Valuing Leadership Over Expertise

So, you also have to make a lot of decisions around hiring as a CEO. What would you say are your top strategies for recruiting, hiring, and developing a team to effectively deliver on your business goals?

Well, I’m constantly learning on this front, Thuy. I mean, it’s just one of those things where I feel like I’m getting better at it, as time goes by, and I’m certainly not perfect at it right now. I don’t think anybody is because we’re dealing with human beings, after all. But what I have learned over time is to value leadership ability over functional expertise. I have in the past sometimes overvalued people having specific experience in a specific area. And while that is helpful, I mean, I don’t want to downplay it in any way, shape, or form. If you’ve got somebody who has worked in a particular area and has experience in that area, it is certainly a plus and a bonus. What I’ve realized is the world is moving so quickly, that as one person put it, the value of your experience and knowledge in a given area is rapidly depreciating.

It's true, though.

It is. And you have to constantly be reinventing yourself, constantly learning. So that’s when we talk about great leaders in our leadership model, they get results, they build teams that continuously learn. And when you’ve got people who do that, make the people around them better. And then they’re constantly reinventing themselves, they’re constantly learning, they’re not sitting on their laurels and falling prey to saying: “|I’m the expert, because I know and I’ve been doing this for 10 years,” or whatever the number is.
And so I really tend to look for a couple things. I look for people who have those leadership traits, because the fact is, the business and the functional aspects, it’s not rocket science, they can learn it, but it’s very difficult to master those leadership skills. And then the other places to look are on our mission and our values. How excited are you about those things? How aligned are you with those things? Because if they’re truly motivated by our mission, aligned with our values, and have strong leadership skills, all the other stuff is pretty teachable. And so I tend to focus a lot of my energy when I’m interviewing or screening people on those things.