Let me take you back to 2012. It was year three for us in the managed security services team at Mandiant. We were in the middle of our monthly team all-hands. There were nearly 50 people in the room. We’d already covered most of the innovation and operational topics. Next up: financial check-in.
We were in a bit of a dry spell from a financial standpoint. We were closing business, but new customers were not coming on at quite the clip we’d anticipated. We were about 12% behind our revenue targets. It was late in the year and in a subscription business it’s hard to catch up on revenue, so, “things looked grim for our heroes.”
I wrapped up delivering the bad news. I offered some thoughts about root causes, steps I’d be taking to improve our outlook, and clarifying that this shortfall was not creating any threat to jobs on the team. Then, “Any questions?”
Mike Scutt was sitting right next to the screen on the left. As one of our analysts, his job was to ferret out evil on our customers’ networks, determine how bad it was, and offer clear recommendations on next steps based on the characteristics of the threat. And he was damned good at it. He raised his hand. I braced for impact as I worried he was about to blame sales in the form of a question.
“What can I do to help?”
My heart grew three sizes that day. Shame on me for expecting less. I told that story to every executive at the company as an example of the kind of person we wanted to keep hiring. Someone who truly took ownership of any problem that came his way.
Hiring Beyond “The Job,” Hiring for Culture
You’ve heard hiring is the most important decision a leader makes. But what should we be hiring for? Sure, I wanted to make sure folks we hired could do the job… but more than that, I wanted to make sure they loved what they did every day, felt like it mattered, had the opportunity to excel, and ideally felt as much ownership for the business as I did.
All of this means, when it came down to hiring — regardless of the role I was hiring for, I was evaluating candidates against the following four criteria: aptitude & skills, motivation, passion, and a set of core values tied into the culture I wanted the organization to take on over time.
Specifically:
1. Personal Accountability. We try to see what we did wrong first, or what we can do to fix
it, before trying to assign blame elsewhere.
2. Personal Growth. We have an insatiable desire to learn.
3. High Candor. If something’s amiss, we expect people to call it out.
4. Leaders Delegate & Listen. We believe people closest to the problem come up with the best solutions.