I keep track of how many people I hire and how many people I fire each year. This is not a department KPI but a personal one, an indicator of whether it was a good or bad year at work. Related personal KPIs are: number of meals ordered on Seamless; number of social plans cancelled; number of times I cried or yelled during a meeting. My income usually trends in the other direction-- I have more leverage in bad years and I tend to increase my scope.
I am going to get my ass handed to me in a board meeting in a couple of weeks for hiring too slow this quarter and it’s too late to change the outcome so I’m reaching out to people in my network to get advice on how to take this one on the chin. I think I can do it without getting defensive. I want to be the type of leader who can handle it without getting defensive. Something in the market changed very slowly and then all at once and this is shaping up to be a very good year at work and I’m not sure I have the tool kit for that. Yet.
On Friday I took the high performer I took a chance on six months ago, and who I’ve tasked with recruiting way too many roles this quarter, to the spa-- an apology after the company hike she planned got cancelled at the last minute because our sales team is on fire (in a good way). She asked me about my work history, not-so-secretly the most interesting thing about me-- the string of weird jobs and weird bosses and weird situations I’ve woven together over the past 15 years. I don’t even tell her the craziest stuff. I do tell her this one is shaping up to be one for the memoir.
I am very conscious of how many people I have looking to me to tell them what to do right now. I am trying to be very transparent that I am making this up as I go along because I know everyone else is, and it seems like we might as well be open about that. We just elected a 34 year old social media manager as CEO of the greatest city in the world and god I hope he figures it out because we really, really need him to. If no one actually has a playbook for anything anymore, maybe we should start throwing things out the window.
