The growth problem in tech
For all its innovations in leveraging internet for growth and the fun scaling challenges we all enjoy to have, tech has a growth problem. A problem that has been mascaraed into many other forms. It’s been called pipeline problem, diversity problem, diversity and inclusion, we can’t find people and we can’t retain people because we can’t pay like big tech. I’m sure in private there might be other names for this same issue.
In modern software companies, products and services, growth is the main driver, the golden goose. The company has to not only grow, but keep growing. In a sustained way through the years, or else, well the market might have opinions of its presence, or investors will gather the board to see what is going on. It involves questions like how do we grow systems to support more capacity, scale and complexity, how do we grow teams and retain culture, how do we get people to grow and learn more, faster and tackle more complexity.
The only way to grow your systems is to get a good team or team of teams of people driven enough towards building and maintaining software that can be used to build more and better software. Motivated, driven, capable people. All of that sums up to people. That’s the first rule, not matter how many automation and let I say it, ChatGPTs we get, the reality today is we need people and in order to grow more, we either need them to get twice as better and as faster or to get more people. Hold to that thought. If you need more people, and everyone is hiring why do you keep evaluating people with a fixed mindset?
In Mindset: The New Psychology of Success Carol Dweck takes us on a journey into how our conscious and unconscious thoughts affect us and how something as simple as wording can have a powerful impact on our ability to improve. The main question that Carol pose is What are the consequences of thinking that your intelligence or personality is something you can develop, as opposed to something that is a fixed, deep-seated trait? What I want to do in this article is apply this same thinking to how leaders see others with fixed vs growth mindset. If you see someone giving interview feedback like they are going to learn it in a minute, we don’t have time to teach them, we don’t have enough people to mentor, ask: am I assigning to this person a fixed or a growth mindset? How have we done this in the past in a way that has moved our numbers one way or the other? Until you come to honest terms of how the hiring decisions you are making today are shaping your company, you can not say there’s a pipeline problem or we can’t find people. Hiring is hard because evaluating people and getting people in alignment with what you want is hard. In part because the people hiring are not good at it, are not conscious of their own biases and have little courage in calling themselves out. And they have pre-assigned fixed or growth labels for people. Note that I’m saying people, not women or men or tall or short, as a company you need people, that’s rule number one. If your first rule is the need for young ambitious and willing to put in a lot of work men, that you can share jokes with and don’t have to listen to their struggles, you will let someone with that blueprint get away with almost anything, because it fulfilled your first rule. People who do not pass the first rule usually have to jump through additional hoops. More interviews, more years before promotion, more certifications, more qualifications.
“There is a pipeline problem”: The underlying problem is not that you do not know people from different backgrounds in your network to hire them, recommend them or promote them. The real deal is how you assign inherent worth to candidates. Who has to prove their salt with work and more interviews vs who gets to be believed by their words. If you have not sat to have an inner truthful conversation of what is your first rule, and ask yourself, do I expect the same from this candidate than from others? If you, as a leader of a software company today in charge of hiring people, keep thinking your network is the only place to hire, stop saying there is a pipeline problem.
In The War For Talent, Good Is No Longer Good Enough
The war for talent is as much about attracting and retaining the right individuals as it is about developing them and unleashing their potential. In addition to investing in recruitment and providing incentives, most organizations will need to transform how they engage employees and whom they look to for leadership to fully tap into the potential and talent of their employees. Clarity of purpose and strategy, a culture that is adaptive and responsive, and an environment that encourages more leadership from more people is a significant competitive business advantage in today’s world of increased uncertainty and complexity.
Source: https://chiefexecutive.net/in-the-war-for-talent-good-is-no-longer-good-enough/
Never has been a better time for companies to reconsider their first rule, to bring it into awareness. Unleashing potential means first accepting said potential from all candidates and of those already working at the company. In this regard, I like to subscribe to the rule that people will show what you expect of them. This tweet and graph illustrates it better:
I was working on second year at a company where I sat with my manager for an anniversary lunch. During the lunch I planned to have a talk about a raise. This is a company where I have never received negative feedback about my performance or the how I was delivering. To my surprise my manager listed the ways in which I was not being great with detail. He even compared me to another engineer working on a different area of the company and the ways in which I was not working/being like him. I was surprised because certainly if he already had all of this formed in his head I should have heard about it in the past 2 years. Only now, after I ask for a raise he considered bringing it out. In these 2 years I could’ve either decided to improve the aspects he mentioned or find another place to take my talents where they were more suited. This is an example in which leaders are stifling company growth, by bringing feedback only when it’s convenient for them, instead of using feedback as a tool to help people unleash their potential. But maybe potential is not a what a company cares about after all. And to that I would say, only of some people, only for certain minorities asking for a raise is an opportunity for negative feedback (at that point I will refrain to call it constructive feedback). Only then is an opportunity to remind them how lucky are they to even be here! That’s what I heard from an event organizer when I asked about payment after featuring the event in the podcasts and newsletters I coordinated: hey I’m giving you a space here. Was that the payment in his head? And you know what, he wasn’t far from the truth, and they know this, cause there wasn’t many people like me at the event, and a couple of years out of the event where I don’t participate anymore it has become more and more less like me. They know the cards they have to play and the play them. Is it really a problem of growth?
