Richard Schäfer retweetledi
"Look, I am going to be real with you; I promise neither of us will likely retire here."
Those are the words I used to close Sahil and hire him. I hired him into what was, at the time, a nascent and relatively early-stage startup that could've still failed by all objective measures. He had reservations, and he was on the fence.
But after that conversation, he immediately accepted.
In fact, those are the words I used to close numerous phenomenal engineering hires even after we stopped being a startup. I stole engineering hires from the likes of Google & many with offers to firms like FB & Apple, which wasn’t easy to do as a startup; I am proud of that.
But there is a lesson from that which applies to more than just hiring.
In short, I was real with all of them. I told them as long as their contribution to my team is big, everything will work out. They'll move up fast; they'll earn more. They'll likely be in demand.
I told Sahil, "If you do your part, it'll work out for me; it'll work out for you. It'll work out for our team. The skills you pick up here will be real, the titles will be real, and the money will be real. We'll all be earning more & neither one of us will retire here."
You might be asking yourself, how could that work?
It is the exact opposite of what most managers, leaders, and firms do today. Most leaders still play pretend.
Leaders still pretend employment is for life even though it doesn't work that way anymore.
Pretending leaders ooze a fakeness that few buy into. They say things like, “We want people to be missionaries.” They want people to be "on the mission until the end." Right up until things don't work out, then it's "Sorry, but this is just business; we have to downsize."
As we recently learned, firms always fire people when they have to—even hard-to-hire, highly skilled, highly educated people with credentials, tenure, and all sorts of accomplishments.
Downsizigin is understandable.
But what's not understandable is the play pretend.
Many leaders fooled themselves first because it benefited them and now attempt to fool everyone else too. They think it's the only way to get people to work hard. But people crave the truth.
Even when negotiating to hire Sahil, I knew I had bigger aspirations than to be a middle manager forever. So I told him that. And why would I even pretend I will be there until the end? I won't. And that's ok.
As Puff Daddy famously said in 1998:
"Even the sun don't shine forever
But as long as it's here, then we might as well shine together
Better now than never, business before pleasure."
Sahil signed the offer with me as a mid-level engineer and became a director of engineering in a few short years. Of course, his contributions were massive to my teams. He did his part; I did my part. He grew; he hired and built up multiple teams. But the important thing here is that our relationship was built on being real with each other from day one.
That's the relationship I had with all the people I hired. And that is the relationship I aim to have with all the people I deal with, even strangers on the internet. And I have been rewarded for that, and I believe you will be too.
Just keep it real; the right people can handle it. And the ones that can't, you probably don't want by your side anyway.
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This was a small story from my newsletter that went out tonight. The link to subscribe is on my profile.
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