Part of why it is so difficult is that these C-level executives have mastered the art of sounding good with minimal set of accomplishments. Sometimes I listen to these presentations and it feels like a solid story and presentation, but there is nothing behind their rodeo when you sit back and dig deeper. A fucking mirage.
It's not the person who does excellent work that gets promoted or climb up the corporate ladder, but the person who knows how to sell their work, as sad as this is.
There's the "grass is always greener" phenomenon, too. Companies are struggling to figure out the next step, so they hire an exec from some other org that's equally struggling but looks shiny from the outside.
Another pattern I see a lot in the tech world is people who jump up the corporate ladder quickly by jumping from the tech side of companies in some industry, e.g., widget-making, to working at tech companies trying to sell software to the widget industry to startups convinced they can use AI to make better, cheaper widgets and then back to some big widget company that just put out a press release saying they're really a tech company that happens to produce widgets. The widget people figure the exec knows tech, the tech people figure they know widgets.
Well, it's also the people still on the ladder are the ones that aren't smart enough to realize there's diminishing returns on personal wealth and a diminishing supply of personal time.
In less than two years I went from my second job out of college to being offered to come up with any role for myself in a 10B cap company in order to retain me as I was getting bored, and after a night's sleep I came back and gave my notice.
The person that offered that position later turned down an offer for CEO of a 100B+ company for similar reasons.
There absolutely are people out there that shoot up the ladder based on skill. But when the people holding the ladder don't realize at a certain point time is worth more than any amount of additional money, it's hard to keep those that do realize it from jumping off.
The problem with filling the C-level positions isn't just that good candidates are obscured by founder Dunning-Kreuger, it's that generally the pool of candidates is going to be biased towards people echoing the BS toxic work culture that is the startup world, and the good candidates are going to have grown past participating in that charade.
WFH and changing attitudes about work life balance may reduce achiever churn moving forward, but I still see the "I'm so busy" posturing with C-levels and their wannabes here and there when I still have to interact with them, so I doubt it's going away soon.
Yes there can be diminishing returns on time, but C-suite positions are almost always on the declining side of time taken to do their jobs across their careers.
The C-suite of a 100B+ company shouldn't be spending more than a few hours a day really working hard. Compare that to something like a staff engineer who's become the lynchpin for more layers of their engineering org than anyone could ever list.
In fact I'd almost say no one has their WLB respected as much as people in the C-suite. Who's time in the entire org is considered more valuable?
And who has more autonomy to define that WLB to begin with? The chair isn't going to complain because the CEO left at 3pm to catch his kid's baseball game...
IMHO for start-up to hire a C-level manager the best way is to look at VP / director level at a large company, preferably director level. If a start-up looks for a VP look at senior manager / director level. Basically hire people from large, established companies that a re currently at least 2 level below the senior position you are looking for. Those people are high enough to bring the seniority and low enough to still, maybe, do some of the actual work. Select from this population for the ability to cope with non-existing structures, be hands on themselves and the ability to calmly guide an organization.
The last thing you want is those career politicians that tend to climb the corporate ladder and rely on others to actual do the work.
Work is a type of performance art. Bosses pay to see you suffer. And if you do not act like you are suffering enough, more work will be added to your desk for proper amount of suffering.
I’ve experienced that it suffices to give constant updates on things I’ve shipped and where I’m stuck. In meetings, I regularly give a short show and tell of what I’ve built. So far, that has worked out well.
Using a display of suffering as virtue signal sounds not like a recipe for an uplifting workplace.
I believe that if I tried playing the game, I'd make a pretty good CTO. But as PG is aluding to, there are a lot of really talented people out there (including myself) who hate playing the politic/self-promotion game. For small startups, you can be an effective C level player while avoiding these "soft skills" but the bigger the org the more important these skills get. Avoiding the game, or worse: playing it badly, can kill a startup. I think this is why a lot of founders struggle as their org grows.
It’s a different skill set. When companies are small, advancing the agenda is the most important thing. As companies get bigger “advancing the agenda without pushing anyone off” is what’s important.
When companies get huge, the balance gets lopsided. So many people have explicit or implicit veto power that the “don’t piss anyone off” becomes more important than getting things done. And that’s why you see execs failing forward with content-free messages of glorious buzzwords. It’s also why it’s very dangerous to hire Big Company execs into a startup where it’s still important to advance the agenda.
A good CTO lives and dies on "soft skills". At two places I've been I've seen competent engineers with solid technical pedigree brought in as CTO and completely flounder since, for whatever reason, they could not get the managers below them to execute his (in my opinion very sensible) plans.
> [...]C-level executives have mastered the art of sounding good with minimal set of accomplishments
I mean, they get hired to do the same for the company (internally to potential and current employees, and externally to partners and financiers). The ability to sell is a crucial skill in the C-suite: it's no wonder they can sell themselves.
The CEO is the greatest salesman of the company. So they better excel at selling snake oil. There are positions for technical people, CEO is not one of them.
People believing their own hype are the worst. As a sibling pointed out, the CEO is the main sales person. that's fine, unless all the CEO and the company is doing is selling some vision. That approach might have worked in the past, it seems to work a lot less lately. Especially when it comes to investors, as those are the main buyers of these visions. Actual product is secondary in a lot of cases. At those places that manage to do both, like flexport (just to mention one that came to mind), great thongs are done. At those other places, not so much...
