Startup CXO

Chapter 103Hiring and Growing Leaders

Next to hiring well, the next important thing is to make sure you have the right leaders in place and that you are continuing to develop the bench of future leaders. I'll start off by saying that hiring leaders externally is difficult to get right. You are looking for people who are highly aligned with the culture and practices that you are building and who have the ability to build trust and rapport on the teams they will be responsible for. They also need to be a good leader, with both the skills to work effectively with people and the ability to get the team to execute and hit business outcomes. Finally, especially with technical roles, the leader needs to have deep experience as a contributor in the area that they will be managing. When you take all of this together, you can see how challenging it can be to find the right person who covers all of these areas. I find that it is easier to hire a leader into an organization that already has a strong leadership team—that peer team provides a center of gravity for the new leader and a chance for the new leader to pair with an established leader on a team for a period before taking over. Even then I've had mixed results with hiring leaders externally. The biggest misses have been getting people who weren't fully aligned with the culture we were building and creating pockets in engineering with different values or approaches to engineering. Or, we'd get people who were strong technically but ...