Trials, sport teams, and motivation 💡
Monday Ideas — Edition #121
1) 🤝 Consider trials for hiring
In our recent interview with Denis Yarats, CTO at Perplexity, Denis explained their unique hiring process, involving trial periods instead of traditional interviews.
This approach allows the company to assess candidates' skills and cultural fit in a real-world context. Candidates work on actual projects for a few weeks, giving both parties a chance to evaluate the potential for a long-term relationship.
This method is effective at avoiding false positives, and it dramatically lowers the cost of the hiring process, at the expense of cutting out some candidates for whom trial periods are not a good fit (i.e. they have another job and/or can’t work a lot out of hours).
We talked about the various modes to acquire tech talent today in this recent, thorough article 👇
2) 🎽 Is your team a family or a sports team?
One of the most famous Netflixisms, which got popular through the book No Rules Rules, is the idea of treating your company like a professional sports team — rather than a family.
Reed Hastings, former CEO at Netflix, says that family is about unconditional support, while professional players on sports teams are judged on results, and there is no shame in being let go or changing jerseys every now and then.
I have no objection to this — it makes sense and I am sure it works for Netflix, but is it the only way?
Bill Campbell, whose legendary coach career we reviewed a few months ago, went the extra mile to treat people on his team not just like family — like close family! He broke down the walls between human and professional personas and cared about teammates as human beings.
He argued that people who feel appreciated end up performing at their very best.
Ray Dailo, in his book Principles, shares so many ideas with No Rules Rules, but skews towards the team-as-family approach. He believes a strong bond makes employees feel like they work towards a shared mission, which in turn is better than any transactional employment agreement.
So, as with all true cultural topics, these are choices to be made, rather than absolute best practices.
Founders shape the culture they are most comfortable with (rightfully so!) and hire the type of people who go along with it.
No Rules Rules is a fantastic example of a strong, opinionated culture, which should give everybody plenty to reflect, agree, and disagree on.
3) 🔺 The Pyramid of Motivation
I believe team motivation builds on four key elements, which work together like layers of a pyramid: Psychological Safety, Communication, Alignment, Autonomy
Each level builds on top of the previous one, so you should address them in order.
So let’s talk about these layers one by one.
1) Psychological safety ❤️
I believe the foundation of any motivated team is people who feel safe to take risks, voice their opinions, and fail without fear of repercussions.
In my experience, here are the best way to foster this:
🌱 Encourage people to give feedback — especially to managers. If you are a manager, ask for feedback all the time from your reports; also because, if you don’t, chances are you will not receive it. When people are comfortable at giving feedback, they also become more receptive to the one they receive.
🔄 Hold regular retrospectives — and group feedback activities. Sharing and receiving feedback in a group is scary, but it’s also incredibly powerful. Mastering retrospectives gives your team superpowers. We also wrote a full piece about the.m
🙌 Sponsor people for challenging work — which means, things they don’t think they would be capable of. Push them a tiny bit beyond their comfort zone, and clarify that it’s ok if they fail. Make people used to taking on challenges.
2) Good communication 💬
Psychological safety creates a foundation of trust, which enables good communication.
To me, good communication is about three things:
🪟 Transparency — share everything, and for everything you share, share the why, and the why before the why. Share goals, plans, strategic choices, and what guided them. When people comprehend decisions and their motifs, they are more likely to be invested in the outcome.
⏱️ Frequency — share information regularly, both in 1:1 and team contexts. E.g. don’t just present OKRs once a quarter; grade them bi-weekly, share your concerns, opportunities, early reasoning about next quarter, and so on.
↔️ Bi-directionality (is this a real word?) — create avenues for team input and demonstrate how it influences decisions. Share top-down direction, and allow for bottom-up contribution. E.g. look at the W framework.
3) Alignment 🎯
Effective communication creates alignment. There are two versions of alignment that you should take care of:
⬆️ Alignment of actions to company goals — when engineers know how their work contributes to the bigger picture, they find purpose in their daily tasks. Their agency and creativity also increases, as they can autonomously find more actions that cater to the goals.
⬇️ Alignment of company goals to personal goals — for each individual, design a progression route that benefits both them and the company. Talk with them about their career and aspirations, and try to create a path which marries their individual progress with company impact.
4) Autonomy 🛠️
At the peak of the pyramid there is autonomy and ownership. When people are aligned on what needs to be achieved, trust is in place, and good feedback is constantly shared, you can focus on delegation and expanding people’s scope.
Here is what you may do:
🛑 Define boundaries — establish areas where engineers have decision-making power. Clarity allows them to act confidently within their sphere of influence.
🤝 Delegate meaningful responsibility — give ownership over significant parts of the product or process. More trust usually equals more motivation. We also wrote a full article about delegation.
🏃♂️ Encourage initiative — create space for engineers to do more. Can they own some features from top to bottom? Can they propose and lead entire projects? Empowerment may feel scary but most often leads to innovative solutions and a strong sense of accomplishment.
You can find the full article about fostering motivation in engineering teams below 👇
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I wish you a great week! ☀️
Luca