3 Frameworks to Hiring Top Talent w/ Romeen Sheth

What's up, everyone? I'm Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. And welcome back to another episode of Founder's Journal, my diary made public for the world. Today's episode is a guest journal by one of my smartest friends and intellectual sparring partners. Ramin Sheth is the CEO of Medicis, an 8-figure IT staffing business. He's also a prolific content creator with 173,000 followers on Twitter and tens of thousands of newsletter subscribers. Ramin is a truly special person who I will speak to and learn several profound business lessons as well as life lessons in one seating. And now I am excited for Ramin to provide you a few of those very lessons in this podcast seating. So without further ado, a guest journal from my friend Ramin Sheth.

My name is Ramin Sheth, and this is a guest episode of Founders Journal. I'm best known online on Twitter for bootstrapping a business to over $50 million in revenue and exiting to private equity. But what's less known about me is the business that I run. We're in the people management and talent space. We help enterprise companies manage their talent at scale. And from being in the space, I've seen almost every incident you can probably think of with respect to hiring people, retaining people, and managing people. I firmly believe that the lifeblood of any business is its people, and the most challenging thing for founders is to create an environment in which the best people want to come work for them. So today I want to talk about 3 frameworks related to talent. All 3 of these things have been personally instrumental, not only in my life, but they're the go-to things my team refers to internally at our company. I share with founders that I've invested in, And I often tell people early in their career to think through when thinking about their professional journey. The 3 frameworks are number one, how to choose where to work. Number 2, a working guide for once you've picked where to work. And number 3, how to transition if it's not working out for you. So let's dig into the first one, how to choose where to work. One of the biggest mistakes I observe people make is not evaluating their career decisions with intent. Now, I'm a firm believer that you should evaluate career decisions With the same degree of rigor and thoughtfulness that investors apply to their investment decisions. When you work at a company, you are an investor, just like all the other investors. The difference is, while they invest their capital, you invest your time, a much more precious asset. In early-stage companies, we talk a lot about product-market fit, but when choosing where to work, I like to think about 3 other kinds of fit. The first is company-market fit. Is this company going to win? It's critical that when you're evaluating a place to work, You actually know how the place works. You should gain both a qualitative and a quantitative understanding of the company's business. You should ask questions about the metrics. How's the company doing? You know, what's their traction? What's their burn? What's their valuation? What about the vision? What's the strategy for how the company scales? How about the business model? How do they make money and is it sustainable? Who's the competition? Who are private and public competitors and why are they better or worse? And finally, who are the customers? Why do customers buy? Do they love the product and service? And where's the proof? The second type of fit you should think about is person-company fit. Am I in a position to succeed? Most people early in their career overvalue position and they undervalue contributing to a winning team. Getting an additional 20% of compensation at a flailing company is always worse over the long term compared to joining a rocket ship. High-growth companies unlock opportunities. They're the opposite of zero-sum environments. That said, what you do do in the short term matters. You want to be in a position to succeed. So you should ask questions like, what's the day-to-day responsibility of the current role? Who's the team I'm going to be working with? What are the other teams I'll be interacting with? What's the attrition rate of employees? Is the company a leaky bucket or do people actually stay? Why do people stay? Why do they love working here? All right. And are those actually good reasons? Right? Focus more on substance as opposed to the perks. And the third is person-problem fit. Am I in it for the long term? Career gains are inversely correlated with career hopping. You should imagine spending the next 5 years working at a company. Knowledge and skill accumulation come from staying past that honeymoon period, 0 to 12 months, maybe even 0 to 18 months. And after that is really when you get pushed. You have to make the tough calls and you have to live with the repercussions of your decisions. So you should ask questions like, what skills are particularly valuable to this domain? Is this a problem or industry I care about? You know, when it gets tough, and it always does in any business that you're in, am I motivated or excited enough to stick it out? Probably the most important question, and one I, I often ask myself and encourage others to ask themselves, is, do you believe that you can uniquely excel in this domain? The best way to bring rigor to your decision is to write a career memo. The exercise includes analyzing each opportunity you have across the 3 vectors I laid out, And then comparing the full opportunity set. Choosing the right place to work is a really important step in setting yourself up for success. You may not have perfect information to make your decision, but you should have perfect intent because that is fully in your control. Now, let's assume that you've picked the right place to work. Great. How do you make sure that you're most effective in this environment? That's where the second framework comes in: how to develop a personal working guide. Misunderstandings are the source of 95% of frustration in the workplace. As individuals, we're wired to our own internal soundtrack. And in my experience, most conflict in the workplace doesn't actually come from disagreement over substance. It comes from disagreement over style. As organizations get larger, style issues start to emerge. Relationship dynamics, varied opinions, conflicting personalities, disparate interests. But if harnessed appropriately, style is also the engine for soul at a company. It breeds creativity, firepower, intelligence, and energy. The raw ingredients are there in both cases, but the real question is when you put the ingredients together, how do you create the latter and not the former? Now, there's obviously no perfect silver bullet, but there is an exercise that can go a long way. A personal working guide. The intention of a personal working guide is to help your colleagues understand your personality, how you think, and what interaction approaches work best for you. Most importantly, it's not a mandate or set of rules. It's a starting point for a conversation on how to best work together. Now I've written a guide and structured it in 3 sections. It goes from strategic to tactical, and here's a template that you can use to build your own. First question is your personality type. What makes you the best version of yourself? You should ask yourself questions like, where do I get energy from? In what types of environments do I succeed? What are the areas I'm working on to improve? Maybe what are my pet peeves that my teammates should know about? And finally, what's my north star that I'm solving for? The second thing you should think about is operating principles. How do you like to work and how do you like to collaborate? What's your default mode of problem solving? What do you expect from your team? What should your team expect from you? What's the pace you like to move at and what do you feel you need to be equipped with to be most valuable? And the final is communication style. How do you like to receive and share information? How do you learn best? How do you like to receive feedback? What's your default mode of communication? Is it text? Is it verbal? Is it just-in-time? Is it async? And then what does a successful interaction look like to you? When you develop your guide, you should be explicit and specific. The point, after all, is to draw elements that contribute to your style, your superpowers, eccentricities, quirks, and the nuances that tie all of them together. And the beauty of this exercise is it works at every level, from the CEO to the junior-most frontline worker. Again, there's no silver bullet for culture and collaboration, but in my experience, you can take a lot of the heartache out with a good personal working guide.

