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| Home - Articles by Sterling-Hoffman - Apr 03 Issue |
Bruce Lee says your new VP Sales will Fail
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3) Get Granular about Defining Expectations.
Expectation setting is a necessary and critical phase in any relationship. Too often, however, CEO’s (and entrepreneurs in particular) rush through this phase or skip it altogether because they want the early stages of the relationship to be smooth and pleasant. This is why the opening weeks or months of a new executive’s tenure are often referred to as the ‘honeymoon period’. During a VP Sales search we conducted earlier this year, I encouraged the CEO and top seeded candidate to engage in a discussion regarding mutual expectations. The conversation went something like this:
CEO: “Well, the first thing I want is good communication. It’s the most important thing…I want to know what’s happening every day…”
Candidate: “Every day? Really?…” (hesitating)
At this point, sensing that the candidate had become uncomfortable, the CEO backed off from his ‘extreme’ position of wanting daily updates and closed by saying, ‘I think you know what I mean – I just want to be kept in the loop, and things will be fine.’
Actually, things would not have been fine. I interrupted the conversation immediately and forced both parties to explore the issue of communication further. As it turned out, the candidate was particularly sensitive to ‘micro-management’ and had once changed jobs (years ago) because his boss was a ‘control freak’. Further, interviews with other members of the CEO’s management team (conducted by Sterling-Hoffman during the discovery phase of the search project) identified clearly that the CEO was very much a hands-on manager who enjoyed being involved with his team day to day. None of this would have come to light, however, had I not insisted that both parties define expectations to the n’th degree.
What is important to note is that the CEO mentioned above had an initial reaction (to back off) that was quite natural. Consciously or subconsciously, his goal was to diffuse a possibly tense situation before it began. The mistake, however, is in assuming that tension is always a bad thing. Consider: the exchange described above occurred during a formal job interview - typically a low pressure, genteel affair. Day to day business operations, on the other hand, are anything but. If the CEO and a potential VP Sales are unable to engage in productive conflict during the interview process, how can they possibly hope to deal with conflict situations that are sure to emerge in the course of growing an enterprise?
Getting granular about defining expectations also means going much further than simply communicating the expected results. It is not enough to tell your VP Sales that the company’s targets are $10m per quarter, and then walk away and hope the job gets done. I am well aware that management bibles advocate communicating the expectations and then leaving people alone to figure out the ‘how to’ component. However, to do so (in my view) is like handing your four year old child an encyclopedia and telling the infant that you ‘expect’ it to be completed in 3 months. But wait, some will protest. Shouldn’t a seasoned executive already know ‘how to read’? If I hire the right person, shouldn’t they be able to hit the ground running? The answer is yes, with regards to functional tasks. But NO, when it comes to organizational dynamics.
Idiosyncracies matter. That is why a CEO needs to discuss not just what the actual objectives are, but also the strategies & expectations for how those objectives are best pursued. If ‘communication’ is important, drill down on what ‘communication’ means to each party. What amount of detail does the CEO require about each executive’s weekly activities? Is the VP Sales required to provide reports on the facial expressions and dietary preferences of each influencer in each prospect account? Or is a simple pipeline report with probability rating enough? The devil, as they say, is in the details. Shed light on as many individual and team idiosyncracies as possible, and the chances of a new hire succeeding will go up dramatically.
4) Test for Self-Awareness & Emotional Maturity.
Self-awareness is the trump card; it is what allows a new relationship to remain strong under pressure, over extended periods of time. A candidate that is self-aware is able to regulate his/her own emotions, confront mistakes, and make productive use of external feedback. This means less wondering about where the new team member’s head is at during conflict situations, and less worrying about whether they can take it when you tell them what you want changed.
