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At Plum, talent is our biggest moat, and I am extremely lucky to be building this company with some of the country’s best operators across functions. I take immense pride in witnessing first-hand how our best performers have grown over the years to take on more responsibilities and grow into leadership roles.
In addition to their existing responsibilities, they now have to build and scale teams. And this means hiring people better than them. I often think of David Ogilvy’s practice, where he sends newly appointed heads a Russian doll with the following note.
“If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.”
Easier said than done.
Through experience, and from other conversations with founders and people leaders – ‘hiring people better than you’ is incredibly difficult for people to execute on the ground. There could be many different reasons – the ability to attract those people, the ability to sell to those people, and then managing these people when they’re part of the team.
So when I was speaking to Sunitha Lal, Head of People at Ather, this was a tangent that came up when we were speaking about Ather’s culture and approach to talent. You can watch the entire conversation here.
Sunitha believed these were three problem statements in themselves.
- Talent not being available.
- Available talent not interested.
- The leader, or hiring manager, not being secure enough to hire high-caliber individuals because they think they might hire their successor.
The third point interested me the most. The reason didn’t need elaboration, so I asked her what Ather did as a company to empower leaders to feel more secure.
Two broad themes.
Leaders who take pride in the collective
A clear sign of a secure leadership is an immense sense of pride in the teams they’ve hired and scaled.
These leaders are proud of the number of team members who are ready to take on harder challenges, greater responsibilities, or new positions that are emerging in the organization.
This is a great lens through which you can evaluate leaders you might want to interview, as well as a mindset you need to inculcate when you promote your best operators into leadership roles.
Baking this mindset into org design
Sunitha believes a key responsibility of talent partners and HRBPs is to help leaders build their teams.
As soon as a new leader joins, they need to start sitting with their HRBP to build a collective vision on understanding the current org design, and what design they want to build. This helps leaders understand who they want to hire and their long-term plans.
It’s also about including this mentality in the culture of the organization, and part of everyday conversation.
“Are you getting promoted? Are you getting talked about if you're able to hire great people and better people than you?
If that’s happening, you’re being incentivized as a leader, and to go and make that happen/ You'll become happy about it. So an important question organizations need to think about is how can you make it part of the day-to-day conversation?”
This has opened a very interesting line of thought when we think about building teams at Plum, and has been instrumental in helping us identify future leaders.
We’re looking at folks who’re not just extremely high agency, but also capable of uplifting the work of their team and their adjacent teams. I admire seeing them pick newer problems to solve with the same enthusiasm as day one, and share that enthusiasm across the teams they build.
As Ogilvy would put, here’s to building Plum in the company of giants.
About Musings: Musings is a series where leaders at Plum write notes on culture, team building, and talent-density, inspired by their own experience and related conversations with people leaders.
