What’s in a Team

You were at Clorox for 15 years. And then prior to that you spent more than 14 years at P&G in senior marketing positions around the world, along the way you had to build lots of teams. What is your philosophy around hiring and what qualities do you look for as you build those teams?

Far and away, the most important thing for me is leadership. I look for people that are leaders, and that means people who aren't doing things because they want to checkboxes, but people who are doing things because it's authentically them and because they want to do them, people who can form a vision of what the future looks like, people who can communicate this vision so others can be involved, and then people who can execute that by translating the vision into a plan and by getting barriers out of the way. That's what I look for. Leadership traits that are particularly important to me are courage, curiosity, and humility, big egos often get in the way of leadership so I'm not very fond of that. So it's really about leadership and it's about the ability to translate that vision and the leadership into consistently strong results. I like to throw people into lots of different positions to see how they're doing in different situations and whether they can translate behavior into results, and importantly, how fast they are learning from mistakes. I've always found that speed of learning, you know if you're a quick study, that always translates well into people's future potential.