Hire Squad

So when you're hiring what do you look for what do you tell your managers to look for when you're creating those high-performance teams?

Yeah, it's a great question and there's certain things of course in any particular role you're looking for functional capability or expertise to do to do the role but we put a lot of focus on culture fit and sort of the ability to have people that want to grow with the company

What about things like, you know, smart work ethic ego?

Yeah, what's actually very funny I actually have this little formula you might appreciate that I talked about people being successful and what you need to do to be successful in your career from sorts of an intrinsics like you're talking about but it's also a great tool to use and interviewing it's a it's a formula it's a little complicated but there's three factors to it the expression is SEW and the S is around smarts and that is sort of just people's the skill sets they have and the intelligence they have you get comfortable that they're going to bring a lot the second one is E for ego and that's people's really ability to suppress focus on themselves and actually be oriented towards the team success which I think is great and then W is for work and how hard you work or the grunt that you're willing to put into it and I say if you take the smarts and you divide them by the ego and you raise that whole piece to the power of how hard you work yeah that's the formula and so when I interview people I you think most importantly is having your smarts higher than your ego because you want to have a positive ratio and then the work just amplifies it and it's obviously the biggest driver of how much you can achieve so those are the ways I think about people's intrinsic skills.

So the smarts easy to identify in conversation right the ego piece how do you know what I mean you know it the person could be faking it the person could be a ego maniac once he or she starts the job?

Yeah, you're very right and you know I think the best way to sort of ferret that out in conversations with people is less about saying do you have a high ego and much more about saying tell me stories about how you work in teams and one of my favorite questions is to ask people if all your colleagues and your last couple of jobs are in the room and you weren't here and I said to them hey, Thuy, what does she do that's just amazing and then they answer and then I say hey if I ask those same people what would they say the things that you know you really need to work on and you get the response and some people say things like well they'd all say I work too hard I'm too much of a giver you know all I do is give and you realize you have no self knowledge and if you have no self knowledge you probably have an ego challenge and if people can really point to constructive things that they're working on that they're aware you get a much better sense that they have that control of their ego so that's how I think about it.