Pedro Franceschi explains why Brex doesn’t hire “people managers” anymore

One day we, I sat down and I wrote a list of all the people that have worked and the people that didn't work. And I was trying to find like, what is predictive of leadership success? What are the things that only the people that worked have in common and the people that didn't work do not have in common? And a lot of things are not, a lot of things are important, but they're not predictive, right? So for example, someone that's like customer obsessed, very important, but there's people on both sides of the list that have that. So it's not exactly predictive. And the only thing that we found at Brex is this, this trait that we call operate at all levels, like someone that has the ability to operate at all levels. And the way we define it is someone that even at the highest levels of leadership has a deep understanding of the details of execution at an individual contributor level. So what that means in practice is like, A great CTO is someone that's actually a great engineer first and can actually write great code and design great systems. A great head of design is someone that can actually design amazing products. A great head of sales is someone that can actually go and close deals themselves if they need to. And doesn't mean they're gonna do that all the time, but it means that they know the nuances of what makes someone great at the craft, someone great at selling, someone great at writing code, someone great at designing great products. And if you don't know how to identify greatness because you know how to do it yourself to some degree, or you know what the bar is yourself to some degree because you're intimately connected to it, there's no way to build a team that's great. And so I think the first thing is identifying, creating a very clear sense of like, who are the people that actually understand the craft and the specific nature of what is great work in this function that they're doing. And then the second thing is how to be very consistent of that across every layer of the company and painfully so. So one of the things that we did in Brex 3.0 when we did a big cultural reset is we basically said, hey, we went through every leader in the organization and said, can they operate at all levels or no? And a lot of people couldn't. And we had this, a lot of companies have this over time, this role that people call it a people manager. It's someone that's like, well, this person is like, they're sort of a, they're like a director of engineering, but they can't really code because they manage people now. Or this person is like, they're like a VP of sales, but they can't really sell because they're now managing the team. And that concept is just something that we eliminated. There's no role for that anymore because what it means to be, at the end of the day, there's no way to manage people divorced from the work. You're managing the work itself. A great head of sales is not managing the team that goes and then closes the deals. He's managing the deals through a team. It's like Brian at Airbnb talks about this. It's almost like, imagine like Jony Ive at Apple designing the iPhone, managing the team that goes and designs the iPhone in the corner. No, look, he's designing the iPhone with a group of people. And it's just, it's sort of simple, but it is a very profound change in how you orient your relationship with the work and your relationship with what you put out there in the world. And I think you just have to select for people that appreciate the actual output of the work and the work itself and not the process of doing the work, not the team that does the work, and not like what people perceive internally about who does the work. All these things are like accessories. They don't matter. What matters is like, do you know what great looks like? Can you do it yourself and bring people along with a really high bar for doing it at that level?