Recruiting Animal

Culture: What they do vs What they say

From: Patty McCord  (edited)

I asked the CEO what the most important value for his company was. "Efficiency," he replied.

“OK,” I said. “Imagine that I work here, and it’s 2:58 PM. I’m playing an intense game of pool, and I’m winning. I estimate that I can finish the game in five minutes. We have a meeting at 3:00. Should I stay and win the game or cut it short for the meeting?”

“You should finish the game,” he insisted. I wasn’t surprised; like many tech start-ups, this was a casual place, where employees wore hoodies and brought pets to work, and that kind of casualness often extends to punctuality.

“Wait a second,” I said. “You told me that efficiency is your most important cultural value. It’s not efficient to keep coworkers waiting because of a pool game. Isn’t there a mismatch between the values you’re talking up and the behaviors you’re encouraging?”

It’s a particular problem at start-ups, where there’s a premium on casualness that can run counter to the high-performance ethos leaders want to create.

I often sit in on company meetings to get a sense of how people operate. I frequently see CEOs who are clearly winging it. They’re working from slides that were obviously put together an hour before.

 

Recruiting For Culture

Featuring: Paul DeBettignies, Jerry Albright, Alejandro Guzman, Animal

 

 

 

 

 

 

PLAY - Recruiting 4 Culture: Paul, Jerry, Alejandro, Animal - 16 Min

PLAY - Recruiting 4 Culture: Paul, Jerry, Alejandro, Animal - 9 Min

 

 

Company Culture

I had a chat today with @JohnSumser about company culture. John said that there is a problem with vocabulary when discussing culture because it can refer to temperament, personal style or company size and structure.

A lot has been written about company size and candidate fit.

Here's Jessica Mintz in The Wall Street Journal:

While entrepreneurs might be tempted to hire candidates with big-business credentials, they're rarely a good fit. "There are rules, regulations and processes to do everything" in a big company, says Mr. Marshall. "In a start-up, there are no set jobs. Everyone does everything." Start-ups should be looking for flexible candidates who are used to smaller environments.

Here's Cindy Alvarez

Big Company people are not universally bad for startups. In fact, you’ll never grow your startup without them.  But lots of them are not the right hire for your startup.

Your Big Company candidate ought to be squirming with impatience in their current environment. They want their ideas to be implemented faster.  They want to stop with the extensive analysis and start experimenting. They crave doing things vs. talking about them and planning them for next year.

Here's Devon McDonald quoting Mark Suster on the Openview blog

BigCo reps.... may be used to relying on a steady stream of quality inbound leads and find it too difficult to build a solid pipeline without them. But even those with plenty of success hunting for their own deals may find it’s a different story when they don’t have the instant authority and credibility of a big company logo on their side.

And here's Mark Suster on his Both Sides of the Table blog

Early stage selling is way more “evangelical” than process driven.  That means you’re more often than not trying to get customers to realize they actually have a problem versus their already having budget assigned for a system in your category.

If you hire that person straight from a sales academy they will be hugely frustrated that you don’t have pricing sheets, high quality sales collateral, a well-oiled sales process integrated into Salesforce.com and a clear sense of why customers should buy your product.

Culture Is a Complex Package

Note that Suster changes topics. He's still talking about small companies but not an organizational issue. He's talking about different sales skills: selling a new product versus an established one.

You can call the lack of admin support and the need for a specific kind of sales skill part of the culture of a start-up. But your meaning will be clear only if it's understood that culture refers to a package of issues that are related but still distinct.

The sophisticated person will know that a start-up includes people who have an informal personal style, are temperamentally enthusiastic, who like to experiment, who can sell new products, and are willing to work long hours without any admin support.

But, unless you are clued in to the full checklist of its elements, when someone uses the term "company culture", you are going to find it confusing. I do and I believe that most people who use the term do not have a fully articulated idea of its meaning in their own minds.

I'm No Sherlock Holmes

As I write, I'm listen to TalentCulture Radio and China Gorman is explaining that companies attract people by means of their strong cultures. And what does that mean specifically?

