Next week I will be appearing on a streaming event called “One Crucial Thing” in which 20+ business leaders each share a 5-minute success tip. It’s hosted by North Coast Ventures, an early stage investment firm that has been a great friend to our companies. But 5-minutes is just a tease, so this is a deep cut of the one crucial thing I will share. Make sure to sign up to see the others and find last year’s event here.
I found it a bit challenging to come up with a single business tip. There’s some friendly competition among other accomplished leaders, so it had to be good. I reflected on the lessons I’ve learned that have enormous leverage—the decisions or processes that spawn countless other good decisions and results. That led me to team-building, which has always been core to our successes. And I recalled the lesson from my friend at Red Bull (see note at bottom) many years ago that we applied with great results: When you hire people with common values, the rest takes care of itself.
“We’re Cancelling the Weekly Meeting”
I was exposed to many top brands while in marketing at P&G, then went on to spend 15 years leading digital marketing companies. During that time I’ve worked with hundreds of the biggest global brands. I presented on the campuses of Coca-Cola, Disney, Mercedes, Visa, and Nike. But Red Bull is easily the strongest brand team that I worked with. While every big brands writes a creative strategy brief and hands it over to their agencies, the Red Bull marketers and our creative team came up with ideas together. They dreamed up ideas and pitched them to us. Their bias was to say “Yes, and” to our ideas—as long as they truly big and risky.
Why is Red Bull different? It’s not because they hire at the best schools, spend the most money, or have been around the longest. I discovered the secret when a friend of mine explained his experience in the hiring process at the company: It’s all about being super-selective in hiring people that live and breathe the values of the brand. They hire living examples of what they want their business to be.
My friend shared a telling example: After some market weaknesses at one point, the business unit brought in a new leader—a long-time Red Bull veteran that had done a few years abroad. Upon her return, she immediately announced that she would be cancelling the weekly team meetings. She used words to the effect of: “We hired you because you know the brand…go do what you think is right.”
That story rattled around in my brain for years until I had a chance to build my own startup with Ahalogy. I realized that starting from zero was a unique opportunity, and we decided to similarly hire people that embodied our values. It took us fits, starts, ups and downs to get it right, but eventually this became the one crucial thing that led to our success and scale.
Many good things happen when you hire people that have uniquely consistent values:
You can hire people more efficiently, accept younger & transitioning employees, and they get up-to-speed faster.
Teams gel faster and communicate easier since they have a common mindset.
Decision-making is driven down to the employees who are closest to serving clients and writing code. That means faster productivity and problem-solving.
Throw those things together and you have a high-trust, successful group of people that love their teams and don’t want to leave.
Our model led to massive revenue growth and industry-beating profit. We scaled sales 10x in 3 years without issues. And we thoroughly enjoyed the ride.
Your company can get there, too. All you have to do is get two things right…
1. You Must Have Unique Values
This is where most companies mess up. They treat mission, vision, and values as an executive team task—a necessary evil that’s done every few years with the help of a consultant to walk through a process of applying “power dots”. While consultants can be of great value, they tend to exist in this situation to soothe the tension and give the output a feeling that it was done well—with a fee to match.
The outcome of most of these processes is a very bland set of words that literally any company can—and should—have. You know, things like Integrity, Teamwork, and Innovation. They tell you nothing about how this company or its people are uniquely consistent.
Your company values should be created and tested in two ways:
Are they strategic? This isn’t touchy-feely stuff, it’s about choosing what kind of people will power everyday decisions at every level. Your values should flow from how you are different from the competition and include elements that will drive growth and profitability. At Ahalogy, for example, we chose Curiosity as a value, in part because our competitors in the influencer marketing business were bad listeners and slow to change. Curious people are excited about what’s new and lean forward when clients ask for something different.
Is this who we are? When we created and periodically re-evaluated our core values at Ahalogy, we looked at ourselves in the mirror. The existing consistencies in your team are a great starting point. Sometimes this will come from the company founder(s). In our case, the value Competition came from something I personally have, which others tended to take up. On the other hand, our value of Support came from our entire team’s natural tendency to help each other out as a default mode.
Note that when done well, your values should allow for a team that is truly diverse and inclusive. In our case, values like Curiosity, Support and Joy are not over-attributed to certain races, genders, sexual orientation, or other background attributes. If anything, I think strong, consistent values can improve diversity in your hiring process because your assessment is based on looking for a common, consistent trait that is more blind to biases.
Once your values are set, it’s critical to make sure that they are applied consistently. But nothing is more important than building the hiring process around them.
2. Values are Core to the Hiring Process
Red Bull is unique in its interview process. It doesn’t dig into skills or give work tests. Their team asks questions to get to to whether or not the candidate embodies the brand character of Red Bull. For example, “Mystery” is one of about a dozen words the brand uses internally. No offer is given if just one of the interviewers says that a candidate is missing just one of these brand characteristics. My friend said “no” to some really accomplished people in his years of interviewing.
The first step here is being extremely transparent about your values with potential candidates. At Ahalogy we posted our “Playbook” for success on our careers site. It laid out our mission, vision, values, and some very direct words about the kind of people who did and didn’t work out at our company. Our playbook attracted people who were truly excited about our company—while also nudging people who wouldn’t be happy to not bother applying. My friend, Nick Seguin, recently posted a similar example for his company Rise Science. If it doesn’t excite you, don’t waste your time.
From here, interviews follow a simple formula: Get to discussion about whether the candidate fits your company values or not. You can use the “Tell me about a time when you showed (insert value)” I tend to encourage people to draw upon their hobbies and passions outside of work, since sometimes their previous company failed to tap these strengths.
This process makes it easy for even your most junior employees to interview consistently well. Things like skills and experience can either be taught once you hire, or come out of work history and former co-worker references. Feedback should be given independently right after the interview. The default answer is always “Do not hire.” As CEO I looked at my role as the last line of defense and I was the final interview for every candidate. I never over-ruled my team, but once in awhile I nudged them to dig a bit deeper.
While this post is mainly written for organization leaders thinking about how to structure their teams, all of us are going to be looking for a job again some day. When that day arrives, I beg you to look at the values of the companies you consider. Are they clear, strategic and unique? And if so, do you personally embody values that match?
If the fit is there, I promise you’ll go much farther and have a lot more fun on the journey.
NOTE: Shortly after publishing this piece I discovered that last summer Red Bull fired its senior U.S. leadership team because of failures around diverse hiring support for BLM, and some other really crappy stuff. It’s been more than 10 years since my interaction with the brand, and I can really only speak to my personal business experience. One positive from this recent story is the fact that Red Bull employees led a rebellion that resulted in change, which supports the point that their common values united them.