Welcome to back in your Leadership. I'm Chris and I'm Lorenzo, and welcome
to this week's Thoughtful Thursday. Don't forget to follow us on YouTube at Hacking
your Leadership and leave us a review on iTunes. On this leughtful Thursday,
I want to play a short little clip that I found online from Gary Vaynerchuk
and you and I are both fans of Gary vee. It's about maybe twenty
or thirty seconds long. And then I want to get your thoughts about it
because it's a little clickbaity, but I like it, and I seem to
kind of gravitate towards his mindset on this kind of thing. But there's a
potential other side of it too, So let's listen to that and we'll come
ar back. I'm a big believer in hiring fast. I think people overthink
it. It's a guessing game. I don't think I've ever checked the reference
check. It's not practical. Of course, you're going to put the three
people that either most believe in you or love you, and or you prep
them to be like, hey, give my back. I think you're making
a logical guest to the best of your ability. Based on what you know
about your organization and the series of questions you asked. I'm a big fan
of of hiring fast, meaning I don't think you should just hire everyone,
but if you feel it, don't need to go through too many more rounds.
It all depends on how much you trust your intuition and pattern recognition.
I think once you have someone in your organization, you now know the truth.
Hiring is guessing, you know, firing is knowing. To me,
it's higher fast, you know, fire faster. That doesn't mean like be
mean and fire. It means put in the work quickly. If you can
recognize something's not working, and if it doesn't work after six months to a
year, like you got to go all right, what do you think about
that? Hire fast, no reference checks, you know. I mean,
I'm a fan of just the intuition from a hiring standpoint. We've talked about
this before. I know, we've talked about just hiring in the length of
time it takes for somebody to kind of make a decision on somebody you know
that would come to an organization. Because I think that there there is definitely
kind of like a vibe a feel if you're in an industry, especially like
in a customer service industry, how somebody presents themselves, how they how they
the energy they give, the confidence they exude. These are all things that
you can pick up relatively quick. And I just like that idea because I
think sometimes we do over complicate hiring processes with so many interviews and questions that
we just teach people how to be better at answering questions instead of just like
assessing whether or not somebody can join the company and knowing the fact that we're
taking a risk no matter what. Right. No, I agree with that
unless you're promoting somebody from within, there's a certain amount that there really is
no way to know till you actually see somebody in the job. The idea
of hiring fast and using your gut, I like that. There are some
other parts of it, too, which is you have to kind of you
have to de risk it a little bit. You can't just kind of throw
anybody in there who you want to just because you happen to like the cut
of their jib. You know, they have to have a process to this
that is more rigid, that makes sure that you are you're at least slowing
it down a little bit and putting some objectivity to it. But at the
end of the day, you're right, it can't be something that takes weeks
or months. A decision that should take you know, one or two interactions
with somebody to kind of figure out. And obviously, the more you move
up in an organization, the higher the position is, the more gravity there
is to those decisions. But in terms of just letting somebody into an organization,
yeah, there there's a there's a real benefit to hiring fast and also
by de risking that by by hiring fast, meaning if you hire fast,
you you haven't put the rigor into this this process that now is going to
be looked at as like, wow, with with all this, all these
seventeen interviews you made this person go through and they still didn't work out,
Your process must be terrible. You know, if you hire fast and you
don't put a lot of time or or investment into the process, then if
it doesn't work out and you can help a person exit gracefully and go on
to the next thing again, that would be fire fast too. Uh,
Then that I think you are better equipped to kind of go through this process
over and over and over again. You're kind of you're your muscles are kind
of exercised on this as opposed to only you know, going through two or
three times a year, because you've slowed it down so much that you really
don't know how to do this without the work of seventeen people involved. Yeah,
and I think there's also like ways to make it happen faster. Like
I'm a big proponent of like finding your best people and saying, hey,
who do you recommend, Like sure, who do you know that maybe you've
worked with in the past, or that you feel would be a good fit
here, like things like that, because it also then helps to bring on
people and they kind of have a co sign when they come in and you're
not just necessarily like meeting strangers that don't have any type of relationships with people
that already work in your organization. But I agree, like I think that,
especially if you're a hiring leader, I would imagine that you've got enough
experience and tenure and you kind of know, you know the questions that you
want to ask, you know the things that you kind of want to filter
for. And to your point, it can feel like all of these interviews
and conversations are an investment in selecting the right people. But then I also
think it, you know, is that really necessary and is it only a
few people, especially like those that work directly, Like like, if you're
gonna work for somebody directly, they should have input in that of courcause they're
part of making this decision. And they're only going to get better over time
of making hiring decisions and building the intuition they need by by making calls and
then seeing how it works out. And I think that that's helpful in realizing
like, Okay, this is maybe where I thought somebody would work out because
I maybe heard something similar or similar background or some experiences or that type of
thing. Maybe I'll ask a couple more questions to see if there's a different,
you know, way this can go. And I think that's really really
important to be able to build skill in talent selection with leaders. Yeah.
