearing calibrated while hiding what you actually think.
Put bluntly, again: if the performance of your epistemics leaves your people confused about a) what you think or b) what they should do/consider next, you need to communicate differently. Strip out percentages; draw bright lines.
-ben
Related: Using alter-egos to deliver feedback (to start)
Share a worked example
When you ask someone on the team to take on a project that is new to them, give them a worked example if you can. This artifact can do more for them and shoulder more of the teaching burden for you than lots of explaining or your list of desiderata.
If you want to make your worked example especially potent, work it yourself while they watch. Narrate your thinking as you work it; name the decisions you’re making as you make them. You can do this live and in person or, if needed, you can record yourself doing it (Loom or Zoom could both work for this).
-eric
Related: I do we do you do ; A forbidden sentence
COMPELLING QUOTATIONS
Writer Sam Kriss goes for it:
Sometimes, I also dream about eating the Sun. I’m holding this great bowling ball-sized Sun in two hands as I bite straight through its waxy photosphere to get at the jellied sunflesh beneath. Bursting the Sun against my teeth. You’ve seen the videos online of a hippo just going to town on a watermelon: like that. Messy eating. A coronal mass ejection, hot glowing sunjuice, dozens of solar prominences all surging at once. I slurp at the juice. Chowing down on the inner portions of the Sun, ravenous, like an animal. Tear away the surface in strips, the wispy corona and that thick waxy rind, until I’ve gobbled up all the soft flesh and all that’s left is the solar core, the densest part. A plasma so thick its constituent atoms start to collapse under their own weight. It’s chewy. Like caramel. Sunstuff puddles on the floor. My hands are sticky with it. They shine.
Editor Jeronimo Gonzalez on the economic impact of honey v vinegar:
Overseas visitors to the US are on track to drop by almost two million year-on-year, with even the FIFA Men’s World Cup failing to arrest the decline in tourism.
The slide is hurting the US economy, and as Axios put it, is partly “self-inflicted:” There has been a significant drop in visitors from US allies like Canada and several European countries, which have been a target of Washington’s trade war and taunts.
Meanwhile, China is attracting more visitors with its visa-free entry policies, and Japan’s weak currency is drawing in a record number of tourists.
“We’re the only major country in the world losing visitation,” the head of the US Travel Association said. “It’s mind-boggling.”
Elephant shooter George Orwell on nukes:
Considering how likely we all are to be blown to pieces by it within the next five years, the atomic bomb has not roused so much discussion as might have been expected.