Here's something that rubs me the wrong way whenever I see it: a senior leader tells their story in a way that makes her current or former employer look like total idiots. If they meant to do that, fine - everyone has an axe to grind. But I am actually not sure they even realize they are doing it.
How many times have we read an article that goes like this: "when I started at X, everything was a mess. I quickly turned things around by doing Y." Well the CEO who hired you at that company now looks like an idiot, and their board of directors is quickly taking notes. You took credit by making someone else look bad. Was that really necessary to get to the point you're trying to convey?
The reality is that the CEO built something out of nothing, and prioritized certain tasks (eg: PMF) while deprioritizing others (eg: the company's expense policy). Eventually there was enough money in the bank for the company to afford a $300k/year hire, who then paid back the administrative debt. How you paid back that debt is orders of magnitude less heroic than how the CEO got to the position of being able to afford your salary in the first place.
I really wonder if all those later-stage senior leaders could be that tone-deaf, or if they are throwing their CEOs under the bus on purpose.
In the case of a fence someone built a thing in a particular place. That it was constructed and positioned intentionally is clear, and it’s simply the reason that is missing.
In many orgs things are much more organic and random, and less intentional.
Stories like this are an ad. They signal that the person is in the business of mess cleaning.
You don’t feel bad for calling a sewage specialist when your septic tank breaks and there’s shit all over the lawn. And the septic tank person isn’t calling you out by saying “Wow there’s shit everywhere”
You know there’s shit everywhere. That’s why you called a shit specialist.
I don’t read this particular interview that way and even in cases where that signal is somewhat stronger, it’s still a mark of the CEO to identify a problem and hire an executive to fix it. That doesn’t make them look like an idiot at all in my book. If they left a significant problem to fester, that’s bad on them, but merely letting a significant issue develop and then addressing it is the on-going job of the CEO in many ways.
The way I see it is not an indictment of that CEO: Their company survived to get a big mess going and then they hired a great person who solved it. That senior leader is describing a positive thing they did for the company, and describing how the CEO saw and then solved the right problem there.
I don't necessarily agree with that take, but I do appreciate you sharing it.
Companies are about change - much of the state of a company is a result of decisions that were made years prior, based on assumptions that aren't true anymore, or as you noted were reprioritized. The best run 100 person company will struggle as a 1000 person company with their old policies (and likewise, the best run 1000 person company's policies would crush a 100 person company).
@aerosmile is correct. "People managers" are not capable of managing their way out of a wet paper bag. They use stories like this to insinuate themselves into positions of power which, actually, they relinquished when they majored in Communications in college.
I will trust the person with dirt under their fingernails that came from building something, long before I'll trust someone in a nice tailored suit (resembling the guy in the Snowden article) who talks corp-speak.
I should set the record straight. In my experience, later-stage senior leaders can be tremendously helpful, and I currently work with a few that make my life much easier. But if they wrote an article where they took credit at someone else's expense (either their manager, or even their predecessor, like: "it was really bad until I arrived"), I would be disappointed in their lack of understanding of the big picture.
The first wave of people you hire are very strong in certain areas (eg: pain tolerance, imagination), and very weak in others (organization, social skills). It turns out that in the first year, the pain tolerance is a lot more important than organizational skills, and that first wave of people didn't care about certain things, like an employee handbook, performance reviews, etc - all they wanted to do is get shit done. Eventually, things flip, and suddenly we find ourselves spending an entire week doing 360 reviews and similar work. The new people who join the company notice that the 360 reviews are not sufficiently streamlined, and they bring this to the attention of the newly hired chief people officer. That person takes a look at the problem and fixes it. At that point, the story should be delivered as follows: "the company decided that it was the right time to invest in this process, and this is how we did it." That sounds a lot different than "it was a mess and I fixed it."
I've observed a weird bit of title inflation for this job role in the last few years. I think all four of these mean the same thing?
VP of Human Resources
Chief Human Resources Officer
VP of People Operations
Chief People Officer
and now this interviewee, who is actually "Chief People, Places, & Publicity Officer" if you read down to the bottom.
I think it's very telling that this turns out to actually be a "PR" job title. It's really about controlling the message, inside and outside the organization. Creating a perception of valuing employees and customers and satisfying their respective needs.
Also, doing performance review cycles 4x/year is completely insane. What a waste of everyone's time.
> "Also, doing performance review cycles 4x/year is completely insane. What a waste of everyone's time."
