I see two big problems with this statement:
1. It falls into the "everyone must be extraordinarily excellent" trap. The average employee is... average. Odds are your hiring practices are average too. It is better to focus on getting people's best than it is to focus on having the best people, because very few companies actually do have the best people. If you think your company is different, you had better have a compelling reason.
2. Even for good employees, it takes time for them to adapt to your company and perform at their best. Obviously you need to let some people go, but if you hold a noose over their heads from day one they're just going to worry about looking good for long enough to collect their options/bonuses/etc.. Looking good in the short-term and doing good in the long-term are often incompatible goals.
2. I didn't see him say anywhere that performance has to be measured short-term. Having a noose over your head based on long term results is very possible. Of course you evaluate your executives on their last major completed project/action, it may have taken 6-18 months (or longer) for it to come to fruition, but that doesn't mean a noose isn't over their heads.
Even in sales, which has an unusually straightforward success metric, beyond a certain threshold of above-average competency the leadership is more about how well their approach gels with the most suitable approach for your service, and how flexible they are in their approaches than whether they're some mythical 10x unicorn. Someone who is "world class" at scaling inside sales teams is not going to be "world class" at figuring out how to get your small team of domain experts to network their way to niche domination... if anything applying lessons learned from their experience might make things worse. And I'm not sure what even makes a Head of HR "world class", but I'd certainly prefer a shared philosophy than a stellar set of resume accomplishments.
Anyone involved in a sufficiently large organization who thinks all their senior executives are "world class" or necessary to eliminate is clearly the weak link on the team, especially when it comes to judging others' abilities.
Once you get to the top, it's much more difficult. Indeed a non-Finance CEO can't teach much about Finance to the CFO. And they need stars for direct reports because too much is at stake to rely on mediocre people to improve by self-learning.
Where the argument breaks down is culture comes from the top. If the CEO doesn't take coaching seriously, their direct reports won't either. The CEO has to find a way to show that personal growth is a top priority, even if it isn't by teaching outside of their own domain.
If its glorious, its because the previous executive left. You in this case have the excellent opportunity of not screwing it up. Good luck, but it'll be while before anyone figures out that you're an imposter. Typically, your team will know well ahead of the CEO. By the time the CEO knows, its too late to mentor you. The damage is done.
If the state of affairs is terrible when you join, as a semi reasonable executive, you should be able to identify the most basic things that are effed up, and show improvement within 90 days. If you're unable to improve things right away, when they are screwed up -- sorry, you don't have what it takes. No amount of mentorship will address this.
0: http://www.amazon.com/The-First-90-Days-Strategies/dp/159139...
edit -- links, how do they work
any (senior) executive who changes things in the first 90 days has got it completely wrong. And if who hired them expect sweeping changes in 90 days then they got it even worse.
Anything that a new hire can do in their first 90 days can be done, and better, by whoever that new executive will report to.
E.g.: if you hire me to fire the people you want fired then there is no reason to wait for me and you should do it yourself. The moment you hire me to get help you have to give me the time to decide for myself who to fire and who not to and it will take more than a few weeks to make sensible decisions.
And yes, that's the exact conversion I had when I found myself in that situation and it's not valid just for SMEs, see 'Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?' for basically the same idea in a place as big as IBM (when he talks about everyone expecting him to come up with a brilliant strategy fast)
As I recall, in my first 90 days:
1. On day one several people hinted to me about work from an under performing contractor. On day 2, I met with this contractor and looked at his code. On day 3 I put him on a performance improvement plan. On day 8 I decided that he was the wrong fit for the role and ended his contract. Great guy, but he was just hired for one thing and then asked to do something else. But there wasn't anyone else who was really qualified to track down whether the problem was direction or fit.
2. There was a general consensus that we weren't shipping code fast enough. On week 3 we implemented Scrum (it was 2005). The engineers kind of hated it. But Scrum achieved what was needed. The rest of the company had enough visibility into development speed to realize that the problem with the company was bad product/market fit, not bad developers. We pivoted a bunch of times. Twitter was one of those pivots.
3. We were running our own servers in a cage at 360 Main. Those servers had been setup originally by one of the founders. There was definitely a desktop computer in there serving production code. The servers were administered by various engineers on the team (administered poorly because it's not what they wanted to be doing). So I started recruiting for a sysadmin. I definitely had hired him within the first 60 days.
There were plenty of things in there that I tried to fix as well and failed at. I can't imagine an exec coming into a startup and not trying to fix things. 90 days is an eternity. Normally there's so much wrong that the exec actually has a lot of latitude from day 1.
If you're not finding and correcting those things in 90 days as an executive, you're warming a chair.
Your people are at least nominally competent. They got you to this point, after all.
So, all of his points about people already inside the organization are much more easily summarized as "If someone inside your organization is performing poorly, you don't have the time to do anything but fire them." I probably agree with this not because I think that your startup magically needs to move so fast, but because most managers are far too unwilling to fire people that desperately need to be fired.
As for an external executive hire, the whole point of pulling them in is to add a needed skillset to the mix. If they don't actually have the skill you needed, why did you hire them in the first place.
As for long term, this article falls into the trap of assuming that management is somehow an inherent talent. It is not--it is a learned behavior. This is a huge problem in business since people who believe that managerial skill is inherent never strive to measure or improve their skill.
By the time you come in at executive level, as you say yourself, you'd better have the skillset needed, and better be functioning at an awfully high level with it.