Well, she's been talking a lot about paying for education. And listeners are tweeting about investing in employees. And when they say that these things build a strong company culture I think they mean what I would call a strong team spirit. People are engaged. They are happy working at the company, they think it's a good place and do not want to leave.

So, that's a part of company culture, too. But, as I said, you have to be well-informed to get it. And, maybe that's my problem. Perhaps, I'm not.

But, look, I run a recruiting radio show and I remember asking Donato Diorio, a very smart CEO and former recruiter about his company's culture. And, you know what he said? "Work hard, play hard?". And, maybe that means it's a good term for sloppy talk but has little practical value.

Culture In Recruiting

On the other hand, I've long been impressed by the idea that a paleontologist can find the footprint of a dinosaur and know what the entire creature must have looked like. Or, an archeologist can find one tool in a pile of sand and know a lot about the community it came from.

Some things are necessarily tied together. So, if you know one thing about a company, it can imply a lot. That means, in recruiting, maybe you only have to know a few things about a company and search on that basis to find a cultural fit. For instance, someone coming from the public sector doesn't usually fit into the private sector and vice versa. I know it's simple things like these we talk about when someone mentions culture. Nothing more. As you can see, however, from what Cindy Alvarez says above, crude generalizations while often meaningful can lead you to miss out on individuals who are misfits in their current companies who could be good hires for you.

 

 

Selling A Second Rate Product

From: Billy Davidow (edited)

In the 1960's I was the first manager of marketing for Hewlett Packard's computer division.

HP's first product was the 2116A -- the heaviest, biggest, slowest, most expensive, and worst architected minicomputer on the market.

The manager of the Los Angeles sales office told every salesman to come back to the office at the end of the day and tell each other about their successes, no matter how small.

Going out on sales calls was torture, as customers explained the products shortcomings.

The Tough Communicator

From: The Story of Steve Jobs (edited)

Apple employees rarely quit when Jobs called them shitheads, or even when he took credit for their ideas.

An early manager on the Mac team told Isaacson about the abuses Jobs heaped on employees.

But she said, “I consider myself the absolute luckiest person in the world to have worked with him.”

These testimonials are proof, for many, that strong leadership and impressive results will lead employees to tolerate, even embrace, unpleasant work conditions.

Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, practices radical forthrightness in all his personal relationships.

All Bridgewater employees are expected to clash with one another, to speak without filters or concerns about sensitivities.

Dalio shares Jobs’ belief in the benefits of a tough, brutally candid office environment, though he requires his employees to dish it out to him just as much as they take it.

He likens the mode of dialog he practices to twisting one’s limbs into a difficult yoga position or training as a Navy SEAL.

“Pretty soon the pain becomes pleasure and you can’t live without it.”

 

Changing A Culture

Andrew Sullivan was the first person I read who discussed the idea of a war against Iraq. He was very enthusiastic and here's why.

He believed that Iraq could be democratized in the same way that Germany and Japan were democratized after World War Two.

I don't remember him mentioning that Germany and Japan had been beaten to a pulp after years of war. And here's another thing that might have been considered as well.

Educated Western readers tend to see the case of de-nazification in Germany and the complete rejection of Hitler's past by the Germans as something normal. But it is actually an exception with few if any parallels worldwide.

Japan, for example, is far less willing to admit the scale of its former misdeeds, and in Turkey the mainstream opinion is not ready even to accept the fact of Armenian genocide - probably, the first "modern" genocide.

Each case has its explanations, but one should realize: the total rejection of the recent past, German style, is by no means typical.

The inevitability of Kim revisionism, Andrei Lankov, Asia Times, May 4, 2011

Those countries which already had strong internal opposition to communist rule, like Poland, were the ones which were better able to adapt to post-communist life.

Where opposition was weak or ruthlessly suppressed - Russia, or East Germany perhaps - there's still for many a strong nostalgic pull back to the "good" old days

Mick Hartley, Kim Revisionism, June 09, 2011

 

 

Tweetdeck Is Modest

There are no rock stars in the company, no egos, no celebrities. We’ve never courted publicity - @richardbarley http://bit.ly/bTNMKh Sun Apr 03 12:39:03 +0000 2011 via web Recruiting Animal
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