We're going to take a quick break, but more from Founders Journal when we get back.

Now, let's assume you didn't pick the right place to work at. You went through framework number 1, and with the information you had at the time, things looked good. You went through framework 2, and you really tried to bend the environment to your style so you could be the best version of yourself. Or, you know, maybe you did pick the right place and you did have the right working guide and everything was great, but for whatever reason, It's now the time for a move. This is where framework number 3 comes in. How do you switch roles? Most people idealize careers as clean linear trajectories. They're not. They're windy, they're messy, they're filled with ups and downs. And this really isn't uncommon, but what is common is every person thinks they're different. Now, why is that important? Well, when you think you're different in this situation, you get stuck. And this is where a lot of people fail. They don't want to go backwards and they're crippled by some combination of FIRE: fear, insecurity, ego, and resistance. Here are some typical thoughts that go through someone's head in this type of situation. You know, fear: I feel like I'm going to fail. I don't know what I'm doing. Insecurity: maybe I'm not where I'm supposed to be, you know, at a certain age in time. Resistance: am I going to fit into this new environment? Maybe it's just not meant to be. And ego: I know too much and maybe I think I'm too good to start over. But if you internalize this as a common pathway, that careers have peaks, valleys, and all sorts of elevation in between, you understand that it's normal to go down to go up. And it's actually a really freeing insight. You know, understanding this at its core removes artificial constraints and barriers from your thinking. More importantly, it focuses you on the right variables to consider in this situation. Now, if I were making a switch, I would ask 4 questions. First is peak. Second is velocity. Third is endurance. And the fourth is personal fit. So let's go through each of the 4. Peak, how high can I go? You should be asking yourself that if you make the switch, what's the potential upside of this new direction? How does it compare to the current direction that you're headed for? Second question you should ask or think about is velocity. How fast can you get there? If you do end up making that switch, are you set for a slow and long grind, or is it a curve that'll require deep learning and familiarity, but once you're up to speed, you're going to be able to really accelerate on? And to be clear, neither is necessarily better or worse, but it is important to understand depending on what phase of life you're in, You know, what your obligations are, what your personal situation is, a different answer might make sense for you. Another consideration when you're thinking about velocity is consider compounding. At 5 years into your path, you're just likely getting to a stage where the benefits really compound. You know, year 6 to 8 is not going to be a linear ascent. It could be exponential. And so you have to make sure that if you're switching, you really understand this. The third vector is endurance. How sustainably can you get there? Will you personally endure the path for a long period of time? And building on the point of compounding, real gains really come when you're 5, 10, 15 years into a journey. Personally, in a former life, it feels like a really long time ago, I used to be a consultant at McKinsey and Company, and after 3 years I quit. It was an excellent place to work, but I just knew in my heart of hearts that I would lose in that environment. I didn't have any doubt in my capabilities. I had great sponsors and mentors and was consistently ranked highly internally. But the problem was I just wasn't that into it. I knew I'd get outworked, outmaneuvered, and outmuscled because someone with real motivation, whether it was extrinsic or intrinsic, would just downright beat me. Now, whenever I think of my involvement in anything, and I encourage you to do the same, I try to think about if it's a journey I can see myself lasting on. It turns out that sometimes you're your biggest competition. The 4th factor after peak velocity and endurance, and the final one, is personal fit. If I get there, how do I feel? This is a forward-looking exercise. You should envision you've climbed the mountaintop. High fives all around. You're the man. Or the woman? Do you feel great or do you feel empty? This is something I think people spend too little time on, in my opinion. The worst thing in life is playing the wrong game. So make sure you give it some thought to how you might feel if what you set out to accomplish actually came true. Type A people, high achieving people are really good at playing the how do I win this game? What they're really not as great at, and I'd encourage you to spend the time on, is, is this a game even I want to play in the beginning? If you're a founder that's thinking about hiring and making your organization successful, or you're at some point in your career and thinking through where you should allocate your time, I hope you can simplify the exploration by utilizing these 3 frameworks: how to choose where to work, how to work effectively with people in your organization, and how to think about switching things up. Once again, my name is Ramin Sheth. You can find me on Twitter @RaminSheth, and I appreciate you, Alex, for having me on for a guest episode of Founders Journal.