How to win leaders for your business
Hiring leaders for your remote company is the most crucial hiring you will ever make as an entrepreneur. Today, I will explain my preferred framework on how to do it.
There will be a point when you need to grow beyond the original founding team of your company. You’ve run out of friends and families and close recommendations, and you have all the co-founders there.
It is time to hire your next 10 team members - people you don’t know. This next group of people will have the most significant impact on your business ever.
If you hire the right ones, your business becomes a rocket ship. If you hire the bad ones, in the best-case scenario, you will lose half a year of growth at the most critical time of your company. So it is essential to have a framework for finding the right ones.
Startups at this stage fail because of many things:
trying to find a magician who can wear many hats
trying to engineer the heck out of it and aim for an expert, not a leader
don’t have a framework and hire too fast without proper checks
First of all, you need leaders, not managers. Your goal is to grow at this stage, so you need to find people who can build out entire “departments” for your company. A highly skilled expert can solve a problem for you but is not necessarily able to build teams for you.
Second, you need a framework that can be applied to any leader. I call it the asynchronous leader scorecard.
Using it is simple: there are six areas, each with a score of 1 to 5. You can hire anyone who reaches 20 points.
Remote work experience.
This is the most critical area as you have a remote company. You need a leader who managed remote teams before. The more remote work experience the leader has, the more points they get.
A simple background check is enough on the first interview to check this area.
Communication skills.
What you need to look for is someone who can communicate properly in writing. It is not an obvious trait - most leaders are great at speaking as they are used to having meetings. Remote work is different. You need a precise writer who can brief, delegate, and manage people in writing.
Checking writing skills is easy: give candidates a problem and let them write a brief as they would do it for their team. A nice trick is to show this brief to one of your team members internally without briefing them on the situation. If they can figure it out, the brief was clear.
Inspirational mindset.
I have talked about what it means to be an inspirational leader here. The more adequately they can explain and transfer your company’s mission to someone else, the more scores they can get during the hiring.
Checking this area is a bit harder, and it is highly up to you and your company. A practice I had was to give candidates the written company’s mission and let them explain it to me to see if they understood.
Management skills.
You need to know how your leaders are solving problems. If they are throwing resources at problems, they are not taking responsibility. They can be a good fit if they are genuinely building out a process to solve a specific problem.
Checking management skills can happen in parallel with communication ones. The same problem, but after the briefing, they also have to develop an action plan for solving the problem.
Leadership personality.
Often overlooked part, but you need people who are nice. You need more supportive leaders, less dominant ones. More empathy, curiosity, warm calmness, less practical conformity, or impulsivity. Don’t get me wrong, you need assertive people - but you don’t need the narcissist a-holes.
Checking this area is entirely up to you. These traits can surface during the interview process if you think you are a good people reader. Or you can stick to any personality test filled out asynchronously.
+1 Chemistry.
Now, yes, I know - you can’t ignore this one. We are human, after all. But trust me when I say this: chemistry means almost nothing in a remote environment, especially in an asynchronous environment. You don’t need to sit together in the same office every day, so whether you like the person or not means almost nothing.
Checking this is up to you. It is a free bonus of 1 or 5 points. But please don’t let these points make or break the decision.
That’s it; I hope it was helpful.
#TLDR
Your most essential hires will be the first people you hire out of the blue, as they will shape the very face of your company the most.
You need to hire leaders as they can build and grow teams for you.
You need to have a framework to hire great leaders because if you hire bad ones, you will lose valuable time and resources at a crucial time for growth.
You must check their remote work experience, communication skills, inspirational mindset, management skills, and personality.
That’s a wrap! See you next week.
Peter
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