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The following post was written by Director of Product Management at Taboola, Yoni Epstein, during his tenure as Senior Associate at Viola Growth (2015-2017).
Company executives talk a lot about talent and take pride in how talented their employees are. “We recruit only the best”, or “we gathered the top talent, the crème de la crème, the smartest people”, etc. I have sat in countless all-hands meetings listening to CEOs or other senior managers praise the quality of the people in the room. Naturally, it’s important to praise your team as it’s a great way to boost their motivation, but it has also made me wonder: Is the quality of the people in a company the main reason for its success?
I’ve had the opportunity to work in various companies internationally and I can say with confidence that most of the people around me were very talented, especially in the hi-tech world, where people deal with data, algorithms, physics, software and other fields where being smart and talented is a given. But after reflecting on the different organizations I was a part of, I cannot conclude that the “quality” of the people directly correlated to the success of the company. Good people create great companies but good people can also create bad companies.
How do you judge the “quality” of your people?
The notion that a company will only achieve success if it employs the best possible people, or the compulsive tendency of some managers to recruit graduates that come only from best universities with the best grades, reminds me of the critique by psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm on how people perceive love and relationships in the modern world.
In his book The Art of Loving, Fromm expresses the idea that in today’s world a “successful” relationship is often considered the result of a successful choice. If the relationship was not successful, then it’s probably because it wasn’t a good “match”. This notion in which the “perfect relationship” depends solely and entirely on finding the right partner reminds me of a manager’s fantasy that if they can only find the right talent, the rest would be a fairytale.
Fromm talks about how, in many forms of traditional marriage in which the two partners don’t choose each other, but are chosen for each other by other people and are expected to love each other nonetheless, there is an underlying idea that love is not just a feeling but a decision.
I’m not saying you can build a successful company with any random bunch of people but I do believe that organizations often put more effort into choosing their employees than into building an environment that will make them successful.
In the investment world we evaluate companies against metrics: How much did their revenue grow? Is the company profitable? What is the ratio of debt to equity, and so on. You can even try to quantify the individual value of your employees with factors like how many sales did they generate? By how much did they exceed their goals? How much code have they released in production? How many bugs did they find?
But there are also things that are hard to measure, like how much people care about their work, what sort of sense of responsibility do they feel towards their job, how much of their talent do they contribute and how much cooperation exists between employees. To me those are the kinds of critical factors that make a company successful.
Companies often establish complicated organizational structures to cope with a complicated reality. But sometimes, problems arise that either don’t fall under anyone’s direct responsibility, or fall under the responsibility of several people at once. One way for an organization to cope with that is of course to re-organize. However, in my view, the key element that determines how well employees cope with these types of problems is their attitude, which generally fall into two extremes that I like to call the Batter, and the Catcher.
The difference between “Batters” and “Catchers”
In Baseball when the ball passes close to the batter he tries to bat the ball as far away as possible. Similarly, employees sometimes “bat their problems away” as far as possible from their area of responsibility. Catchers, on the other hand, try to catch the ball even if it wasn’t thrown directly at them, just as there are people in organizations who will fix things even if the problem does not impact them directly, just because they care about the company.
Some employees are Catchers, some are Batters, and some are Catchers at one point and Batters at another. We all play different roles at different times. The question is how can you encourage the people in your organization to become more like Catchers than Batters?
If you succeed in creating an “all-catchers” company, then the organizational structure is of secondary importance because each employee cares about the company’s success as if he or she were the CEO. This type of environment may well be the most invaluable asset in a company’s balance sheet, and I have noticed a few factors that can be promoted to foster such an environment.
How to create an environment where Catchers outnumber the Batters
1. Encourage Diversity
I am a strong believer in diversity and its contribution to organizations. There is already plenty of research that suggests that diverse groups make better decisions than homogeneous groups.
Homogeneous groups are a fertile ground for sarcasm, which is a very efficient way to kill new ideas or to hinder cooperation when two different homogeneous groups interact. Diversity is the number one weapon to fight that. Diversity can be manifested in employees’ backgrounds, personalities, skills, gender and most notably in their culture.
Companies like to show off their diversity by presenting it on a macro level, for example, “we hire from X nationalities, Y backgrounds” etc. But if you want to unleash the full potential of your organization’s diversity you need to make sure that diversity exists on the most granular level by mixing up the teams.