The people doing good work are too busy doing working and increasing related skills that they have no time to improve their skills in selling themselves.
Those without skills have nothing to do other than sell themselves so that is what they get good at.
I'm very mixed on this as I agree a lot of C-Levels mostly have mastered the art of selling themselves and I find most announcements of new C-Levels in my company to just be a waste of an email and likely salary.
But your last part strikes me as falling to a common misconception that climbing up the corporate ladder from inside is best done based on merit, as leadership is not always compatible with the actual work being done at the lower levels.
C-Level leadership tends to be more about company growth and being able to understand which parts of the company do need to change/evolve to reach that next level, sometimes with hard decisions. I've gone up the ladder like this from a very low level to a few reports away from the CEO and definitely it changes your perspective a bit on how you approach things.
The simplest example is realizing you have a lot more decision power over how you interact with your customer base, and options like "we simply won't support this" are a viable option when before you didn't have such options. How you allocate your people towards projects becomes far different when you introduce a new product/feature, and so on. It becomes a lot less about the minutia of the day to day work and instead about the long-term sustainability and health of the people and the company. Learning to take in a larger scope of understanding is not easy and not everyone naturally learns it, yet many companies still follow the time-based seniority model or promoting to leadership persons who really don't have basic leadership qualities.
You also have to consider your top people and how to evolve your strategy without ostracizing them or causing disinterest; too much workload on your top-tier team members and you'll start to bleed such people. Same with adding in too many things not related to their interests. Ideally, in such a high level position you're listening closely to the feedback from the lower managers and making decisions that try to balance both aspects and pushing only on situations where the growth is very essential, but there in is the catch: how can you know what is essential until you try it and see the result? What worked for one company doesn't work for another as no matter how similar the product/services might be. I've seen this happen tons of times with support and RND teams that were basically modified to include professional services aspects which is not what any of those people signed up for, and there was a huge exodus. The justification was that the C-Level who made the call had success with this at another company X, but the scope of what had to be managed was far more narrow at X and the client base with a support package was significantly smaller. The results at X were undeniable, but the conditions under which such a change were effective were quite different, and the C-Level just failed (refused?) to recognize this.
Leadership is very hard to grow properly, and personally I'm of the opinion that people who seek leadership are to be treated sceptically, as it's something that grows with familiarity and organically, not in a classroom. The Classroom helps with the fundamental skills (statistics, financial studies, etc), but my personal observation is that what gets lost in these classes is that such knowledge then needs to be heavily customized to the environment you're in. It doesn't really matter how many tools you have for leadership if you're using the tools incorrectly.
I worked for a large, late stage, Softbank backed company. They brought in some C-suite execs while I was there. A CTO paid several million annually with large, public company experience. They were totally clueless, and the engineering org was almost revolting within 6 months, trying to stage a coup to the CEO. No technical experience, no leadership, installing cronies, speaking in opaque platitudes.
I'm not angry about it, though they did oversee us being on the cusp of a promising IPO to a pretty bad outcome that cost me a lot of money, but I'll say that any illusion that you have to be competent to be a C-suite exec, and any imposter syndrome I ever had, went out the window after that. Ironically it increased my personal confidence, if these idiots can do it I certainly can.
I think the old saying "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" kinda applies to some execs maybe, like nobody gets fired for hiring some stellar resume exec with lots of experience, but they may get fired for taking a chance on an upstart.
This company has uniquely terrible CEO leadership who systematically have a track record of very poorly choosing senior leadership, recklessly changing the culture and doing zero to curate innovation, people development.
All of the talent left, mostly to direct competitors who will now be super charged to annihilate them.
This May one day become one of the saddest case studies, along with how Intel has shaped up, but the damage is going to show up everywhere for years to come.
Having burned very significant energy at this company, I am deeply sad to see the most garbage humans left in charge and also deeply glad to see the talented people effusion to great roles where they will mop the floor with this company.
The interesting thing about that company is how badly it failed at filling executive roles with promotions from within OR experienced hands.
Fundamentally, the CTO failed because in their previous success, they built it from the ground-up. They had zero experience trying to take over a large org, came in like a bull in a china shop, and worst of all, made a lot of very costly, morale-destroying mistakes.
But see also the Chief Product Officer who left in disgrace or the quasi-COO who also left in disgrace. They were both promoted from within well past their level of proven competence.
The common thread? The CEO who made all of those decisions. Executive hiring requires a CEO with the ability to reflect on their personal shortcomings and those of the team. And then, they need the ability to attract and evaluate candidates. And even if they do that successfully, they need the ability to meld a group of these execs into a highly functional team.
Our CEO only had the ability to hire people he saw as junior versions of himself.
I joke. I probably wouldn't have called us "large", but otherwise your story matches my experience word-for-word, which says something about the industry...
That's because you shouldn't hire them but you should grow them internally. Outside hires for executive positions are usually a great way to de-stabilize your company, early hires tend to be loyal to the founders and if you then hire some 'suit' to sit between them and you you risk them breaking off.
So the solution to this problem is to ensure that your early hires are all top notch with the potential to eventually build out to become your C-suite, and to treat them as generously as you can when it comes to equity.
