Month: August 2020

(Hint: Try the Warby Parker Way)

Imagine you need to hire someone quickly. Perhaps your company’s hockey-stick growth isn’t exactly aligning with how many people you need to deliver or maybe your key marketing leader is moving to London?

The only clear part of a hiring story is that the wrong hire will take you even further away from a good night’s sleep.

We’ve seen how the speed of hiring can translate into irrational decisions. You have important projects to keep moving forward — and you don’t want to lose momentum. But this could be a good time to take a breath and slow down your hiring frenzy. Because there’s always more than one solution to a problem.

Consider taking a lesson from Warby Parker, the innovative eyewear company whose philosophy is ‘try before you buy.’

Warby Parker encourages their customers to try out up to five pairs of glasses at one time — decide which ones you like — then place your order. Brilliant! It turns out that with eyeglasses, what costs money are the lenses; the frames are more of a commodity.

Our experience at Forshay has taught us that there are three compelling reasons to ‘try before you buy’ when hiring:

Reason #1: Hiring a hands-on, roll-up-your-sleeves, get sh*t done consultant allows you to think well.

Progress happens while you search for the right person. You have room to see what’s possible in the open position. You avoid the tight feeling in your chest to act quickly, because you’ve bought yourself some oxygen.

Reason #2: Sometimes the consultant is open to joining the team, and is just as interested as you are in trying the team/company out to see if there is a fit.

Our consultants are keenly interested not in just solving interesting problems, but in working with teams where the cultural complement is aligned and everyone is playing to their highest and best use.

Twenty years ago, the only people available for interim basis were entry-level temps. In the last ten years, experienced professionals are choosing consulting as a career path for reasons that include autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Reason #3: Building relationships with new people is good for everyone

The future of work includes more fluidity of teams. Teams are always evolving. You may have a great core team, but how often are you bringing in new team members, and/or objective outsiders to add fresh thinking, and seeing other people move on? Old-school thinking was to avoid spending time on relationships that weren’t “long term.” Now leaders understand the fluidity of organizations, and embrace the benefits of growing a wider and more diverse network of people.

So next time you have a hiring crisis, consider leveraging an interim professional. They can evaluate whether it’s the right fit for them and you can see how well they work with the team. Your best-case scenario is that you find the perfect candidate who turns out to be a great fit. Your worst-case scenario is that you accomplish some of your company’s current needs while looking for the right person.

Let’s keep redesigning work in ways that benefit everyone.

We hear it so often: Follow your passions. Do what you love and the money will follow. But then we keep listening for more specific advice and, not surprisingly, it often conflicts.

Recently, Jeffrey Katzenberg surprised a crowd by suggesting that young people follow not their dreams, but their skills: “I believe every human being does something great. Follow that thing you’re actually really good at and that may become your passion.” In the parlance of the diagram above, he’s suggesting that the joy of doing something well, something you’re suited for, can turn a job into a career.

Meanwhile, in a speech to Stanford business school students, Oprah Winfrey suggests two keys to finding your “power base,” following your instincts and connecting your skills with your values: “Align your personality with your purpose, and no one can touch you.” In the language of the diagram above: when what you do well meets what the world needs, you turn a talent into a career.

I love Oprah more than I do Disney (although with Frozen maybe I can love both). But the thing Winfrey and Katzenberg have in common here is the assumption that both success and fulfillment require that we look consciously at our lives, taking into account both practical needs and less rational – but equally crucial – issues of fulfillment.

So how do we apply all this to our actual lives-in-progress?

When I talk with people about finding satisfying work, the conversation often turns to deeper issues – what they like and don’t like doing day-to-day, and how that syncs (or doesn’t) with the effect they want to have on the world. The question underlying these conversations is a big one: “Does what I’m working on really matter?”

I often advise people at crossroads in their careers. So many of them have succeeded by societal standards but, in the midst of that success, they feel something is missing – call it heart or impact. They’ve been heads down, working hard for so long, and finally, they realize some part of their diagram of “doing your best work” is missing. And sometimes they conclude that – to find passion or meaning in work, they must make an enormous change.

Give it all up. Do something entirely different.

For some people – the ones who should have been artists, activists, explorers all along – taking such a leap is a lifesaving move. But for many more, the changes they might want to make are more subtle, more of a recalibration. I ask these people to envision ways they could use their talents not to start anew but to expand what is possible.

Which of their current skills can they offer the world, and in what capacities might

exercising those skills bring them fulfillment? How can they use those skills in new ways? If the company where they work isn’t aligned with their values, can they find one that is or go freelance? What aspects of their current work take them away from what they value, and how can they shift their focus to give the world what they’re made to offer?

In short, for each of us, the diagram of “doing your best work” is a work in progress, one that continues to shift across our working lives. When we start to engage with the questions it represents, we move closer to work that we feel matters.

What does your diagram look like? What shifts do you need to make?