Tips for Twits

Recently I took over the portfolio of our HR manager. Now, I can fully understand her pain. Thanks B, for putting up with all our complaints.

There’s a lot challenges when it comes to managing talent. The first of which is in attracting people to take note of Savant Degrees through all that noise. Everyone wants a rock star programmer, ninja coder or some other similar oxy-moronic titles.

So when I re looked at our previous job descriptions and studied the many others out there, I had an epiphany.

Instead of doing anything, I took a step back and I decided to spend time to talking to great engineers and hires. As I interact with them, I realized these are the people with skills and passion; and you immediately know they can do anything, anywhere.

From then on, I come to believe it’s not about what the company is doing, it is the raison d’être (reason for existence in French and I can’t find a better phrase) of a company that attracts people.

A similar parallel in marketing can be seen in the following clip many decades ago by Steve Jobs. It’s not about the how fast the processor is, how much ram it has or how big the HDD is. It is in what the company believes. The WHY instead of the what or how (Simon Sinek). In this case for Apple, it’s “Think Different”

An engineer with great skills can excel in any company that sells phones, laptops and music players. It can be LG, Samsung, Sony or Apple. It doesn’t matter. What matters is they believe in the vision of the company.

I tried a little experiment (I will probably talk about it another time) and we had a surge in number of applicants in a less than month. Interestingly, there were many who didn’t know what they can do in the Savant Degrees but they want to be in the company anyway. I guess this is a minor success but it got me excited to continue in this role.

Gary and I was in a sales and management class and we were sitting on the same table as a late 30 to 40ish entrepreneur, Greg. When we first introduced ourselves as product managers and designers, he could barely wait for us, these couple 20ish year old kids, to finish our introduction.

Into the class, we worked on a short assignment about selling a product and he went into details into talking about the features instead of higher order benefits. From the start, he was so sure he was to be the one representing the team. He was insistence about his answers. It was obviously wrong in this context and I could see his body language turned from confidence to hostility to frustration as Gary and I cogently put forward our points and the consultant trainer agreeing with us every step of the way.

It was clear that we turned him around and later he became more interested in what we do in Savant Degrees.

This incident had me thinking. When I’m his age, will I have the humility to listen and learn? I believe the only reason why we were able to grow so rapidly in the last few years is because we were like a sponge. We had to learn from everyone, including our peers, our clients, our mentors, our parents etc. Everyone has something to teach and we just need to listen.

I’m writing this now and in years to come, when I’m acting like Greg. Please forward me this.

The Greg Syndrome n. A condition where a person has an inability to learn through open discussion and listening due to pride, ego, seniority, age, expertise(lack of) or a combination of the following.