This article was written by Ken Leaver who comes from a product & commercial background. He has founded multiple companies and held senior product positions at SEA tech companies like Lazada and Pomelo Fashion.
Now Ken runs his own agency that helps early stage startups with content and traction called End Game.
Guest Author: Ken Leaver
I view that you want a culture where the best strategists thrive… and not the popularity contest winners
A friend and i fell onto this topic the other day when we were talking about cultures of the companies that we’d worked in across our careers.
And I shared my view that the worst cultures (which also just happened to be the worst performing companies in my career) were the ones where the culture led itself to being driven by ‘popularity’.
Popularity typically becomes the north star in a company when things move very slowly and there is a lot of bureaucracy.
In such a situation it is hard to really decipher a single person’s contributions/results because not that much progresses. And there are so many dependencies that slow everyone down.
So instead what i’ve generally seen in such situations is that popularity becomes the north star. Fueled by popular HR tools like 360 feedbacks, etc.
But in a company that is struggling to get product market fit and become a viable business… my consistent experience is that you want to avoid this type of culture at all costs.
You need to actively seek and reward the ‘strategists’ regardless of whether they are popular or not.
Because these are the folks that are going to think more three dimensionally at the complex set of problems the company is facing and are more likely to come up with creative/innovative solutions.
This is one of the primary things I think founders should think about when hiring their initial management team… regardless of their position.
Am i hiring a CTO? Or perhaps a Head of HR?
Doesn’t matter in my view.. the questions are still the same:
Is this person a strategist?
Can they outthink me?
Or are they more oriented around becoming popular among their team?
This single factor has probably correlated more with success in the companies i’ve seen the past couple decades than any other.