And if you're really smart you stick to that mantra: hire quality over quantity, it will allow you to push back the typical organizational struggles until you've achieved an order of magnitude or more in revenues (assuming product market fit).
It’s insane how many don’t realize this when it’s so obvious. Seen so many big shot c-levels wander in from Amazon, Microsoft and the like, institute some changes to make a mark and hit promises they made coming on, then leave 8 months or under 2 years later with the thing they were in charge of in disarray only for another to roll in and do the same.
Company I work at was almost ran into the ground until we fired all the c-levels for hire and empowered the top levels of individual contributors instead.
> ensure that your early hires are all top notch with the potential to eventually build out to become your C-suite
Are we talking about developer early hires, or sales, or whom?
The skills and character required to be a succesfull developer are totally different than whats needed for C level. Thr training required to get there is a lot. Finding the right people and keeping them is hard enough.
But all means try to grow them internally and probide training, but as a 'solution' it is not realistic.
> The skills and character required to be a succesfull developer are totally different than whats needed for C level.
The skills required to be a Lead and/or Principal developer seem to overlap quite a bit with those that an executive needs.
I’m sure there must be some, but I certainly haven’t noticed any extra skills in the executives I’ve met except a larger willingness to compromise and do things that are globally suboptimal (e.g. bad for the company in the long run, but good in the short one).
> The skills and character required to be a succesfull developer are totally different than whats needed for C level.
I would disagree. Hiring for a small company/startup typically leans towards people with a breadth of skills. You need the first set of engineers to be thinking about the product and the business in addition to how to build something. Good leaders will also emerge from those early hires, otherwise the company will struggle to grow. Those early hires are often well suited to eventually move into executive roles.
I think the bigger issue is whether the early engineers want to stop coding and be in management where their primary job is hiring, strategy, and sales (everyone sells all the time in a small/medium sized company).
Takeovers and special circumstances aside, "promote, don't hire externally" should be way more common and the prefered approach (imo).
I think there's a three question protocol that should work reasonably well.
Q1: Do we actually need this CxO role?
Q2: Who will report to this CxO?
Q3: Why can't we promote from the pool from the answer to Q2 instead of hireing externally?
If someone is already handling the functions of the CxO role internally and doing it well, they should be considered as a forerunner for the position.
Anyone hired externally must be expected to meet a substantially higher bar than the existing employees. Bringing in an external CxO who is less qualified than internal candidates will destroy morale and lead to attrition.
However, there’s a lot to be said for bringing in an external CxO who can take the team and the company to the next level.
A CxO role is quite different than a traditional manager role. You can’t expect good managers to automatically be good C-level executives because the work is just too different. It’s the same story as promoting ICs to managers - Different responsibilities and different skill sets.
But internal employees should always at least be considered and given a fair shot.
Eric Schmidt was a great example of bringing in outside help to take the company to the next level.
Sheryl Sandberg is another example, probably more famous mostly because I think Schmidt almost seemed like he was a founder whereas Sheryl’s story is always about coming in as the Adult to be #2.
Where the CxO role interfaces a lot with external parties is where an external hire often is better suited because they have prior experience dealing with external facets of their roles. An internal person in Finance may not have the requisite experience regarding dealing with public company reporting requirements, for example.
You’re very right on the bar. They have to be so clearly better (in reality as well as resume) that they can move skeptics from the bias of “I could do the job better” to “I can learn from them.”
Well one of the problems is that you're often hiring a CxO to bring characteristics of a bigger company to your smaller company as it grows. For example, if you have a haphazardly grown sales team doing about $10 million in revenue, you might want to bring in someone who has been a Director in a $100m sales org to be your Chief Revenue Officer to bring some of the sales force management and compensation practices that you need to develop as your sales team gets bigger. There's nobody in your organization who really knows that.
I must disagree. What I have seen is what you are saying enables bad internal culture, decision making and technical habits to become more ingrained into the very soul of the company.
I see well meaning senior technical people disregard my advice on technical matters because that's just not how things are done there ever, some things are so far out of the box they can't even conceive of it as a possibility. Manager after manager telling you the same answer because that's what whoever they ask about tells them because everyone at that dept/company is 15+yr tenured.
If you want to keep things as they are but maybe slightly better or to make different internal people happy you promote from within. If you want fresh thinking and new directions you gotta hire from the outside.
I can't emphasize this enough. The only analogy that comes to mind is eskimos that have to traverse a desert but only want other eskimos in their team.
If we are going to go to extremes to illustrate the disadvantages then let me point out what happens with the opposite.
When you choose to hire outside for every single leadership position especially senior ones you send the message to the people that their effort and sacrifice is not appreciated and you don't trust and that they won't be growing with the company.
The people who built the company then get disaffected and leave, eventually no one is committed and things go to hell because there is no loyalty or personal interest.
> Q3: Why can't we promote from the pool from the answer to Q2 instead of hiring externally?
To offer a few potential answers:
* Because the existing company culture is not conducive to taking a step forward, and you intentionally want to bring in outside ideas (e.g., bigger-company experience).
* Because the people who are the answer to Q2 don't get along all that well, or are worried about their individual career paths, and promoting one of them above the others will make them upset in the short term.