So at CK in particular I know they used to have "annual cycles" and you had to "overperform for two cycles to get a promotion." I.E. You had to be outperforming the role you were hired at for 2 years to get a promotion. So unless you were underhired, you basically wouldn't get a promotion in a normal software tenure.
Depending on the organization, a VP title may not have "a seat at the table", which can lead to HR taking a back seat. This can include being overshadowed by Finance or Operations if HR rolls into the CFO or COO, respectively.
So the "title inflation" is a recognition that people is a tier-1 function, and needs airtime and visibility at the most senior levels.
As an aside, "Human Resources" is falling out of favor given the Dilbert-esque implications around HR. And "People Ops" always struck me as overly operations-focused and tactical vs. strategic.
Interestingly I worked at Credit Karma years back and part of the reason I left was I asked my manager directly, "Tell me exactly what I'd need to build to get promoted, it can be any amount of work, just set the bar." He said he couldn't.
I think some people would find my question profoundly fair ("OBVIOUSLY there's SOME amount of work that deserves higher pay"), and some people would find it profoundly unfair ("OBVIOUSLY a manager can only promote so many people per team"). I think this would be a good litmus test for employee-company compatibility.
Regardless, I was never getting promoted there so I work at facebook now.
Well, to be clear I didn't say do your job with no screw-ups and get promoted.
What I'm saying is in theory if somebody is willing to personally build a huge project that should deliver enough revenue to the company to more than pay for the difference. If everybody is willing to work twice as hard as 9-5 worker the company could 10x or 100x, isn't that the whole premise of startups?
Of course not all companies are poised for hyper-growth and are just in maintenance mode or dying, and those places probably don't have much use for people who will build extra hard.
So to answer your question, really the theoretical upward limit is how much value you can generate. Imo it's the opportunity for any great manager to say "Let's meet all your deliverables for the quarter, then I'll talk to the business team and see if there's an extra project for you"
I always want to hear the opinions of the managed when managers make presentations about leadership. In my company there is often a huge disconnect between how managers think things are and what the managed think.
Maybe I have seen too much shit in my time but everything in this article makes me squirm about where we have come with respect to HR/People practices. The job of HR is to maintain the working conditions for people to continue doing what they are being paid to. This usually means ensuring some simple, sane processes and getting the fuck out of the way.
But more often than not, we see HR as this pervasive, all permeating entity that keeps biting off more than it can chew in trying to justify its presence. There is a process for every thing and this is how we do it. Everyone must follow these processes and we need to standardize. And these processes tend to be complex monstrosities that change all the time because no one ever lost their job for attempting to do a lot of work.
What organisations fail to see is that, the more people have to deal with such complex monstrosities, the more they have to adapt to changing policies and incentives, the more time they have to spend mulling about and carrying out these processes. Time and effort that detracts from work that people were hired for, which was supposed to be the job of HR to ensure in the first place. I think a good acid test for the functioning of HR is to see how visible they are in the environment. If you are having to hear from them a lot, or you find yourself carrying out their mandate frequently, then they are probably not doing a great job.
> People will react not just to what they hear, but what they're actually seeing in practice.
That's a pull quote from the article that the editor has chosen to highlight. Is tech leadership so intellectually and ethically bankrupt to not understand that if you promise something and fail to deliver it, the people who you made promises to may no longer trust you? Why does that even need to be said, let alone be highlighted as if it's some sort of profound insight?
I just imagine some guy somewhere hitting himself on the forehead and saying "Ohh so I SHOULDN'T be duplicitous!".
Yes, it is completely proper English and is the sort of thing that you would say but probably write in a slightly different way. If the author used punctuation properly then the sentence would be been something like this:
"“I think, universally, founders and early startup leaders underestimate how hard people-work is,” she says."
The person talking may have been using 'people-work' as a jargon term for team management, but otherwise there is nothing out of the ordinary about the statement.
How many times have we read an article that goes like this: "when I started at X, everything was a mess. I quickly turned things around by doing Y." Well the CEO who hired you at that company now looks like an idiot, and their board of directors is quickly taking notes. You took credit by making someone else look bad. Was that really necessary to get to the point you're trying to convey?
The reality is that the CEO built something out of nothing, and prioritized certain tasks (eg: PMF) while deprioritizing others (eg: the company's expense policy). Eventually there was enough money in the bank for the company to afford a $300k/year hire, who then paid back the administrative debt. How you paid back that debt is orders of magnitude less heroic than how the CEO got to the position of being able to afford your salary in the first place.
I really wonder if all those later-stage senior leaders could be that tone-deaf, or if they are throwing their CEOs under the bus on purpose.