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3 Tips for Hiring Leaders

and 1 Essential Quality for
Everyone.
Publicado el Publicado el13 de noviembre de 2017

Michael Skok

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Riddle: What goes from A to Z and is still the same in

between? EG what do Acquia, Zenefits and many others in
between like Hubspot, Netflix and Salsify all share?

Earlier this year I shared a post about the most important thing I
look for in Leadership: Mission-driven leaders. But what happens
when you have to change leaders? How do you sustain your
advantage while you find the right new leader and then adapt to
take advantage of new leadership?

To bring this to life I shared the story of Acquia, a company that

has grown from a raw startup in my office to an 800 person global
business serving thousands of customers. Today were
announcing that our founder Dries Buytaert is being elevated to
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Chairman and continuing as CTO, while simultaneously

transitioning the CEO role to a new leader, Mike Sullivan.

You can read all the news here and on Dries blog but what can
we all learn from this kind of leadership transition? Ive been
asked many questions along the way that we can all learn from,
most of which boil down to: What qualities did we search for?
How did we find suitable candidates and ultimately arrive at our
choice? And how is this typical? Ultimately its all down to one
harder thing. First though, here are 3 easy tips:

What qualities did we search for?

As is often the case, this was about complementing the founder

Dries and his team. Dries exhibits one of the top characteristics I
look for in founders = self-awareness. Furthermore, the team at
Acquia is full of strong leaders that in many cases have been
CEOs of businesses themselves. They all have one thing in
common - they want to learn and grow to be their best. So that
made it easy for us to focus on someone who had deep operating
expertise at scale, had built multifunctional global teams and
would lift everyone. The easy lesson here is

Look to complement a team, but never look

for a replacement. Always make room for a
new contributor.

Note that last part. At Acquia, Tom Erickson has been a fantastic
leader for the business and done a stellar job in this transition.
Thank you again, Tom! .. and like all of us, Tom is unique. We
could not replace him and nor would we want to try. We wanted
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to bring someone in who would bring their own unique strengths

to complement the team in their own way for this next era of
growth.

How did we find suitable candidates?

We partnered with a great search firm (Brad Stadler, TrueSearch)

because no matter how strong our networks are, we needed to
ensure two things: 1) An unbiased, diverse search for quality
candidates and 2) a great process for both the candidate and our
team. Do not skimp on this no matter your size or stage.

The impact of a senior hire in your business

is incomparably greater than any potential
cost of a search.

Time is your enemy, so even if you think youve got a great initial
set of candidates, remember someone needs to run the process
expediently with a single-minded focus and unless youre a
search expert willing to give up your day job to do this, hire the
best search firm you can afford.

How did we find the right person?

As Dries noted, we screened over 140 candidates over several

months. We set the bar high and as the search lengthened (as they
so often do), it can become tempting or even pressing to make a
fast hire to address mounting business pressures. However, the
lesson here is always the same.

Hire the right person, not just the person

right in front of you.
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Sometimes it can feel like filling the seat on your rowboat is just
so important to not lose momentum, and for some more tactical
roles, it might be. But with senior hires, you're not just filling the
seat, youre ensuring they can join or set the rhythm and pace to
win. Never take a shortcut or shy away from the work to find the
right person.

Dries and my board colleagues Tom Bogan and Rich DAmore on

the search committee were terrific partners as we divided and
conquered what we could each bring to the party. At one point, I
did six blind reference calls and meetings for a candidate to
ensure we all had the full picture of the person before we even
shortlisted them. The candidate said he wondered if hed been
professionally stalked - and fortunately, we laughed as he asked
what Id learned. Ive written about the 7 ways avoid the biggest
hiring mistake. Dries never wavered from his commitment to
finding the right partner, rather than just making a hire right
away.

Now the hard part.

Sadly, it would be easy if that were all there were to it. Its all
about fit. And fit is a multidimensional thing. Of course we search
for the right experience, knowledge and skills, but actually, thats
the easiest part and it's really just a qualifier.

The hardest part is the soft stuff - the cultural

quality of fit.

First and foremost, a candidate must fit with the culture of the
company. Ive written about this in 3 Steps to Making A+ Hires
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that Fit and its never more true when making a change at the top
of a company, because culture comes from the top. Just as one
looks for IQ and EQ, the CQ, (Cultural Quality) of fit is all about
cultural values, work ethic and style of working that must not
only be additive but inspiring enough for a leader to bring their
passion and aspiration to galvanize a team.

At the recent Underscore VC Core Summit, we hosted 450 top

leaders in roundtable discussions and Culture
featured everywhere. First Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan
emphasized over and over again the importance of Hubspots
culture and how he and Dharmesh Shah have had looked at other
iconic cultures like Netflix, then defined their own, and continued
to evolve and refine it to keep it real.

Brian described the companys growth as often being two steps

forward, and one step back but always emphasized the
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underlying importance of their culture in their scaling, describing

it as easier than ever to start a company and as hard as ever
to scale it.

Then by popular demand, Jason Purcell, CEO of rapidly growing

Salsify was joined by his Core Partner Brett Hurt (2x public
company founder and now CEO of Data.World) to run a full-on
session focused on Culture and Hiring.

Jason Purcell (left) with the whiteboard notes of his

conversation between him and Brett Hurt (right).

The discussion electrified the room, causing vigorous yet

consistent discussion of topics such as the importance
of integrating Culture into the hiring as well as
the onboarding process. This included one example of a hire
being dismissed during onboarding due to not passing the test.
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Finally, we purposely highlighted Jay Fulcher, CEO at Zenefits as

a comparison of a more challenging story, where Jay took on the
turnaround of Zenefits after it had dropped a couple
of billion dollars in valuation before Jay even joined.

Still, Jay emphasized the importance of culture first, saying Its

all about aligning the culture with the execution and that
was job one for me when it came to taking on the challenge
at Zenefits, a company that is now firmly on its way back to
prosperity under his leadership.

Fortunately, Acquias team havent faced the challenges that

Zenefits endured before Jay arrived there. They have consistently
upheld their culture in an actionable form, posting two record
quarters of results so Mike is joining a thriving business. And he
has already proven to live up to Acquias values such as
Committed to Awesome for stakeholders and community in his
track record. This came out strongly in our interviews, working
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sessions, and references over the weeks leading up to his

recruitment.

So we are excited to welcome Mike as our new CEO and

congratulate Dries and the team at Acquia for attracting him to the
iconic company they are building. It is a pleasure to share the
journey with them and our learnings with you.

Conclusion

As I said at the beginning, there are some straightforward things

to remember when making any significant leadership hire: such as
being patient to run a professional process and not just look for an
immediate replacement fill. And ultimately its all down to one
word -- fit -- but most importantly because of the importance of
culture as highlighted by Acquia, Hubspot, and Zenefits. The
Cultural Quality (CQ) fit is critical. We had many candidates with
the capabilities to do the job for Acquia, but being patient to
allow Dries to find his partner was the key. Finding a CQ fit for
any hire you make in your company is the key to building a
consistent cultural foundation that can support your vision and
mission on the ever-changing journey to becoming an enduring
success.

Incidentally, we ourselves are hiring at Underscore VC right

now and you can find more about how were emphasizing
diversity and culture for these hires - wed love to hear from
you or a referral if youre interested.
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As always I enjoy sharing my continuous learnings from working

with great teams and welcome your thoughts in the comments
below.