From: Betashop Quartly (edited)
The most important hiring criteria for your executives is cultural fit. You need to work with people who work like you do, and who enjoy and appreciate your style and pace.
It doesn’t matter how smart or experienced people are, if they don’t match your style it’ll never work. You need to love working with them, and them with you.
Work with people who argue with you and tell you no. Be willing to fight like hell during the day but still love each other when you go home.
Don’t work with people you don’t love. There’s no short term gain that is worth sacrificing for working with someone you do not love working with. If you aren’t enjoying looking at each other each day, you’re working with the wrong people.
Here are the criteria I review Fab’s executives on:
Fab Culture. Does the executive personify our culture, cultivate it, and help us nurture it?
Fab Passion. Is the executive passionate for our specific Fab mission or could they be working at any company? Is Fab their life? Were they made to work at Fab?
As you grow, the hardest thing to manage is culture. We’ve probably worked harder on trying to make Fab Fab everywhere we operate than on any other initiative. Alignment amongst managers around who we hire, how we hire, and how we manage (and how we have fun doing it) is key to culture.
Follow your gut, and back it up with data. At Fab we like to say that we start with emotions and then support our emotions with data to learn whether our emotions were right. But, it’s emotions that come first. I firmly believe that’s how it should be.