The most important hiring characteristic for growth
"That's great as a soft skill, but what's th *real* thing?"
"**********? That's great for a soft skill, but what's the real thing we're hiring for?"
I was helping a founder hire a head of growth a few years ago and we were discussing key traits needed.
The first thing I said was 'humility', which prompted the founder to smile and then ask what we really were looking for.
But I actually find humility is maybe the most important characteristic for a growth person. Here's why.
Growth is about mastering uncertainty
There's a bias I've discovered over the last three years.
And that's because growth is so data-centric, people assume that growth equals confident predictability.
A huge metastudy published a few years ago showed that predicting the outcome of an ad on Facebook was essentially impossible.
Add to that and the environments we operate in change all the time. People change, the world changes, needs and desires change. Platforms change. Advertisers change. What worked last month won’t work this month.
The world is constantly changing. And there are no playbooks. There are no guaranteed results.
Great growth people forecast and model, but that's not an exercise in predicting the future. Instead I find it a great way of checking our assumptions about how levers play together. It’s a refocus to stay on top of the stuff that really impacts change.
Experiments will fail: which is often more important than the wins because it helps us disprove biases.
But it also brings us back to the important characteristic for hiring of humility.
Growth experiments will fail. It’s important we don’t commit too much feeling towards those.
We cannot become wedded to our own viewpoint on work works or who our customer is or what they want or desire or how they will act. Predicting these things with high degrees of certainty is very hard.
And so when we operate in an environment of uncertainty, it’s important we embrace that and that requires humility.
It’s very natural to do that too, which is tough. If you’ve built a product and a brand and managed to find your first 2,000 people who love it, it’s very easy to feel protective of it. If you’re a junior employee who feels that failure might be detrimental to your career, you might try to find wins in losses. If you’re someone selling your services, you might not want to look like you don’t know what you’re doing.
But it’s important we don’t fall in love with our own ideas.
Without humility, you will be overconfident and less aware of bias.
Without humility, you will attempt to find 'wins' in losses.
And without humility, you'll try to convince others of a path, rather than follow the unpredictability of growth.
Other bits
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