* Along the same lines - because you don't trust the people from Q2 to level up and handle the full scope, and will instead always favor "their" organization.
Anecdotally, I've observed that man CxO roles are created at the behest of the board or to acquire prestige for some purpose. It would not surprise me that it's easy to find highly successful people who will trade Prestige for money and WLB after a certain point in their career.
Promoting internally won't buy your firm more prestige/credibility.
Spoke to the founder / CEO of a wildly successful now-public (former startup) company about his exec-level hires. He confided that 1/3 of executives were net positive (i.e. should retain), 1/3 were net neutral (i.e. should be fired) and 1/3 were net negative (i.e. separate ASAP!).
Gentleman also indicated that his peers on similar trajectories were even less successful at exec hiring. So there's a point of anecdata for you: "Good" at exec hiring might just be a 33% success rate. YMMV.
That seems unsurprising. It reminds me of that bit from one of Ben Horowitz's old articles [1]:
> Things go wrong, because building a multi-faceted human organization to compete and win in a dynamic, highly competitive market turns out to be really hard. If CEOs were graded on a curve, the mean on the test would be 22 out of a 100. This kind of mean can be psychologically challenging for a straight A student. It is particularly challenging, because nobody tells you that the mean is 22.
This reminds me of how one of the most disorienting feelings is when you've taken five steps on a journey of self-improvement. Miles ahead in the distance, you see your inspirations. Looking back, you see that those first five steps already put you in the 99.95th percentile of all humanity.
I think a lot of people fall for this kind of fallacy (no offense meant to your acquaintance).
1/ You really cannot grade absolute values on a curve. As others have pointed out, your A players are only in comparison to others in your team. Maybe they are actually C players, who knows? Maybe they are A players only in the environment you created etc, etc..
2/ And a more important point is that a lot of work is being done by people that are not A players. Whom I would call net positive is only in relationship to what I can measure. I know of many people in my team who were not exceptional at software, but got things done due to building relationship with other teams, ability to see things to completion etc. I think Amazon fell into the trap that only type A personalities get things done and I see it in other places too. It is easy to see the extremes, but a lot of times the glue that holds things together is almost invisible.
It is hard to gauge value and I personally am refusing to judge anyone (to the extent possible).
Projecting the exec's effectiveness onto the exec (e.g. "A/B/C Player") is woefully unfair, and my acquaintance & I would never intentionally suggest otherwise. Their effectiveness (positive, neutral, negative) is determined by a great many factors outside the individuals control -- e.g. company's size, growth rate, org structure, personnel, industry, etc.
The exec's success or failure isn't an indictment of their abilities, just that they're (in)effective in this organization at this particular moment in time. It's on the founders / CEO to recognize this, manage expectations, continuously communicate, and ultimately to force a transition if necessary. Luckily, most execs know the score. This is also why exec's have such generous exit packages: both parties can admit they made a mistake & separate amicably.
I would say this is true of almost any position. Ask any manager and they will probably say this is usually how it shakes out. 33 percent of hires are A players, 33 percent are B players, and 33 percent are C/D/F players.
It is grading on the curve. An A player at one company might be a B player at another. If someone is an excellent CxO they are probably a good candidate for a bigger and better company or the CEO job somewhere else and so will leave after some time unless given large incentive to stay or otherwise have reached their career ambitions.
Thing is, in many job positions "A players" add a lot of value, "B players" add reasonable value, and "C players" still do some useful work, it's only D- that are worthless.
However, for CxOs the dynamic is as the grandparent post mentioned, that mediocre CEOs add trivial value and the weak CEOs are actively harmful; so the expected tolerance to B-players should be quite different.
It's like any employee, vitality curve and all. The top 10-20% are responsible for 90-80% of positive results and the bottom vice versa while everyone in betweek keeps the boat afloat.
As long as you can identify which are which quickly and action then 33% hit rate can stack your roster pretty quick. Hiring takes time though, in most cases.
It also takes time to see results: the higher up the ladder, the more the work is second or third order effects which take time to show up.
If I hire someone to be a JS grunt, I’ll know very quickly if they can make a CRUD form because their job is to produce tangible assets which are immediately usable. In all but the most extreme cases, it takes months to years to tell whether a C-level hire is making good decisions, policies, hires, etc. and repairing the damage can be a substantial amount of work in its own right.
Sounds simple, but C suite executives have a high profile, high turnover at the C suite can spook the board, investors, etc. you don’t want too much turnover.
Hiring takes time and not having people in roles can be worse than a mediocre performer and sometimes worse than a bad performer who generally gets the job done.
usually there are lawyers involved when hiring a c-suite and there are negotiations and contingencies. if you fire a c-suite you might have to send them off with a lot of cash and/or legal fees. it might even cause a little stir in the public image and hurt the stock or investor perception. It might be cheaper or less of a headache to just work around them.
one of the better scenarios is to have a candid, open conversation about their offramp and give them a couple quarters to find a good spot somewhere else and then they "resign".
I think there’s all kinds of problems that intersect to create the problems we see with these hires:
- founders, especially first time founders, often have middling experience hiring for any role, and zero experience hiring execs.