The second part I want to talk about here is where he talks about firing
faster. Now, he mitigates it and says, you know, he doesn't
mean, you know, kick somebody out on the curb, but the idea
of firing faster, in his words, is along the lines of you know,
don't don't string somebody along hoping they're going to eventually be able to have
skills that are needed, when it's clear they don't have the skills or they
can't get there very very quickly. I know a lot of organizations where this
doesn't happen very quickly, and it causes a lot of fall out and a
lot of damage is done by people, especially in leadership roles, who don't
have the skills to be there, and they're there hoping they're going to,
you know, kind of magically get there. And so I want to ask
you a question about when this has happened to you, But first I'm want
to give it toward for one of our sponsors, Rio Lorenzo. Have you
ever been in a situation where someone reported to you and you almost felt like
a personal responsibility to get them up to speed or where they needed to be,
even though everything that you were seeing was telling you this is the wrong
person for it, but you kind of felt almost pot committed and bought into
them, and so you kind of made it go longer than it probably needed
to go. Definitely, I think there's that's a part of human nature of
kind of like if you felt that you've made the right call. Maybe there's
something that's like that's not connecting here, Maybe there's something that's gone going on
where like you want to give them a benefit of the doubt and things like
that. And I've been in those situations, and I think that over time,
which you realize is once somebody and especially a leader, has had enough
time to kind of like immerse themselves in what's going on, get to know
the team, see what's happening, find you know the way to add value,
and have enough time to do all of that. If you're not seeing
that happen, or if you're not seeing the behaviors that you kind of assessed
for, I think it's critical that you have that conversation and say something like,
hey, it's been ninety days now I want to talk about how it's
going. What are you seeing? What are some things And this is the
kind of the types of question that I ask, what are some things that
you've done that you're really proud of, things that you've kind of caught onto.
What do you see as the hurdles that are maybe slowing you down from
showing up to the best of your ability. And then what are some mistakes
that maybe you've made that looking back on it, you would have made a
different decision. And I'm asking these very specific questions because I'm also trying to
understand and assess, like do they have self awareness? Are they tracked in
the same if somebody says to me, I don't I don't really think I've
made any mistakes. I think I've I've I've you know, done a lot
of Okay, would you like for me to share with you some of the
ones that I've recognized and observed, right Like, we're going to have this
conversation, But I think it's it's really fair in that moment to say,
like, these are things that I you know, if you look at the
job description, if we look at what's expected here, these things have to
move very quickly, right Like, like we can't have somebody in a role
where they're learning how to do the basics of the job. Sure, you
kind of have to be able to do the basics of the job. And
then there's like the extra things and and and the the ability to have bandwidth
to take on larger projects, to do more types of things. But let's
focus on this and to say things as a leader, to say, like,
you know, I I believe and what I've seen that you have the
potential to move to move faster here, or to be able to accomplish these
things. But I am a little bit concerned that it's taking a little bit
too long. So I want to talk about that, like what do you
think is slowing it down? What are they like? Like really having the
conversation, having the dialogue, of course building some confidence there, but being
really clear about it to say, okay, so what's the next thirty days
going to look like? What's the next sixty days is going to look like?
What are some things that you're working on now that we're going to follow
back up on to validate and verify that you can kind of put these these
behaviors into action and we can see something a little bit different. And it's
and it's maintaining that dialogue and having those conversations to get to the point where
you may have to say to somebody like, it's clear to me that this
isn't working out how we thought it, What is it clear to you?
Where do we go from here? What do you think? And and just
being comfortable having that dialogue so that it can be about the leader understanding that
this is not personal, and that just because they may be struggling doesn't make
them a bad person. But also we're going to have accountability conversations and we're
going to talk about it, and we have to be really we have to
be honest with one another. And I think that that is the due diligence
that a leader has to have. But you have to commit to the time
and effort to be in positions to notice, to observe the behaviors, to
take your notes, and to be really specific about what you're going to deliver
to them, because it's unfair if you just have the opinions of others or
what you've heard, or the team says like, if you're doing that,
then you are delegating that responsibility as a leader, and that is not you
know, doing the right thing or building the right culture. No, I
totally agree with that. I think when I've been in situations where I've had
leaders who have articulated almost a feeling of personal responsibility to help somebody along or
that maybe you know too much was asked of them too fast, Like there
are real hiring decision failures where someone where if you are a leader and you
put the wrong person in role, and you own that, you can feel
that sense of responsibility. I'm the one who caused this problem, so therefore
I have a responsibility to see it through, and I would just I would
argue that it really is not that you can own a mistake and stop it
from causing further damage and kind of, you know, move move past it
while helping a person you know land gracefully or write a reference letter for them,
or whatever that is. But what you need to be thinking about is
what is the damage being done to your other people who are one or two
layers below this person, who are maybe even if they're not a bad person,
maybe they're a good person, but they're not a good leader, or
they're not a good developer of people. How many other people's careers are being
put on hold because they don't have a direct leader over them that's looking up
for them or helping them develop and move further on their career. So your
responsibility as a leader is not just the person who you think you shouldn't be
who needs to be kind of brought along for the ride. Your responsibilities to
all those people they touch and effect to If you look at it from that
from that standpoint, I think it's a lot easier to make these tough,
tougher decisions, you know, quickly, as opposed to you know, take
longer than they should. Absolutely and with that it brings us to the end
of this episode. This is hack your leadership. I'm Lorenzo and I'm Chris,
and have a great day.