Photo by Nick Wehrli.
A hard thing about being a leader is that your words have to do a lot of things at once. You get asked a question and the words that come out of you need to:
- Answer the actual question
- Answer the question behind the question that you think the person secretly wanted to ask
- Avoid talking about the new thing that will change your answer here, but isn’t public yet
- Signal (in politics we’d call it dog-whistling) to the other constituencies who will hear your answer that you remember them and their concerns
- Bridge to the point you really want to make, which may or may not be what this question was about
- What was this question about, again?
This happens in all hands meetings. It happens in press briefings. It happens in board meetings and investor calls, too. You may have done it and you’ve certainly heard it. And it’s tiring.
When you do this a lot, it goes one of two ways. The good version is that you get very good at thinking before you speak. You figure out precisely what you mean to say. You use the pause. And while it might make the audience or the interviewer or the asker uncomfortable for a moment, you never get quoted saying something you don’t mean.
The bad version gets very bad. You become incomprehensible. Jack Dorsey has the bad version. Last month, when he spoke with Ashley Feinberg, the headline was, Jack Dorsey Has No Clue What He Wants.
This week, he got into a very-hard-to-follow conversation with Kara Swisher (this seems to be the easiest way??) But it’s worth the pain to read it all, because the contrast in how they speak is so stark. Kara asks for a concrete, SPECIFIC thing they’ve done to address harassment, Jack says, “We have evolved our policies.” Kara asks why there’s still so much unchecked awfulness. Jack talks about “actioning all we can.” Kara asks Jack to grade his performance. He gives himself a C. Kara gives him an F.
One of the most important signals you can get from smart people you respect is that they don’t understand. It’s a sign that you’re spinning internally, or that you’re not showing your work enough to bring others along, or that you’re just wrong. Our hope for you all this week is that you have someone in your life who can tell you when you’re making no goddamned sense. Hug that person.
— Melissa & Johnathan
What Melissa’s reading
About that undergrad degree requirement in your job posting
It’s one of my biggest pet peeves. Someone will send me a job spec and ask if I can send it around to my network. And there it is, the last bullet tucked at the bottom of a laundry list of poorly considered requirements. Bachelor’s degree required.
“Do you really need this?” I ask. “Cause if you don’t, you should take it off the list.”
A new email comes in: I don’t know. I have a notion of what it means if someone has completed a university degree and I’m worried about removing it. I want the person coming into the role to be professional.
I try again. “OK, let’s say you get two resumes. One has a college degree but few or none of the other requirements. The other has no degree but every other thing on your list. Do you want to at least talk to the second candidate?”
The response is usually a sheepish and mildly exasperated – yes, of course. Of course you do. You want to hire someone fantastic. And there are lots of folks with college degrees who are well south of fantastic. And lots of folks without them who are incredible.
If you’re hiring a surgeon, by all means ask if they went to med school. But for an office job? Or a startup role? For many roles, college degrees have little bearing on a candidate’s ability to perform the work. If Gates and Zuck can’t pass your intern-level job requirements, well, that’s just silly. The worst, and most frustrating part is that for a lot of hiring managers, the bullet isn’t even a considered job requirement. It’s the result of lazy cut/pasting.
The same writer who did the millennial burnout piece that ricocheted around the internet last month is back with another jawdropping bit of longform. This time she’s written about student debt in a piece titled Here’s Why So Many Americans Feel Cheated By Their Student Loans. It’s an uncomfortable read about privilege and our unhealthy obsession with accreditation.
Stop the cycle. Ask yourself if it’s truly a requirement. And if not, take it out ffs.
What Johnathan’s listening to
James Citrin talking about CEO/Executive Search
There seems to be a lot of Kara Swisher in the newsletter this week. I enjoy her. I don’t always agree with her, but her Recode Decode podcast is one of the best going right now for conversations with the people shaping tech. And this one is a good place to get started if you haven’t, yet.
James leads the CEO practice for Spencer-Stuart, a top-tier exec search firm. That’s particularly interesting for me because when I was an executive at Mozilla, it was Spencer-Stuart (I’m 90% sure…) who ran our catastrophic year-long CEO search that never found a candidate. The vacuum that left is what lead to Brendan’s very short time in the seat. That doesn’t come up in the podcast, which is a bummer because I’d love to hear how James thought that went.
What does come up in the podcast is a broad-ranging set of things that you don’t get elsewhere (at least after the biographical bits in the first 10 minutes). It’s interesting to hear how Spencer-Stuart workshops every notable CEO transition (even ones they didn’t run). It’s interesting to hear him talk about the titanic shift in CEO promotions-from-within over the last 20 years. It’s interesting to hear their Capability, Credibility, and Attractability system for assessing CEOs. I’ll admit I do enjoy listening to people who take leadership seriously.
It’s not a perfect interview. His Professional Discretion stops him from giving more honest answers in a couple of spots, and the majority of his examples – though not all – are male and pale. But overall, this is a perspective you don’t often have access to, shared earnestly. And, having sat on the other side of those exec searches more than once, most of what he says is totally true.