It really doesn't take a lot to be world class once you're past those bars--most people aren't good enough in their areas to achieve executive status (I'm ignoring cronyism and a bunch of other less valid reasons to get the job) so once you're at that point, assuming you're legit, you're already in a small class of people.
Further, the executive sets the example for everyone else. So yes, if they're performing demonstrably poorly, fire them for heaven's sake. Otherwise the example they're setting will either influence everyone, or they'll be written off and now whoever hired them is going to inherit that distrust of competence.
Regarding management being an inherent talent, it's absolutely not. But a new executive hire is not the way to develop that talent--that job is for people who've already developed it. Mentor first, then promote, if you're shepherding someone from within.
And now, not ignoring cronyism and other poor reasons to hire someone, I think that whole "why did you hire them in the first place" is exactly what he's getting at. Don't hire (or promote) someone because you like them, assuming you can make them something they aren't today.
That's pretty much always true, strictly from a business perspective, but it's crucial as you go up the ladder. A bad exec will kill a company way faster than a bad employee, line manager, or even director.
While the advice in this article might hold for the parachuters from outside, it most definitely does NOT hold for those already at your company. Following this advice is a good way to paralyze a functioning company.
The problem is that that's how business executives think. Of course, they all think of themselves as world-class, visionary geniuses, and they think of their enemies as poor performers. There's a certain black-or-white mentality in that set of people that you don't see among people like us.
This is also why CEO pay keeps skyrocketing despite depressingly low (and worsening) quality of people who get into the CEO job. Due to this fallacious belief that all CEOs are world-class individuals, they just have to get 30% raises every year, plus stock options and unlimited personal use of the corporate jet.
In other words, I agree fully. See, I'm a programmer and I'm a fucking good programmer and I wouldn't describe myself as world-class. Even if you bump for the creativity and writing skill and rabble-rousing ability... nope, I still wouldn't call myself "world-class", just "very fucking good at what I do". But I'm not an executive narcissist who believes that the world owes me a better pot to piss in, and even if I were, I'm not sure that I have the negotiation skill that I'd need to get it.
Especially if you're an early employee and not in the elevated founder class.
Far more actionable is when an executive seems to be operating under an incorrect assumption about the world (people, customers, technology, etc) and you offer what you believe is a solid refutation of their incorrect belief, ideally without ego or rancor. Employees that can do this consistently are extremely valuable to an organization.
They might not listen to you but you can certainly tell them.
Beware that very often the response is "Well, I never considered that, but it sounds like a good idea. Why don't you lead a project to do X, Y, and Z and we'll see how it turns out? Oh, and be sure to get your regular work done too."
A month later, the chance to apply for any role (or create a new role) is offered to everyone in the organisation, again done so presenting to VPs and the GM.
I'd not encountered this in a large company; this company is around 150 people.
Some of the best advice I ever got (not for exec things) was "just be sure everybody thinks you're helping, no matter what they do".
Which why its so difficult to get on the path to be a ceo. The only way to really learn to be a CEO, is to be a CEO. And to get that chance you have to take risks, like founding.
When I founded my software company 9 years ago I was 23 and to say I was wet behind the ears is an understatement. I didn't have the faintest idea about leaders versus managers, strategy, operations, procedure, policy, management of staff, performance management...the list goes on. I thought that these were all just bullshit words that people used to cover up the fact that they were sit at their jobs.
Nearly 10 years of trial and error and I'm now capable of operating as a CEO at board level. My management team are crazy good at what they do, so I'd like to think they wouldn't have stuck around if I wasn't any good!
What I'm bad at is ops and managing people but that's fine. I've learned the hard way that this isn't my forte and hired somebody better than me at that to do that job. Hiring better people than you is an old adage but so true.
There is a downside to being a founder and CEO. It makes you more or less unemployable in a typical employer/employee relationship.
On the other hand, if you think that there is any future then non of these things is true.
Think of it from the perspective of a talented, savvy engineer at the company. If your CEO hires a bozo to manage engineering, do you stick around? Why should you? You are very good at what you do; you have plenty of options elsewhere, friends at other companies that are continually asking "Why don't you come work for Floogle?", and recruiters from Flare that are battering down your LinkedIn account. You're already aware that your VP makes a lot more money than you do; if it's clear that you are way more competent than he is, why should you stay?
Ben's guiding philosophy of management is "Always view all of your decisions from the perspective of everyone in the company." Trying to develop an executive for future potential may be what the CEO wants, it certainly is what the executive wants - but it's not fair to the individual contributors who work under that executive.
If you're giving employee #1 0.2%, maybe you should be hiring a contractor or something.
If you're Google, you're not going to give an engineer 0.2% even if he's The Best One.
I love how he switches between gendered pronouns in this article, and ends with a female one.
It is a shame we can't use "it" or another pronoun to avoid the issue entirely. They/their sometimes works but feels wrong when talking about a person in singular.
See, I'm pretty confident that, in a focused year of mentoring, I could turn anyone with strong general intelligence (say, IQ over 125) into a good programmer. If I can train someone into a hard job, then it can't be that difficult to train someone into a much easier job.
You should be extremely clear up front that you expect your executives to be world-class in their functions. If they are not, they will not keep their jobs.
Oh, this is just self-congratulatory claptrap. I don't consider myself a "world-class" programmer. I'm good, but it's not like I'm not one of the 20 best out there. And I'm far more "world-class" than 99 percent of tech executives.