- the absolute best execs often have no shortage of offers, and hence it can be quite hard to identify and attract these people
- founders often don’t want to pay what the really good execs are worth. Not that I’m even “really good”, but there’s a number of startups where I’ve been recruited because things are a disaster, can’t figure out how to scale the business, etc etc, and then after speaking with everyone they turn around and offer half a percent of the company, and act like they’re being generous.
- founders want to hire someone who’s the right person for the long haul, because of all of the above pains - except that those people often are accustomed to two stages ahead of where the company is now and may not be prepared for what’s required right now
And then, sure, there are the people who have failed up enough, or gotten lucky enough to win the startup lottery, and then coasted from there.
But look at it this other way - 50% of engineers are in the bottom half in skill and talent. It’s just that you do your best to optimize for the upper half, and since you’re hiring lots of them, you trust in the numbers to pay off for you. When you are hiring one, and just one, head of sales - the margin of error is really thin.
I guess you comment as an exec but this comment does not help make the case. Without being an engineer myself, I would be very frustrated with the last paragraph. It uses a statistically true fact to make a meaningless argument (how is optimising for top 50% different to e.g. optimising for bottom 50%?). Furthermore it demonstrates a view of a team of engineers as a bag of individual contributors. In a team, skill and talent are only one factor in optimising team dynamics. You don’t trust in numbers, you trust in dynamics and collaboration and in people growing within your organisation. I recently hired a PhD and a bored junior admin whose most exciting piece of work was scripting his boring work away at the same day. Also to your core intended argument, you hire an engineer in a couple of interviews, an exec would go through an extensive round of meetings and interviews and therefore you would optimise the process across different dimensions. The margin of error should be pretty similar, given fundamentally organisations have an underlying risk appetite even if it is implicit. The issue is that execs have more experience manipulating your perception of risk and therefore you should go with your eyes open, because this is part of the skillset you are probably looking for anyway.
Be careful of misaligned incentives though. A PE invested in a company (not a software company) I worked with recently, the PE placed execs and those execs proceeded to:
- professionalize the company by switching everything to SAP and outsourcing all IT to India (and from our interaction with that company in India, they didn't chose a very good company)
- increase revenue in the sort term by devaluing the brand
- lower the quality of products through cost saving
As a result after 2 years, the company sold to one of its long term partner for double the price of the valuation the PE invested in. Since the increase of revenue was done though temporarily dumping inferior products, the revenue is now slightly below the levels before the PE investment.
Customers loved the company before and would evangelize for their products. Now it's no longer the case, a lot of customers have turned on it and openly criticize it. And most of the execs the PE brought in were either fired by the new acquirer or resigned to move on to new opportunities.
So, were the execs the PE brought in bad hires? No, they succeeded in the PEs objectives. Were they good for the company? Not in the long term but, in the short term, they helped the founder get a very good exit (although the founder is pissed because it taints his legacy).
Can we turn it around and ask what we actually want from a (good) C-level. Cos I suspect it's not what most of us imagine.
At some point what we want from C-level is putting in place (bespoke) systems that achieve the "strategic" goals -
Is the monthly churn growing? Are you not able to get high touch sales to take off? Is the European product not ready?
All of those are the sort of "strategic" things people tend to hire CxOs for - but any good analyst can get you 80% of the way to identifying the problems, and then you have to pick a solution. At that point you are hiring someone for a very specific job with a clear roadmap. Maybe you can hire internally ?
Edit: on the other hand this article (from the frontpage) is an excellent example of hiring for a job, even though the person doing it is not going to be building the ditches etc. Walt hired for experience and focus on the job he wanted done. And as that job was going to have to be a negotiation with all the other agents building the park, he needed a high level advocate for the job (minimalmmosquitoes) he wanted
From this I suggest that hiring a CxO is hiring a person to act as advocate for the outcome you are hiring them for - very similar to politics
This is sort of the discussion I wanted to hear from this thread. What separates a a product manager paired with a data analyst from say, a CEO or CPO (product)? Surely the PM and DS are better armed to make decisions with data and talking to users, etc.
In big orgs it’s making decisions based on the totality of the business, not if we should spend $X on ads to grow revenue 50%.
If any company is being honest with itself, there are more good ideas than time or money.
A good CEO sets a course for the company, and most importantly gets everyone on board then relentlessly squashes distractions and basically clears the way for everyone to actually do their job.
CEOs need business sense, but as you said, the people who know the details report to the CEO. At the heart of it, the CEO is a salesperson and people manager.
Henrique De Castro's hiring and firing at Yahoo is one of my best examples of this. But $60 million for a year and change of work sure is a great way to fail!
Readit News
It's not the person who does excellent work that gets promoted or climb up the corporate ladder, but the person who knows how to sell their work, as sad as this is.
Another pattern I see a lot in the tech world is people who jump up the corporate ladder quickly by jumping from the tech side of companies in some industry, e.g., widget-making, to working at tech companies trying to sell software to the widget industry to startups convinced they can use AI to make better, cheaper widgets and then back to some big widget company that just put out a press release saying they're really a tech company that happens to produce widgets. The widget people figure the exec knows tech, the tech people figure they know widgets.
In less than two years I went from my second job out of college to being offered to come up with any role for myself in a 10B cap company in order to retain me as I was getting bored, and after a night's sleep I came back and gave my notice.
