Cerebration on Growing Tech Talent
To cap out the year I’m going to transform the traditional 12 Days of Christmas over to 12 Days of Cerebration and enjoy exploring ideas there never seems enough time to consider. If you’d like to join me in exploring any of these ideas over a virtual coffee - reach out!
Day 1: Let’s look into growing talent. There are two aspects of interest that jump out to me: why is growing talent such an area of interest for companies and given that it’s a goal, how do you follow through?
Let’s take a look at why first, which may help structure and influence looking into the how. The most transparent motivation for companies encouraging employee growth I can see, is companies having limited resources and wanting to achieve more with them. Entertaining the dark side of how companies get in that position, is, there are companies who focus on hiring young or ‘cheap’ talent then use career growth as a way to get more than they paid for from their employee base. The subsequent growth that occurs for the employees is often a function of spending more hours in order to ‘do more’ but is not coupled with the investments to help employees increase the ROI of their work. The result is a brutal burn and churn cycle, which is fine by the company as they have no intention of delivering raises to match the market value of the employee’s accelerated experience. Intentional burn and churn growth does happen, but from my limited sample size I don’t think that’s the pervasive why.
I’ve seen more examples motivated from the talent crunch across tech. We love the examples of what top talent can produce and the impact it has on the bottom line of tech companies, but it is soo hard to hire from that top talent pool. At the end of the day, a company’s main competitor for this talent is the talent themselves. If they really can move the bottom line that much, why don’t they move a bottom line that will pour more of the profits back into their pockets? Next stop, Sand Hill Road. Hopefully, they launch a startup without giving too much of that bottom line to VCs. Even dropping down from the top of the top to strong talent tier, there has been a talent crunch across tech for the better part of a decade. The option available to companies is then to hire the teams they can hire and invest in the growth of those teams to try and cultivate the next generation of top talent. Sprinkle in some loyalty on both sides and you have the makings of a pretty good team. In this version of why, I think the interests of the company and the interests of the individual are most aligned.
The last genre I can think of why growing talent captures company's interest stems from retention. A large fraction of folks working in tech are in some way self taught, self motivated, driven, addicted to breaking new ground, or at least, mimicking those behaviors to keep up with the folks that are. For the driven self starter folks being pigeon holed is akin to suffocation, which can temporarily be relieved by changing companies. Companies can increase their chances of longer employee tenures by investing in employee growth. The trick with this why for investing in growth is to find alignment between the areas where the company wants to invest and where the employee wants to grow.
Understanding motivations is hard, but let’s see if that can make the how to support employee growth a bit more transparent. Know of a why not listed above? Please share!
Burn and churn growth! Wouldn’t you just drown in the ‘more more more?’ Growth can still be achieved for employees working with this form of company motivation. Making quick good decisions and efficiently following through is a competitive advantage for employees over the course of their career. Hopefully, these folks transition to a more sustainable role at some point, but their ability to operate at high speed and pressure is a wild card to be played at the right times. To grow in this rapid decision and execution environment, keep a log of why you chose to pursue a specific task, what results you expected, how hard you thought it would be, and at the end revisit were those results achieved and how hard it actually was. What you’re doing is building up a feedback loop to tune that personal rapid decision model. The efficient follow through, where corners are increasingly cut as a deadline approaches is helping build a ruthless viewpoint on the difference between nice to have and need to have. A question I have for folks who have worked in this environment is whether or not management growth can be achieved in this environment. If so, what are the mechanics to encourage it?
Growing the next Google Brain team! Encouraging growth here can actually be the trickiest for me. I would love to hear folk’s recommendations. There is an easy end of the spectrum where the team a company can hire is a middling/rusty team with an expectation of growing them into a moderate team. From what I can tell, most management guides for growing teams center around this type of growth, increasing focus, communication, incentives, alignment, transparency, psychological safety, on going education are all growth areas for up-leveling these teams. However, the techniques that work to grow a team to moderate performance won’t work for growing them beyond that. There’s also not many examples to study. The ones that I have looked into are so varied, there isn’t a recipe. The common ingredients at least are competitive instinct, inspirational focus, peer networks, expansive problem opportunity, supportive companies, and a pinch of good will towards mankind.
Retention based growth! Growth here can be in increasing the breadth of experiences to different stages of products, internal tool stakes, etc. The mechanics can be with rotating folks through different projects and encouraging them to share their learnings with others.
It’s fun to think. Nowhere nearly as fun as having a coffee chat to hear other folk’s ideas, experiences, and approaches! Hint hint.