How does one evaluate emotional maturity? The question requires far more than a paragraph for appropriate elaboration (the topic has served as the foundation for entire books). In general, try to look for candidates that have long inventories of their flaws and shortcomings. The more self-critical the candidate, the less you’ll have to worry about how the person will react when you deliver negative feedback in the future. The ideal candidate should expect more of him/herself than anyone else expects (which is why I prefer hiring first borns – but that’s another story.) You might also try administering psychometric testing; the Myers Briggs tool, for example, is favored by a number of well respected business minds, including Pat Lencioni (Founder of the Table Group) and Dave Beirne (General Partner at Benchmark Capital.)
The irony here is that only CEO’s who already possess a high degree of emotional maturity are able to evaluate it in others. Overall, the best advice I can offer is to obtain the assistance of someone who is knowledgeable in the field. If you are planning to retain a search firm for the position, make sure question the lead consultant’s domain expertise with regards to the topic of emotional maturity and how to test for it in candidates. If you are conducting the search independently, consult with a business psychologist to obtain some basic guidelines. Expertise in this area is not easy to find – but it is certainly available to those that bother to look.
5) Hire slow.
Many executive search projects I’ve been asked to turn around seemed to have been driven originally by a sense of desperation; as if every minute the position went unfilled was taking the company closer to it’s death. Of course, a sense of urgency is important – and was particularly so in the bubble years. However, the cost of hiring the wrong executive can be far worse. Our instructions to every member of a search committee is that they are required to arrive at a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ decision after the interview. If they cannot decide, we count that as a ‘no’. In fact, if a member of the search committee says they want ‘more information’, I often secretly count that as a ‘no’ as well. This often drags the process out, but the effort is well worth it. The problem is that boards often seem to harbor a collective fear of discarding too many candidates, as if the opportunity becomes less desirable with each candidate they reject. Entrepreneurs in particular seem to derive a tremendous sense of gratification from trying to close a candidate; asking them to postpone making an offer after presenting the company story is like asking an avid hunter to load a rifle, take aim at a target, and NOT squeeze the trigger. The challenge of course is to at once overcome the tendency to hire for the sake of hiring, yet keep in mind the fact that there is no such thing as a perfect candidate. Quite paradoxical, I realize, but such is life. The point is that the first step in reducing executive turnover is to do whatever is in your power to make the right decision in the first place.
Conclusion
Far too often, CEO’s blame themselves for having failed to hire an ‘A’ player. In my view, this attitude is quite flawed. The challenge is not to hire all ‘A’ players, but to build an organization out of the best possible talent that is realistically available to you within the timeline your company must execute in given the window of market opportunity.
Given that the available talent pool is always in flux, a CEO must find ways to win even if his/her individual executives are average performers. Since there are no perfect brides, the real question when evaluating a VP Sales (or any other executive) is: does this candidate have enough of what we require such that it would be possible and cost effective for us to bridge the gap? The goal of this article was to recommend strategies for 1) Structuring the hiring process so as to minimize the gap between what the company needs and what the candidate has to offer, and 2) To better equip CEO’s with strategies to help bridge this gap when it does make itself known (as it inevitably will.)
After all my talk of executing with mediocre performers, readers are no doubt wondering whether I would ever approve of terminating an executive that seems to be failing. Put it this way: if you are already thinking about terminating one of your executives, it is probably too late to implement any of the measures I’ve described above. It’s like physical exercise: by the time you’re at the end of a life without it, it’s probably too late to hit the gym and start reaping the rewards. Further, the other side of the ‘hire slow’ principle is: ‘Fire Fast’. I am absolutely in favor of terminating underperforming executives and moving on (particularly if it means you’ll be retaining our firm to do the replacement search.) But by and large, I would suggest to CEO’s that a great deal of time and energy can be saved if sufficient energy is invested towards helping a new executive hire become successful after the honeymoon period is over. As a final thought, I would urge readers to consider a point brought to light in the book by Pat Lencioni that I referenced earlier: A CEO’s best chance of winning with a group of average individual executives is to build an ABOVE AVERAGE team.
Angel Mehta is Managing Director at Sterling-Hoffman, a retained executive-search firm that specializes in conducting CEO, VP Sales, and VP Marketing searches for enterprise software companies. He can be reached via email: amehta@sterlinghoffman.net
 
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