When I worked in France, I remember how on different occasions groups from different offices had difficulties interacting. The French would say that the English are too positive and superficial, and that the Germans are too detail oriented. The English would say that the French are too negative, and the Germans would say that they are not creative enough. When you put two people from one culture in a room and add someone from a different culture, people automatically begin clinging to stereotypes (as I was the only Israeli there and did not belong to any group, people felt comfortable sharing their complaints with me about the other groups, and the irony of it all was kind of fun for me to witness). However, in the same organization, when I worked in a mixed group, all of that completely disappeared and suddenly the sarcasm and negativity turned into cooperation and openness.
So if you keep your French people in France, your Germans in Germany, your Americans in US and so on, you are not taking advantage of the full potential of your organizational diversity. Similarly if you keep your engineers in one department and business people in another, you also miss out on more creativity and better decision making.
I realize that sometimes it might not be possible to recruit people from different cultures or very diverse backgrounds, but you can create diverse teams in other ways as well. If you make it part of your strategy, you can “engineer” the diversity of your organization.
2. Help your employees tell your company’s story.
I find that people who care a lot about their work tend to talk about what they do with great passion, and I think that the reverse is also true, meaning that if you help employees to tell the world about what they do in a way that is inspiring, they will care more about their work as well. A good test for that is the “tell your mother-in-law test” – when your mother in-law asks you what you do in your job, how easily can you explain it to her and with how much enthusiasm?
One of my previous jobs was at an Ad Tech company and while you could argue that the world of online ads isn’t exactly akin to curing cancer, most people there were highly motivated and believed in the company’s mission. Most of the employees felt that they inevitably helped consumers make better choices, and that they were offering them a choice about whether to be informed about those choices or not, and in so doing they were helping to propel part of a new economy. This sense of purpose isn’t necessarily common to all Ad Tech companies. Of course different companies have different technologies and business models that fundamentally set them apart from other companies but I believe that you should always be able to clearly define the contribution that your company is making to the world and share it with your employees (and if you can’t, then you should consider another job!).
The message has to be genuine though. For example, I once worked for a chip design company whose Mission Statement was “we are helping the world become a better place”, but the employees felt that the link between that message of this mission and what they were actually doing was very weak, so needless to say that no one believed in it and it did not increase motivation, only sarcasm and a negative attitude. Perhaps there was a link to how we were making the world a better place, but explaining and sharing this link with the employees wasn’t a priority.
As a leader, if the story you tell is genuine, if you deal with criticism openly rather than avoid it, and if you truly believe in what you preach, then your employees will too.
3. Recognize that ideas can come from anywhere
In all companies the most important decisions are taken at the top, which is natural. But in some companies, not only are the top managers making the decisions, but they’re also the only ones coming up with the ideas, and that’s bad. In fact, I would say that senior managers are generally better at judging new ideas than coming up with them.
I like the Popperian approach which says that ideas can come from anywhere; all we can do is try to falsify them so what we’re left with is the truths we haven’t been able to disprove yet. Companies need to understand that it doesn’t matter where ideas come from. In fact most often the best ideas come from the employees at the bottom, the ones on the field, the newcomers with an outside perspective, clients and partners. The question is whether there is an environment that encourages those people to put their ideas forward.
The best way to create such an environment is simply to make it a priority. Ask people to come up with new ideas, discuss them openly, and if you criticize an idea, then do it graciously and don’t forget to thank the person who came up with it.
4. Let employees guide their managers, and managers serve their employees.
In my experience, I have generally encountered two extremes of management styles:
1. Totalitarian: “I am your manager and I will tell you how to do your job”
2. Collaborative: “I am your manager, and you should tell me how I can help you do your job”
The first type is most common, whereas the second type is very rare; and as with most rare things they are very precious. A collaborative manager gives employees ownership over their work, doesn’t take credit, and understands that the employee’s success is the manager’s success. The impact of collaborative managers on employee motivation is enormous.
I once worked with a collaborative-type manager and I remember that when we’d have one-on-one meetings, he would always start by asking what I wanted to talk about and how he could help me push my ideas forward. He would then finish every meeting by asking if there was something else he could do for me. This approach was so refreshing it immediately boosted my motivation, which translated into many new initiatives I carried out.
In most organizations the totalitarian-type manager is more prevalent and the collaborative-type is rare, but if you want to create a company that’s full of catchers (rather than batters) – it should be the other way around.
The above is obviously just a partial and subjective list, but it includes factors that I have personally found to be very impactful. I believe that the environment for an “all-catcher” company is not something that you can build magically by bringing good talent into the company, but rather that organizations have the power to create them (or at the very least try). Or to use an analogy, you can pour a lot of talent into the pot, but without lighting the fire, the stew will remain cold.
