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For The Future Indicative, Ep 9 Part 1
Transcript
ALEX EFFGEN
Welcome back to The Future Indicative. I’m Alex Effgen, and in Part 2 of our look at Resourcing, we’ll start at the top, and work our way down when it comes to building a modern company.
KATE MORGAN
“We’re doing more and more CEO searches. Because technical founders are like, I just want to be happy. Why am I trying so hard?
And it’s really the right thing to do because play to your strengths. Don’t exhaust yourself…There’s very few founders that can go to $100 million. So bring in the people that can do it for you, and that’s when you start getting the professional CEO.
When you get the professional CEO, they’re the ones that are going to come in without the emotion. Because…This is a kind of a side fact. I read somewhere that a great profession for psychopaths and sociopaths are actually CEOs at publicly traded companies. Because they can look at things at such a linear level and remove all the emotion.”
ALEX EFFGEN
That was Kate Morgan, founder and CEO of the recruiting management consulting and HR services firm, BostonHCP. Kate knows personalities, and where they best fit in a corporate structure. She’s not casting shade on CEOs, or sociopaths for that matter. They clearly have their place in society. Otherwise they wouldn’t be elected president.
If the CEOs superpower is seeing the big picture without emotion, then AI might be their Kryptonite. The cost benefit analysis tells them: I can cut my labor by degrees of magnitude for immediate and long-term savings.
Removing the human element might make sense in the ledger, because LLMs–or large language models–can see a bigger picture without emotion better than any executive. But when the company that provides you the AI for your resources suddenly increases the price of their tokens, or gets bricked up by a cyberattack, and previously required you to input your entire business into their system, that you can no longer access or afford, how do you maneuver without a labor force to improvise or innovate? What exactly are you now the chief executive of?
But I’m not here to preach abstinence. Just…balance.
KATE MORGAN
“You don’t necessarily have to have it all internal. Working with Forbes for my book, the reason why I specifically went with Forbes was because they’re actually a marketing engine.
They’re more of a marketing engine than probably what most would consider a publisher.
And I could have gone out, hired a head of marketing, a VP of marketing. But I wouldn’t know how to manage that person. And then I could just end up feeling empty and thinking I have to let them go.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Play to your strengths. But before you go to resourcing, make sure you know how to play the game.
KATE MORGAN
“My Achilles’ heel is operations. I’m 100% visionary founder/CEO. Everything I want to do is way up in the clouds looking at stuff. Granted, I’m able to execute a lot, but I do not want to be pulling my own P/L. I want a dashboard for that stuff. I want a dashboard to show me those things that I’m not really good at. So I have access to it, but I ain’t going to be pulling those reports. I need somebody to pull those reports. Because anything that’s going to be an impediment on me being more visionary is going to slow me down mentally and emotionally.
So that’s where the gaps come in, and that’s why people are so quick to jump to bringing on somebody for sales, where it’s not really the right idea.
Because the right idea is going to be you actually have to develop a process. You actually have to have the infrastructure to support that salesperson and unless you can do it ad nauseum then you can’t pass that over to folks.
And that’s when we start to see the bad outsourcing...Like, if you can’t sell it, don’t expect somebody else to be able to sell it. So just word to the wise there.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Thanks! But hiring people can be problematic. They’re not cold, logical machines. What happens when we hire the wrong person?
KATE MORGAN
“It is incredibly disruptive. And yet…you hire the wrong person, and they won’t let people go.
But I tell people, like all the accelerators, this came from my own business coach: You have a toxic person that is really distracting your team, yourself, not getting stuff done. It’s hard leading up to it, but 36 hours after you’re like, ‘Oh my God, why? How did I deal with that?’
It’s because we’re wired for the devil we know. But at the end of the day it can really, really impede everything.
I learned this early on, that when either I’ve terminated people or help them self-select out, the number of people on my team that would come to me and say, ‘I am so glad, so glad, that they’re gone.’
And I’m thinking to myself, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ But that’s, you know, human nature. I think we do want to have groups. We do want to have these relationships and we don’t want to be a jerk.
But that’s why I stress so much on, you know, getting to a point when you have ethos, because then you’re going to have those norms that gives that psychological safety.
It also gives me as a founder/CEO more to be like, ‘Nope, that person does not fit. We will not be tolerating that.’ ”
ALEX EFFGEN
Then how do we SECURE our business from the wrong hires?