The person that offered that position later turned down an offer for CEO of a 100B+ company for similar reasons.
There absolutely are people out there that shoot up the ladder based on skill. But when the people holding the ladder don't realize at a certain point time is worth more than any amount of additional money, it's hard to keep those that do realize it from jumping off.
The problem with filling the C-level positions isn't just that good candidates are obscured by founder Dunning-Kreuger, it's that generally the pool of candidates is going to be biased towards people echoing the BS toxic work culture that is the startup world, and the good candidates are going to have grown past participating in that charade.
WFH and changing attitudes about work life balance may reduce achiever churn moving forward, but I still see the "I'm so busy" posturing with C-levels and their wannabes here and there when I still have to interact with them, so I doubt it's going away soon.
Yes there can be diminishing returns on time, but C-suite positions are almost always on the declining side of time taken to do their jobs across their careers.
The C-suite of a 100B+ company shouldn't be spending more than a few hours a day really working hard. Compare that to something like a staff engineer who's become the lynchpin for more layers of their engineering org than anyone could ever list.
In fact I'd almost say no one has their WLB respected as much as people in the C-suite. Who's time in the entire org is considered more valuable?
And who has more autonomy to define that WLB to begin with? The chair isn't going to complain because the CEO left at 3pm to catch his kid's baseball game...
The last thing you want is those career politicians that tend to climb the corporate ladder and rely on others to actual do the work.
If they actually do this it’s fine. It’s when they think they need to give input instead of steer the ship that things go downhill.
Using a display of suffering as virtue signal sounds not like a recipe for an uplifting workplace.
When companies get huge, the balance gets lopsided. So many people have explicit or implicit veto power that the “don’t piss anyone off” becomes more important than getting things done. And that’s why you see execs failing forward with content-free messages of glorious buzzwords. It’s also why it’s very dangerous to hire Big Company execs into a startup where it’s still important to advance the agenda.
I mean, they get hired to do the same for the company (internally to potential and current employees, and externally to partners and financiers). The ability to sell is a crucial skill in the C-suite: it's no wonder they can sell themselves.
You always need references, and those references need to be trustable.
And very often: how to sell the work of others
But your last part strikes me as falling to a common misconception that climbing up the corporate ladder from inside is best done based on merit, as leadership is not always compatible with the actual work being done at the lower levels.
C-Level leadership tends to be more about company growth and being able to understand which parts of the company do need to change/evolve to reach that next level, sometimes with hard decisions. I've gone up the ladder like this from a very low level to a few reports away from the CEO and definitely it changes your perspective a bit on how you approach things.
The simplest example is realizing you have a lot more decision power over how you interact with your customer base, and options like "we simply won't support this" are a viable option when before you didn't have such options. How you allocate your people towards projects becomes far different when you introduce a new product/feature, and so on. It becomes a lot less about the minutia of the day to day work and instead about the long-term sustainability and health of the people and the company. Learning to take in a larger scope of understanding is not easy and not everyone naturally learns it, yet many companies still follow the time-based seniority model or promoting to leadership persons who really don't have basic leadership qualities.
You also have to consider your top people and how to evolve your strategy without ostracizing them or causing disinterest; too much workload on your top-tier team members and you'll start to bleed such people. Same with adding in too many things not related to their interests. Ideally, in such a high level position you're listening closely to the feedback from the lower managers and making decisions that try to balance both aspects and pushing only on situations where the growth is very essential, but there in is the catch: how can you know what is essential until you try it and see the result? What worked for one company doesn't work for another as no matter how similar the product/services might be. I've seen this happen tons of times with support and RND teams that were basically modified to include professional services aspects which is not what any of those people signed up for, and there was a huge exodus. The justification was that the C-Level who made the call had success with this at another company X, but the scope of what had to be managed was far more narrow at X and the client base with a support package was significantly smaller. The results at X were undeniable, but the conditions under which such a change were effective were quite different, and the C-Level just failed (refused?) to recognize this.
Leadership is very hard to grow properly, and personally I'm of the opinion that people who seek leadership are to be treated sceptically, as it's something that grows with familiarity and organically, not in a classroom. The Classroom helps with the fundamental skills (statistics, financial studies, etc), but my personal observation is that what gets lost in these classes is that such knowledge then needs to be heavily customized to the environment you're in. It doesn't really matter how many tools you have for leadership if you're using the tools incorrectly.
I'm not angry about it, though they did oversee us being on the cusp of a promising IPO to a pretty bad outcome that cost me a lot of money, but I'll say that any illusion that you have to be competent to be a C-suite exec, and any imposter syndrome I ever had, went out the window after that. Ironically it increased my personal confidence, if these idiots can do it I certainly can.
I think the old saying "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" kinda applies to some execs maybe, like nobody gets fired for hiring some stellar resume exec with lots of experience, but they may get fired for taking a chance on an upstart.
This company has uniquely terrible CEO leadership who systematically have a track record of very poorly choosing senior leadership, recklessly changing the culture and doing zero to curate innovation, people development.
All of the talent left, mostly to direct competitors who will now be super charged to annihilate them.
This May one day become one of the saddest case studies, along with how Intel has shaped up, but the damage is going to show up everywhere for years to come.
