After reading Patty McCord’s book Powerful: Building a culture of Freedom and Responsibility. That summarizes the management of hiring strategies describing how Netflix became from a small DVD rental company to one of the biggest and well-known companies in the world with thousands of employees.
Books that talk about how the big companies have done it are such good material. Not only do they inspire the reader but they sometimes give answers to some questions where you were at doubt yourself or maybe sometimes even revelations. I think that most of our team should read this one. At least
So when I heard couple of days upfront that the author is visiting Tallinn and there is a chance for Estonian Startup Leaders to meet her, I instantly decided to redo my plans for that day and be in Palo Club at Telliskivi Loomelinnak this Friday at 16PM.
The house was quite packed and the host of the meeting, Rain Rannu, could humbly brag to our guest that Estonia is the country with most startups per capita. The meeting was in a Q&A format so no long intros or powerpoints.
Patty seemed a very funny lady who made a joke or two almost in every second sentence and nothing seemed to be sacred. The jokes were about herself, her job, her company but also about
My meeting notes
A couple of ideas that I noted quickly down from Patty McCord’s answers, extended and mixed with the ideas from the book itself.
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What should be the main motivator for the people to come to work each day? “I wanna solve these problems with these people” is the best main motivator for your employees. Table-football and free beer in the fridge won’t do it.
“Please, everyone have a look at the Netflix Culture deck. We spent 10 years in doing this document. Yes, for startups it seems like an incredible amount of time – not 10 days but 10 YEARS.”
https://igormroz.com/documents/netflix_culture.pdf
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Give me a mission statement and I will put it on a t-shirt, but what is the actual thing that you are doing to make the life of your customers better.
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High performance is the key factor for hiring people. But the needs for the company are evolving so the fact is that it is quite unlikely that the first 100 employees of your company will be the top people when you have 1000 employees on a pay-roll.
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At first, when you have no clue what it is that you are building, you are hiring people who appear to be breathing, but when time passes and focus and product
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If you are a startup you need a lot of guys who are builders, but at some point you are also in need of people who are maintainers. The same people are not suitable for this
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The question: how to make salespeople more active? They are already gone from Thursday noon?
The answer: You need to try very-very-very-very-very-very hard to make them understand their goals. The fact is they usually do what you have asked them to do. If you set them the targets and they have reached them by Thursday noon, then it is totally okay if they go home.
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Q: Who is responsible for the company culture if the company grows beyond 100-300 employees.
A: It is always the CEO. You will never get free from that responsibility.
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A lot of time when you develop a product, people in the company tend to ask for new features and stuff. The important question here, you need to ask from them is, does this serve them or does this serve the need of the customer?
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If 100 engineers have built some kind of crap, hiring 100 engineers more will not help you get any better.
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Q: What if you get resistance from some sub-groups inside the company.
A: Call them out openly. Tell them that you feel that they are blocking this thing or at least this is how you see this by their behaviour and ask them why they do this.
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You don’t get to have an opinion without speaking. There are only couple of reasons why I would instantly fire a person. If they steal from company which is an extreme case, but I would definitely fire a person if they said “I knew that this does not work, but no-one asked me before” after something has failed.
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Speak up loudly and do not be afraid to be wrong. Of course, be right most of the time, since it does not help if you are always wrong. But never be afraid to make a
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Job descriptions are usually BS. They describe the person who has left from the position or some kind of impossible dream that you have. Instead, deal with the
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Companies sometimes go to extremes. I have met a company who opens
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The job of the board and
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These were a couple of draft ideas that I marked down and I have to say the hour and half went muck quicker than you would expect in that meeting. I hope that everyone from you also grabbed at least one good idea from this blogpost that you can use to make your work (and life) better for yourself and for all of us.