Photo by Tomáš Malík.
Assume Your People Talk About Comp
In our day jobs, we build better bosses. One of the programs we run is called Four Fridays and it’s comprehensive Management and Leadership training across four full days. We did a Day Three today. On any day of training at the start of any module, one of us will whisper to the other “This one is my favorite.” The secret joke is that they are all our favorites.
This morning we got to run a room full of leaders through our Compensation module. A few months ago we changed one of the starting slides. In the old version, we’d dive into the importance of having a coherent strategy around total compensation (cash, equity, perks, etc). For the two of us the why felt obvious.
You should have a comp strategy because:
- It protects you from the worst of lopsided salaries where two people do the same job but make wildly different amounts.
- Because the wage gap is real and using prior comp to set future comp perpetuates that inequality.
- And because if you work in tech, your people are likely to go drinking together and talk about what they make.
But now spell it out. The updated slide says “Assume your people talk to each other about their comp.”
Your approach to compensation needs to be able to withstand sunlight. Not because your company is going to do what Glitch did and make salary bands public. And not because your company is going to go the radically transparent route of Buffer. Not because StackOverflow already shares salary data from their 2018 Developer Survey. And the trend of role and city specific salary sharing is becoming ever more common.
But because the era of information advantage based on candidate and employee ignorance is a relic. It’s archaic. It’s abusive. And it’s not defensible as a modern employer.
We got home from training today and this post from Jackie Luo on tech salaries and pay transparency was EVERYWHERE – in our Slack and our email and our Twitter feeds. Timely af.
— Melissa & Johnathan
Melissa’s Nodding Vigorously While Reading
Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45
I love this article but I would. It’s got all the markers of a Melissa favorite. Conventional wisdom debunked. They throw shade at Paul Graham in the first paragraph. The call Venture Capital on their perseverance of belief bs before closing out the article. It’s clear the research team had a good time with this project.
The punchline of the piece is the headline. So much for building suspense. But then they back up the idea that successful founders are in their early forties by slicing the data across geo, across business type, across growth of business. Basically it all comes down to the same conclusion about your early forties being a great time to start a business.
When they look at why, the research team points to prior work experience as an important predictor of success. Surprising basically no one. And while young founders tend to succeed when they are younger (think Zuck, Bezos, Jobs, Gates), they tend to peak in their 40s.
Last part about this article that makes it clear it was written by nerds. When they looked at the average age of all entrepreneurs at the time of founding their businesses? 42.
Which CEO Johnathan’s Yelling At Through The Screen
Jeff Weiner’s Favourite Interview Question
Let me save you a click. The question is: “What’s your dream job?” Jeff runs a bigger business-site-with-a-blue-logo than I ever have, so maybe you should all listen to him. But as I see it, this reads one of two ways, and both of them are bad advice.
The first thing Jeff might mean for you to do is to take his advice literally. That you should ask this question. That this is a valuable question to ask of potential candidates. Because it will let you see how they think. Because, per Jeff, “people recognize the importance of authenticity,” and it helps you “understand who a candidate really is.”
Uuuuuuuuugh.
There’s a chapter in the book about this. For many people, interviews are incredibly stressful. The power and information imbalance in the room is profound and obvious. And while some people in your candidate pool may be confident, self-possessed, financially stable extroverts, some of them won’t. They rarely come wearing easy-to-read labels.
When you tell managers to ask this question, it feels to me lot like making candidates dance. They came in to talk about node.js programming or copywriting or graphic design. They may have been sweating this interview for weeks, you don’t know. And now, instead of all that, you ask them this incredibly loaded question so you can understand who they really are. How many candidates will feel pressured to flatter? How many will feel pressured to lie? Will candidates feel safe saying their dream job is to be a stay at home parent? How confident are you that managers in your org will be able to manage the bias risks that a question like this invites? I’d rather you throw tarot cards.
The second reading here is that Jeff doesn’t want you to use this question. It’s possible that Jeff recognizes how problematic this question could be if mis-applied. He might just be saying that, for him, in the interviews the CEO of LinkedIn involves himself in, and judiciously applied by his careful hand, it’s helpful. Okay. Could be. But a lot of management advice from executives suffers from this flaw – it works for them but wouldn’t work for you.
Watch for this stuff, folks. Unless you’re Netflix, you’re not Netflix. Unless you’re Apple, don’t assume you should run like Apple runs. I remember a CTO asking me why he couldn’t have 30 direct reports when Google managers sometimes had 40. I just looked at him, and asked, “Are you Google?”
Jeff’s advice might work for Jeff, I don’t know. But my hope for you is that you don’t run your interviews that way.
Anyhow Having Said All That…
He has said some perfectly fine, and borne-of-experience things that I agree with, too.
