“The Hardest Working People Tend to Get the Luckiest”

As a leader, what would you say are the most important performance factors to measure, and how frequently do you measure that performance?

I think it really depends on the role, right? So, if you’re a salesperson and I’m—this is top of mind because I’m here with my sales team today, activity, right? I have never seen anybody in sales either at LinkedIn when I was there or here at Cameo, that was successful, that didn’t work hard. I’ve never seen it. That doesn’t mean that that person can’t exist.
If there’s someone that can hit 130% to plan and make two calls a day, God bless them. I haven’t seen that work here. What I’ve seen work are the hardest working people tend to get the luckiest, right? The hardest working people might get the most no’s, but they get the most yeses. So, from my perspective, hard work is really important and that can be measured in different ways. For sales, it’s measured by call activities, but for engineers—now, checking in the most code doesn’t automatically mean you’re the hardest working engineer.
And I love Amazon's leadership PR principle, that’s “work hard, long and smart.” And I really believe that that’s important and every function has different ways of measuring that.