For all its innovations in using the internet for growth, and the fun scaling challenges we all enjoy having, tech has a growth problem. A problem that has been masqueraded into many other forms. It’s been called the pipeline problem, the diversity problem, diversity and inclusion, we can’t find people, we can’t retain people because we can’t pay like big tech. I’m sure in private it has other names.
In modern software companies, 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 the market might have opinions, or investors will gather the board to see what is going on. Growth 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 learn more, faster, and tackle more complexity?
The only way to grow your systems is a team — or a team of teams — of people driven enough to build and maintain software that can be used to build more and better software. Motivated, driven, capable people. All of it sums up to people. That’s the first rule. No matter how much automation and, let me say it, how many ChatGPTs we get, the reality today is that we need people, and to grow more we either need them to get twice as good and fast, or we need more of them. Hold 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 asks: 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? I want to apply the same question to how leaders see others. When you hear interview feedback like they’re not 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 this person a fixed or a growth mindset? How have we done this in the past, and how has it moved our numbers?
Until you come to honest terms with how today’s hiring decisions are shaping your company, you cannot say there’s a pipeline problem. Hiring is hard because evaluating people is hard — in part because the people hiring are not good at it, are not conscious of their own biases, and have little courage to call themselves out. They come with pre-assigned fixed or growth labels for people.
Note that I keep saying people, not women or men or tall or short. As a company you need people; that’s rule number one. But if your actual first rule is young, ambitious men willing to put in a lot of work, who you can share jokes with and whose struggles you don’t have to listen to, then anyone matching that blueprint gets away with almost anything — they fulfilled the first rule. People who don’t pass it 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 don’t know people from different backgrounds to hire, recommend or promote. The real deal is how you assign inherent worth to candidates: who has to prove their salt with work and extra interviews, versus who gets believed on their word. If you haven’t sat down for a truthful conversation about what your first rule is — do I expect the same from this candidate as from others? — and you keep thinking your network is the only place to hire, stop saying there is a pipeline problem.
The war for talent is as much about attracting and retaining the right individuals as it is about developing them and unleashing their potential… an environment that encourages more leadership from more people is a significant competitive business advantage.
There has never been a better time for companies to reconsider their first rule, to bring it into awareness. Unleashing potential means first accepting that the potential exists — in all candidates, and in the people already at the company. People will show you what you expect of them:
perhaps, at least with team-based work, the skill/experience vs. outcomes “curves” look different. A nurturing environment can achieve “good” outcomes with “average” people. In an unhealthy environment, only the most skilled can achieve outcomes… and even then there’s a limiter.
I was in my second year at a company when I sat down with my manager for an anniversary lunch. I had planned to talk about a raise. This was a company where I had never received negative feedback about my performance. To my surprise, my manager listed, in detail, the ways I was not great. He even compared me to an engineer working in a different area of the company, and the ways I was not working — not being — like him. If all of this was already formed in his head, I should have heard it sometime in the previous two years. I could have improved the things he mentioned, or taken my talents somewhere they were better suited. Instead, the feedback surfaced only when I asked for a raise.
That is a leader stifling company growth: holding feedback until it’s convenient, instead of using it to help people unleash their potential. And for certain people — certain minorities — asking for a raise becomes an opportunity for negative feedback (I will not call it constructive at that point). An opportunity to remind them how lucky they are to even be here. An event organizer once told me exactly that, when I asked about payment after featuring his event across the podcasts and newsletters I coordinated: hey, I’m giving you a space here. Was the space the payment? There weren’t many people like me at that event, and in the years since I stopped participating, it has only become less like me. They know the cards they hold, and they play them.
So — is it really a growth problem? Tech measures growth on every dashboard: users, revenue, capacity, headcount. But the growth of people is the input to all the others, and it is the one we keep treating as fixed. A company that cannot see the potential in its own people has a growth problem no market will fix for it. Reconsider your first rule.
Originally published on Medium ↗. Revised for this site.