Patrick Campbell: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, just renaissance [inaudible 00:04:55] that quote. That'd be hilarious. People will be like, "What the hell's he..." Anyway, let's just jump right in. First topic is building your team as a founder or just a leader of any kind. So here's the question, just what are the biggest mistakes people make building their team? What are the biggest opportunities people miss when they're building their team? Or just generally what's like your take on how to best approach building your team as a founder or just a leader of people? You always have to start answers with cliches, and I think the biggest cliche with building a team is, team is everything, right? If you're listening, you've heard that, you've probably said that to somebody or gotten mentored on that. And I was told that in the early days of building, and I actually thought it was terrible advice. I thought it was going to be the product or marketing or something that was going to hold us back. But I think that although team is everything, and I truly believe that, if you look at most data or most behaviors that most companies make, this isn't actually how we think or what we do. Let me give you two fundamental issues. I think the first one is we confuse team by being everything to all people to accommodating to every single person, and especially in tech the last couple of years, maybe that's going to change a little bit now, but it was always like, "Oh, everyone needs to be happy." And I think that's a really, really big misconception because you're not there to make everyone happy. You're there for some sort of mission and some sort of goal and you want to set up the culture and the team in a way that gets to that particular goal. And I think the little bit more actionable way to look at this is, I don't think we actually focus on our team. The average tenure of a manager in tech right now is about 15.7 months. I actually went and looked into this mainly because we got into hyperdrive about team a couple of years ago. The average time a report has the same manager in corporate tech is only about 10.8 months, so just under 11 months. And there's no way that team is everything, or at least we actually believe that when the purveyors of your team, your management only lasts that long, it's just impossible. And I think for the most part, people ops is an afterthought. And even if you get into the history of HR, which we should not do because that's an entire podcast, it's all about reacting. It came out of the labor movement in the mid 1900s, and it was all about, "Hey, how do we CYA?" rather than, "How do we push our team forward? " And I think in tech we had the opportunity to do that, but we haven't really focused on our team as much. So I don't know if I answered your question, but that's the scope of that problem I think, is we don't actually focus on our team, we don't actually focus on our team in the context of the mission. We just hire people, hope they're really happy. And obviously I'm generalizing, but if you look at the stats and you look at what's happening, that's how it shakes out. Is there something you've done in building your company that has been counter to that, something you've learned about? Because I totally agree, people always talk about team, team, team and then that's often really sucky to work at a lot of companies and clearly they don't care that much about your experience.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.