Having burned very significant energy at this company, I am deeply sad to see the most garbage humans left in charge and also deeply glad to see the talented people effusion to great roles where they will mop the floor with this company.
The interesting thing about that company is how badly it failed at filling executive roles with promotions from within OR experienced hands.
Fundamentally, the CTO failed because in their previous success, they built it from the ground-up. They had zero experience trying to take over a large org, came in like a bull in a china shop, and worst of all, made a lot of very costly, morale-destroying mistakes.
But see also the Chief Product Officer who left in disgrace or the quasi-COO who also left in disgrace. They were both promoted from within well past their level of proven competence.
The common thread? The CEO who made all of those decisions. Executive hiring requires a CEO with the ability to reflect on their personal shortcomings and those of the team. And then, they need the ability to attract and evaluate candidates. And even if they do that successfully, they need the ability to meld a group of these execs into a highly functional team.
Our CEO only had the ability to hire people he saw as junior versions of himself.
I joke. I probably wouldn't have called us "large", but otherwise your story matches my experience word-for-word, which says something about the industry...
Dead Comment
So the solution to this problem is to ensure that your early hires are all top notch with the potential to eventually build out to become your C-suite, and to treat them as generously as you can when it comes to equity.
And if you're really smart you stick to that mantra: hire quality over quantity, it will allow you to push back the typical organizational struggles until you've achieved an order of magnitude or more in revenues (assuming product market fit).
Company I work at was almost ran into the ground until we fired all the c-levels for hire and empowered the top levels of individual contributors instead.
Are we talking about developer early hires, or sales, or whom?
The skills and character required to be a succesfull developer are totally different than whats needed for C level. Thr training required to get there is a lot. Finding the right people and keeping them is hard enough.
But all means try to grow them internally and probide training, but as a 'solution' it is not realistic.
The skills required to be a Lead and/or Principal developer seem to overlap quite a bit with those that an executive needs.
I’m sure there must be some, but I certainly haven’t noticed any extra skills in the executives I’ve met except a larger willingness to compromise and do things that are globally suboptimal (e.g. bad for the company in the long run, but good in the short one).
I would disagree. Hiring for a small company/startup typically leans towards people with a breadth of skills. You need the first set of engineers to be thinking about the product and the business in addition to how to build something. Good leaders will also emerge from those early hires, otherwise the company will struggle to grow. Those early hires are often well suited to eventually move into executive roles.
I think the bigger issue is whether the early engineers want to stop coding and be in management where their primary job is hiring, strategy, and sales (everyone sells all the time in a small/medium sized company).
Q1: Do we actually need this CxO role?
Q2: Who will report to this CxO?
Q3: Why can't we promote from the pool from the answer to Q2 instead of hireing externally?
Anyone hired externally must be expected to meet a substantially higher bar than the existing employees. Bringing in an external CxO who is less qualified than internal candidates will destroy morale and lead to attrition.
However, there’s a lot to be said for bringing in an external CxO who can take the team and the company to the next level.
A CxO role is quite different than a traditional manager role. You can’t expect good managers to automatically be good C-level executives because the work is just too different. It’s the same story as promoting ICs to managers - Different responsibilities and different skill sets.
But internal employees should always at least be considered and given a fair shot.
Sheryl Sandberg is another example, probably more famous mostly because I think Schmidt almost seemed like he was a founder whereas Sheryl’s story is always about coming in as the Adult to be #2.
I see well meaning senior technical people disregard my advice on technical matters because that's just not how things are done there ever, some things are so far out of the box they can't even conceive of it as a possibility. Manager after manager telling you the same answer because that's what whoever they ask about tells them because everyone at that dept/company is 15+yr tenured.
If you want to keep things as they are but maybe slightly better or to make different internal people happy you promote from within. If you want fresh thinking and new directions you gotta hire from the outside.
I can't emphasize this enough. The only analogy that comes to mind is eskimos that have to traverse a desert but only want other eskimos in their team.
When you choose to hire outside for every single leadership position especially senior ones you send the message to the people that their effort and sacrifice is not appreciated and you don't trust and that they won't be growing with the company.
The people who built the company then get disaffected and leave, eventually no one is committed and things go to hell because there is no loyalty or personal interest.
I suspect Eskimos would be extremely adept at traversing some desert environments! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_desert
(I kid, please don't hunt me down)
Another analogy is Eskimos crossing the tundra and the flashy new external-hire exec insisting on camels because that's missing off his resume...
To offer a few potential answers:
* Because the existing company culture is not conducive to taking a step forward, and you intentionally want to bring in outside ideas (e.g., bigger-company experience).
* Because the people who are the answer to Q2 don't get along all that well, or are worried about their individual career paths, and promoting one of them above the others will make them upset in the short term.
* Along the same lines - because you don't trust the people from Q2 to level up and handle the full scope, and will instead always favor "their" organization.
Promoting internally won't buy your firm more prestige/credibility.
Gentleman also indicated that his peers on similar trajectories were even less successful at exec hiring. So there's a point of anecdata for you: "Good" at exec hiring might just be a 33% success rate. YMMV.
