Getting Philosophical: What Makes Someone Successful?

I recently took a new opportunity at a new company and was quickly faced with a challenge that was totally new to me: how do you create a hiring process from scratch? Up until this point, the company had leaned on it’s network to hire a small team of incredibly competent people, most of whom had worked together before. As we grow, how can we ensure that base line of competency is kept and that the team continues to work well together?

What Makes Someone Successful?

When I first sat down to think this through, I initially went back to the interviews and hiring situations I had been in throughout my career. In all of those situtations, both as an interviewee and an interviewer, I was often left with the nagging feeling that there just wasn’t enough useful information being communicated. I had seen first hand how people would get one idea about a company or the hire only for the reality to fall far short of expectations. So how do we set up the team and the prospective hire for success?

Of course, I went to the internet to kick start my thinking on the matter. Having filled my head with articles, including some especially helpful resources in The Pragmatic Engineer, I began to develop a systematic approach to answering this question and, ultimately, developing the core of a hiring process.

It starts with taking a slightly different angle on the question: “What Makes Our Team Successful?”

I started thinking individually about the high performers on our teams. What do they bring to the table? I believe that thinking about individuals in particular is useful because each may bring out a different set of characteristics or traits, but you are also likelu to discover some similarities across many. Though I didnt know it at the time, this is fairly similar to a technique employed by Meta to identify high performers. In their case, they have formalized these different types of individuals into a set of “archetypes” that each have names and a particular “style” of high performance.

I began to write down some of these traits. At first the list was broad, but I began slowly narrowing it down. I did this by choosing carefully between traits that are closely linked and attempting to prioritize traits by percieved impact. Its not as rigorous a process and an engineering-minded individual might like, but it was a highly valuable and insightful experience for me. At the end, I had a list of key characteristics I felt were most valuable. On their own, several of them were fairly cliche (for example, Pragmatism and Autonomy), but with each I included a single sentence explaining why this characteristic is absolutely necessary to succeed. Framing it in this manner was also helpful for weeding out “weaker” characteristics.

Gathering Signals

From here the process turns to the question of how to determine if an individual has those particular characteristics. Borrowing from The Pragmatic Engineer, I decided to call these Signals. In short, a Signal is a generic action or impact that an individual can demonstrate that speaks to a specific characteristic. For example, highlighting a risk to management would be a Signal that an individual is Pragmatic, whereas an ability to unblock themselves is a Signal of Autonomy. These Signals are patterns that can be matched to when discussing work history, tackling coding problems, or even just exchanging pleasantries.

As I began to flesh out these Signals, I did notice that there was a “strength” dimension to them. Some Signals fealt “greater” or “lesser” in their indication of a particular characteristic. My initial inclination was to throw out the “lesser” Signals, but I found a use for them in helping to determine level. I realized that many of the “lesser” Signals are those that can be demonstrated by someone earlier in their development. For example, a strong desire to learn new things is an early indicator of Autonomy, often demonstrated by entry-level candidates, whereas the ability to unblock yourself and others typically comes much later.

Getting Philosophical

In all this deep thought about the team, the people I had worked with, and my own career it was hard to not get a little philosophical about what it truly means to be “successful”.

The truth is, part of a hiring process is to understand if the company’s vision for success and the prospective hire’s vision for success are aligned. They don’t necessarily need to be the same, but they certainly must be in agreement. If the company’s current vision for a product or project is that it needs a steady hand, that may preclude someone who is trying to make the jump from mid-level to senior, however, there are other scenarios where a young and hungry individual is exactly what could complete your team.

The important thing here isn’t the exact scenario, it’s being able to describe in great clarity what you need from this hire. One great exercise to help with this is to list out what success for this individual looks like at set time intervals post-hire (i.e. 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year). The key here is to be as honest and transparent as you can be, and to elicit as much honesty and transparency from your prospective hire.

Another insight that I kept coming back to is the need to distance ourselves from the word “talent”. When people hear that word, they immediately jump to the concept of a natural gift, something that just can’t be taught, but what we’re looking for in hiring a “successful” teammate is the exact opposite. The only way to gauarantee the success of something is to truly obsess over making it better.

This applies to products, and is in part why the software industry has coalesced around iterative approaches to development, but it also applies to human pursuits. I believe the success of my career thus far can be attributed to obsessing over making myself a better programmer, a better leader, a better teammate. That obsession requires that I take a hard look at myself, evaluate my performance and push myself towards even hire goals.

This isn’t talent in the way we typically describe it, but I do think the results of this hardwork are what people typically describe as talent. Being able to see beyond the “natural talent” to what actually makes someone capable of self-skilling allows you to forecast success and put individuals into situations where they can grow and ultimately thrive.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Having laid out the Signals by Level and grouped them by Characteristic, the next step is to begin developing a question bank and evaluatiom sheets for each step of the process, focusing on the Signals that are best collected by that step. We’re still in the thick of it there, so not much to report back yet, but I’m hoping to turn this into a series as we make our way through this process.