Growmance: Recent Episodes
Daniel Hummelsund
To listen to the podcast version of today’s post, click play above!☝️☝️ My podcast is taking leaps forward this week; I’ve added a punky jingle and am freestyling over the content 🕺
Netflix has created what’s maybe the most shared power point presentation in the history of power point. It’s a deck of 126 slides on how they shape their culture and motivate people.
Patty McCord, the former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, was part of Netflix’s radical HR strategy. Here’s a fascinating and provocative talk she gave in 2018. She’s a breath of fresh air in HR and people management — a function which is often only a reactive and supporting, when it really should be a function of growth. Check it out!
Having been a people manager for a couple of years, I wanted to highlight how I’ve seen HR and management enable growth.
Throwing more bodies at a problem will not solve it faster. In my previous job, as my boss and I were hiring a second person to join me in sales, she told me that hiring another me wouldn’t double the sales output. This isn’t to say that I’m better or more productive than whoever was to join our team, but that with new and more people there will be new layers of inefficiencies, such as admin work, training, misunderstandings and so on. To avoid slowing down the growth of the business when new people are joining, it’s important to have a clear onboarding and training plan — if not, new starters will be spending much longer learning the job.
Know the problem you are hiring for. If an organisation is struggling with sales, hiring more sales people may be the completely wrong approach. Taking the time to investigate and identify what’s stopping sales can reveal problems you didn’t know of. For example, customers might be unhappy with the product you are making — in which case, the solution to more sales could be hiring someone to improve the user experience.
Poor behaviour is contagious. At work we’re part of a team and we’re reliant on each other. If colleagues are just doing the bare minimum, constantly complaining about their job, or in general have a bad attitude, they will bring the rest of their team down. Their lack of responsibility and integrity will spread like a disease to colleagues — they will see that poor behaviour is accepted, and will be less motivated to work hard. As Patty McCord says, hire only fully formed adults who take responsibility for themselves and their team members.
Honest feedback. Do you have some colleagues that have poor, demoralising or ineffective habits that really annoy you? The truth is that it probably annoys a lot of other people too, and they are probably not aware of their habits themselves, as no one has ever told them. Whether it’s constant late comings, demoralising comments, ineffective work or anything else, it’s impeding growth — and we do everyone a favour by giving them honest feedback.
Enable and empower people closest to the problem. Senior executives and manager are often not aware of everyday challenges of the business, such as poor customer experience or malfunctioning systems. The doers — those who code software, speak to customers and welcome people in the reception — must be empowered to report internally when something’s not working right, and enabled to fix and improve the situation themselves. That can be something as simple as giving them admin rights to a specific software, so they can log in and correct what’s not right.
That’s it for today! Have a great weekend, and see you next week!
Subscribe at danielsblog.substack.com
Hi!
Today’s an exciting day, I’m launching my podcast: Growmance! Going forward, I will publish once a week every Friday, as per usual, but will also record the newsletter as a podcast. Basically, click play above, and you get the audio version — perfect as you’re easing into the weekend. The podcast will also be available on your preferred podcast app very soon too 😼
You’re probably asking yourself about the name; what does growmance mean? This newsletter has evolved from my early musings in politics and social issues to my deliberations around growth in startups and life, and that’s where I want to keep steering it. Romance? Well, life’s a romance 😘
As always, thank you for following my newsletter (and now also podcast!) — I’m truly grateful for it 👐
It’s easy to be overwhelmed by every problem we need to solve or task we have to do. Often we solve the problems that scream the loudest, but they might be a distraction from solving the problems that really matter.
This is particularly true in startups, where time is the most precious resource. Startups often have very limited money and incur large financial losses as they try to grow and develop their technology — and time and how they spend it is often the most valuable resource they can leverage to turn losses into profits.
So how can we know that we’re spending our time and energy on the work items that will yield the most results? The best way to leverage our time as well as possible, is by taking a data-based approach to decision making. Here’s an example:
Bill (fictional dude) 🤓 has created an app, which has around 100 paying users. That’s a great achievement, but he will have lots of problems to solve now, and Bill has to make a decision on how he’s going to spend his limited time. Here are some useful questions that he can ask himself when looking at the data:
How many months do users pay for the app?
How often do they log in and use the app?
How many new paying users does he get per week?
If you’re enjoying this post, share it with a friend 🧑🏽🤝🧑🏽
Let’s imagine the data says that most users pay for only one month, they log in only 3-5 times per month, and Bill gets about 10 new premium users per week. Where should he spend his time? With this simple data on hand, it’s clear that he should spend time on understanding why users aren’t willing to use the app for more than one month. It’s impossible to grow a business when your customers aren’t willing to use your products or services for more than a month. Imagine a restaurant with no returning customers.
It’s easy to be caught up in vanity problems, such as making a super pretty website, posting lots on social media and making plush business cards — but that can easily lead us to waste our most precious resource: time (website and social media are important, but often get too much attention at the expense of other areas of the business).
Have a great weekend!
Subscribe at danielsblog.substack.com