> Things go wrong, because building a multi-faceted human organization to compete and win in a dynamic, highly competitive market turns out to be really hard. If CEOs were graded on a curve, the mean on the test would be 22 out of a 100. This kind of mean can be psychologically challenging for a straight A student. It is particularly challenging, because nobody tells you that the mean is 22.
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2011/03/31/what%e2%80%99s-the-most-di...
1/ You really cannot grade absolute values on a curve. As others have pointed out, your A players are only in comparison to others in your team. Maybe they are actually C players, who knows? Maybe they are A players only in the environment you created etc, etc..
2/ And a more important point is that a lot of work is being done by people that are not A players. Whom I would call net positive is only in relationship to what I can measure. I know of many people in my team who were not exceptional at software, but got things done due to building relationship with other teams, ability to see things to completion etc. I think Amazon fell into the trap that only type A personalities get things done and I see it in other places too. It is easy to see the extremes, but a lot of times the glue that holds things together is almost invisible.
It is hard to gauge value and I personally am refusing to judge anyone (to the extent possible).
The exec's success or failure isn't an indictment of their abilities, just that they're (in)effective in this organization at this particular moment in time. It's on the founders / CEO to recognize this, manage expectations, continuously communicate, and ultimately to force a transition if necessary. Luckily, most execs know the score. This is also why exec's have such generous exit packages: both parties can admit they made a mistake & separate amicably.
It is grading on the curve. An A player at one company might be a B player at another. If someone is an excellent CxO they are probably a good candidate for a bigger and better company or the CEO job somewhere else and so will leave after some time unless given large incentive to stay or otherwise have reached their career ambitions.
However, for CxOs the dynamic is as the grandparent post mentioned, that mediocre CEOs add trivial value and the weak CEOs are actively harmful; so the expected tolerance to B-players should be quite different.
If I hire someone to be a JS grunt, I’ll know very quickly if they can make a CRUD form because their job is to produce tangible assets which are immediately usable. In all but the most extreme cases, it takes months to years to tell whether a C-level hire is making good decisions, policies, hires, etc. and repairing the damage can be a substantial amount of work in its own right.
one of the better scenarios is to have a candid, open conversation about their offramp and give them a couple quarters to find a good spot somewhere else and then they "resign".
- founders, especially first time founders, often have middling experience hiring for any role, and zero experience hiring execs.
- the absolute best execs often have no shortage of offers, and hence it can be quite hard to identify and attract these people
- founders often don’t want to pay what the really good execs are worth. Not that I’m even “really good”, but there’s a number of startups where I’ve been recruited because things are a disaster, can’t figure out how to scale the business, etc etc, and then after speaking with everyone they turn around and offer half a percent of the company, and act like they’re being generous.
- founders want to hire someone who’s the right person for the long haul, because of all of the above pains - except that those people often are accustomed to two stages ahead of where the company is now and may not be prepared for what’s required right now
And then, sure, there are the people who have failed up enough, or gotten lucky enough to win the startup lottery, and then coasted from there.
But look at it this other way - 50% of engineers are in the bottom half in skill and talent. It’s just that you do your best to optimize for the upper half, and since you’re hiring lots of them, you trust in the numbers to pay off for you. When you are hiring one, and just one, head of sales - the margin of error is really thin.
These seem like (and this one especially) exactly the sort of problems a VC would be positioned to help solve.
So I wish PG would give advice instead of just complaining about bad execs here.
As a result after 2 years, the company sold to one of its long term partner for double the price of the valuation the PE invested in. Since the increase of revenue was done though temporarily dumping inferior products, the revenue is now slightly below the levels before the PE investment.
Customers loved the company before and would evangelize for their products. Now it's no longer the case, a lot of customers have turned on it and openly criticize it. And most of the execs the PE brought in were either fired by the new acquirer or resigned to move on to new opportunities.
So, were the execs the PE brought in bad hires? No, they succeeded in the PEs objectives. Were they good for the company? Not in the long term but, in the short term, they helped the founder get a very good exit (although the founder is pissed because it taints his legacy).
At some point what we want from C-level is putting in place (bespoke) systems that achieve the "strategic" goals -
Is the monthly churn growing? Are you not able to get high touch sales to take off? Is the European product not ready?
All of those are the sort of "strategic" things people tend to hire CxOs for - but any good analyst can get you 80% of the way to identifying the problems, and then you have to pick a solution. At that point you are hiring someone for a very specific job with a clear roadmap. Maybe you can hire internally ?
Edit: on the other hand this article (from the frontpage) is an excellent example of hiring for a job, even though the person doing it is not going to be building the ditches etc. Walt hired for experience and focus on the job he wanted done. And as that job was going to have to be a negotiation with all the other agents building the park, he needed a high level advocate for the job (minimalmmosquitoes) he wanted
From this I suggest that hiring a CxO is hiring a person to act as advocate for the outcome you are hiring them for - very similar to politics
https://mousetrack.co.uk/blog/mosquitoes-at-disney-why-do-yo...
If any company is being honest with itself, there are more good ideas than time or money.
A good CEO sets a course for the company, and most importantly gets everyone on board then relentlessly squashes distractions and basically clears the way for everyone to actually do their job.
CEOs need business sense, but as you said, the people who know the details report to the CEO. At the heart of it, the CEO is a salesperson and people manager.
https://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-coo-henrique-de-castro...