Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

"You should be extremely clear up front that you expect your executives to be world-class in their functions. If they are not, they will not keep their jobs. Furthermore, you will not be able to make them world-class, because you are not world-class in their areas."

I see two big problems with this statement:

1. It falls into the "everyone must be extraordinarily excellent" trap. The average employee is... average. Odds are your hiring practices are average too. It is better to focus on getting people's best than it is to focus on having the best people, because very few companies actually do have the best people. If you think your company is different, you had better have a compelling reason.

2. Even for good employees, it takes time for them to adapt to your company and perform at their best. Obviously you need to let some people go, but if you hold a noose over their heads from day one they're just going to worry about looking good for long enough to collect their options/bonuses/etc.. Looking good in the short-term and doing good in the long-term are often incompatible goals.

1. Nah, I think he's right. You're right in that most start-ups will never run into the issues that he's talking about, because most will fail, but if you need to take sales national or international then your VP of Sales better be either a domain leader or know a helluvalot more than you. Either way, you have to trust executives at a level that you never have to for average employees.

2. I didn't see him say anywhere that performance has to be measured short-term. Having a noose over your head based on long term results is very possible. Of course you evaluate your executives on their last major completed project/action, it may have taken 6-18 months (or longer) for it to come to fruition, but that doesn't mean a noose isn't over their heads.

Your VP of Sales will know a helluva lot more than you do if they're remotely competent at their job though, which is not by any stretch of the imagination equivalent to being "world class". Any decent VP of Sales will also be highly adept at shifting blame if you make it clear the knife is hanging over their head from the start...

Even in sales, which has an unusually straightforward success metric, beyond a certain threshold of above-average competency the leadership is more about how well their approach gels with the most suitable approach for your service, and how flexible they are in their approaches than whether they're some mythical 10x unicorn. Someone who is "world class" at scaling inside sales teams is not going to be "world class" at figuring out how to get your small team of domain experts to network their way to niche domination... if anything applying lessons learned from their experience might make things worse. And I'm not sure what even makes a Head of HR "world class", but I'd certainly prefer a shared philosophy than a stellar set of resume accomplishments.

Anyone involved in a sufficiently large organization who thinks all their senior executives are "world class" or necessary to eliminate is clearly the weak link on the team, especially when it comes to judging others' abilities.

My sense is that the OP's attitude is counterproductive at lower levels. It's much cheaper and more effective to retain your best and develop them, rather than hiring in the open market.

Once you get to the top, it's much more difficult. Indeed a non-Finance CEO can't teach much about Finance to the CFO. And they need stars for direct reports because too much is at stake to rely on mediocre people to improve by self-learning.

Where the argument breaks down is culture comes from the top. If the CEO doesn't take coaching seriously, their direct reports won't either. The CEO has to find a way to show that personal growth is a top priority, even if it isn't by teaching outside of their own domain.

The CEO isn't the top of the org, the board is. Of course the CEO shouldn't/isn't the best at everything. If a C-level is lacking or needs help, you get them the help. The mentality that you are amazing or gone is utter bullshit, at the same time it isn't an excuse for chronically shoddy work. Everyone thinks they can be, or should be, The Yankees.

What makes The Yankees special is that there are millions of baseball players, and thousands of teams around the world, and they all do exactly the same thing, so there is an objective measure that says the Yankees are the best.

However when it comes to companies and executive functions there are as many job descriptions as there are companies. We can quibble all day about the definition of world-class, but I think the article draws the right distinction between executives and employees. The rank and file will converge to average for any large company, but executives will always be a handful and receive outsized compensation, so it is reasonable to demand more from them than you could expect from everyone else.

So, after extracting a large percentage of your liquidity, a CEO should be able to extract talent, intelligence and valuable information as well. Then they shouldn't have to worry about being productive with all those resources because it might make him nervous :(

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