KATE MORGAN
“Without sounding like a broken record, it is 100% adherative to the core values. You can have skills beyond, but when you hire for skills, it’s a crapshoot if the person is going to work out.”
ALEX EFFGEN
So let’s say you’re entering the workforce. A recent graduate from an expensive four-year college or university. You need to make an impression on someone who comes from a different generation that is not a digital native. They grew up before the internet, smartphones, social media. What can you do?
KATE MORGAN
“Relationship building. A hundred percent. When I go to various, sort of, networking functions, people think I’m an extrovert. I’m not. I’m actually an introvert. My battery drains very quickly.
And the older I get, the quicker it drains. But when I go to these various things, I’m not seeing anybody young.
I’m the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards expert for the East Coast and I’m out there talking to students and they have that hustle. They have the understanding. But because of those highly curated environments, they don’t know how to play with one another. They do not know how to say, ‘Hey, let’s go have a pickup game of kickball, because we’re latchkey kids.’
As a Gen Xer, we were establishing these fiefdoms, and going out, and, yeah, natural selection was probably part of it, but we got to test our boundaries. And feel very comfortable doing that. If that’s one thing to take from the past and bring it forward is learning how to have these relationships without it being super curated.
We need to help support our next generations, and give them the opportunity to test themselves. People are not pushing their kids outside of their comfort zones. We as parents are responsible for growing adults. The greatest gift you can give your kids is the ability to be confident in themselves.”
ALEX EFFGEN
When the world goes digital, go analog. Show them what you’re all about without an AI posting it for you. Make an authentic impression in person. And if it doesn’t work, well, practice makes progress.
But in a time and place with incredible competition for fewer open positions, practice might feel…frustratingly regressive. I speak from personal experience that employers have shown the worst behavior when selecting a best candidate. Generic platitudes from an unsigned HR email after several interviews extracting free work can sting. Do they deserve your effort given how they treat candidates?
KATE MORGAN
“We have a lot of folks that are unemployed and from a candidate perspective, there’s a lot of desperation and they’ll take anything.
The interview process goes both ways. It does us no good if we bring somebody on board and six months later they’re unhappy. It’s a waste of everybody’s time, but worse than the time being wasted, the impact on our confidence. It’s hurtful to be let go. It’s hurtful for a manager or CEO to let people go. It hurts when we do it wrong. It doesn’t improve your Glassdoor. It doesn’t improve the morale of your team. The cost of attrition, whether employee-driven or employer-driven is…it’s a lot. It’s a lot.”
ALEX EFFGEN
In her book, Custom-Fit, Kate admits that calling employees “human capital” may feel like you are diminishing them individually. But when we operate companies, we function on two levels: the strategic and the tactical. I’ve already talked about the CEO who only sees the big picture, but the founder who is too emotionally invested in his people has a problem as well: it can compromise the mission and vision of a company employing more than just one person.
The best companies define their core values along with their products and services. They should put these in their business plan. They should also–from the start–for all of their future hires and future growth–define their exit strategy.
KATE MORGAN
“I chair an accelerator program and one of the pillars that we look at is execution. And there was 40 of my accelerators in this session. And I said, ‘Look at it from the perspective of, if you were ever to exit, where are your holes?’
Everyone should be looking at that, and I even push that because I coach a smaller group. I have a cohort that I’m coaching. And I said, ‘What’s your exit?’ And you get blank faces because they’re like, ‘Well, I’m just in it.’
Well, I know you’re in it, but this is going to be our legacy. So moving forward what would you need if you were to get hit by a bus tomorrow, or somebody came and said, ‘Hey, I really like what you’re doing. I like your product.’ What are the holes?
That will help you understand where you need to scale. Without that I don’t think you have a clear idea of where you’re going. Because there’s growth and then there’s scale.
Think about scale. Think about the holes.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Thank you for joining us on The Future Indicative, a podcast produced by me, Alex Effgen, and Indicate Marketing. Our business is to show what great narratives accomplish for your business. The views expressed here are solely our own. No sociopaths were harmed in the making of this episode, but they can contact IndicateMarketing.com if they want to explore how our humanity can help drive their industry growth and market positioning.
If you would like to learn more about the proper way to resource the humans in your capital, please pick up Kate Morgan’s book, Custom-Fit, everywhere good books are sold. We appreciate your patronage, and continued support.
