A Letter to a Small Company’s New Hire — Part II
How to build credibility before you start contributing
Note: This is the second post in my series on how new hires at small, growing companies can make the most of their onboarding and give themselves a valuable head start. If you’re reading Part II first, I suggest starting at the beginning.
Be Curious Before You Criticize
Before business school, I worked on a small sales team. Towards the end of my tenure, we hired a new executive. We had high hopes that their strong track record and deep rolodex would help us turn things around in a slow-growing piece of our US business.
Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Instead, this person put a serious dent in their credibility soon after they arrived and then left the firm just a few years later.
And here’s the sad part: This person wasn’t wrong. They were just early.
Here’s how it went down. Our company had two sides: Sales and Research. Sales was a 10ish-person team, with a handful of senior salespeople who ran their own territories. The research team was much larger — 30 or 40 people, all run by one senior analyst. Let’s call him Juan.
It’s important to understand that Juan is brilliant. He’s one of those people simply born with a better brain. As one of our founder’s first hires, Juan quickly made a name for himself by building sophisticated statistical models that used proprietary data (e.g., web-scraping, credit-card data, and the like) to track technology stocks. Juan quickly became a go-to name among Wall St. investors who valued his data-driven take on their companies. Juan was well-paid and in-demand.
Juan also had, still to this day, maybe the biggest ego I have ever encountered in a professional setting. He was dead set on doing things his way. Juan was notoriously hard to schedule calls with, only opening his calendar for small windows once or twice a month. On top of this, he was also the most reluctant of our analysts to write things down. His research notes were bizarrely vague and high-level. While our other analysts frequently published 20+ pages in a quarterly earnings report, Juan’s reports were often 1 or 2 pages. While I can’t prove it, I suspect his intention was this: By leaving valuable color and commentary out of his research notes, Juan made personal access an absolute necessity. Without talking to Juan directly, you’d never get the whole story. He was irreplaceable.
Despite Juan’s personality quirks, I respected the hell out of him. I still do. An illustrative story: Every quarter, Juan hosted a lunch with a group of hedge fund investors. He sat at the head of the table, and while our clients quietly dined on a high-end tasting menu, Juan delivered an absolute clinic for 90 minutes. From memory, he covered every trend, every metric, and every revenue and EPS estimate (with detailed explanations of the data backing them up) for more than a dozen companies. No notes. No reference material. I was amazed. Sure, the guy had an ego. But as Walt Whitman wrote, “If you can do it, it ain’t bragging.”
Juan’s ways of working bothered everyone to a degree, but they really rubbed our new sales executive the wrong way. It was infuriating that they couldn’t schedule time with our most important analyst. It bugged them when a prospect replied “this is it?” when they forwarded a sample research note. It bothered them even more that despite the evident frustration across the team, no action had been taken. Why wasn’t anybody doing anything about this Juan thing?
So the new exec decided to bring it up. In a pointed question to the CEO. In a company-wide town hall. Shortly after their first day on the job.
See the problem here?
The new executive’s intentions were good, and their assessment was spot-on. This was a real problem. We had a serious bottleneck in our research department. It was limiting our growth and causing frustrations for our team. It needed fixing.
But the way that they brought up the problem — publicly, before building meaningful relationships, and before asking “why” — turned out to be the death rattle for their time with our company. The sales exec left for a new role a few years later, frustrated at their inability to change things for the better.
How to Close Gaps and Connect with People
Your new employer didn’t hire you to fill a role.
They hired you to close a gap.
They hired you because there’s something holding them back. Something in the way. An obstacle standing between between the company they are today and the one they want to become. You’re there because there’s a problem that needs to be solved, a customer that needs to be landed, a process that needs to be built, or a team that needs to be assembled. This is the question you should consider as you begin your new role: What are the gaps? And which ones most need filling?
But you’ll never get a chance to close the gaps if you can’t build relationships. Business improvements happen by way of clean agreements between people. These agreements spread the work of changing things amongst the team. It’s very difficult to steamroll collaborative change. If you’re not the CEO, it’s pretty much impossible. Before you point out what needs fixing, you need to be accepted by the group and viewed as an equal. Only then do you earn the right to add to help point out and prioritize the gap that needs filling first.
When I coach friends starting new jobs, I give them a couple of questions to ask their manager. These questions are designed to surface what matters most and what most needs improving without being too threatening. They’re tools to help you get curious before you get critical. Nobody likes to hear “you’re doing it wrong” — especially from the person who hasn’t done a thing yet.
The questions are:
THE BEST VS. WORST QUESTION: “What does our team look like when we’re performing ‘at our best’ vs. ‘at our worst?’”
THE NORTH STAR QUESTION: “What couple of metrics or indicators do you pay the most attention to in your role? What do you look at to figure out if you’re on-track or off-track?”
THE ALL-STAR QUESTION: “Who should I look to as an example of ‘what good looks like’ in my role? What do they do differently than others doing the same job?”
These three questions will help you benchmark the business in a natural, conversational way. They will help you unearth what might need improving without forcing too much early vulnerability from your new team. And they’ll give you the information you need to change things for the better — while connecting with your new teammates.
(You know — the people you need to help you make it actually happen.)
