May 09, 2020

The Cookbook: Persuasion

May 09, 2020/ WC

If there is one thing I wish I knew before I started creating my company, it would be the fact that persuasion skills are acquired skills. As a leader almost everything you do will require you to persuade and influence someone. Some people are good at this and some people are not. But the amazing fact is that it’s easy to be good at this. That’s because persuading people is a science.

I remember clearly the day I learnt that persuasion is a science.

I was going through a very difficult time at the company. We were just a one pony show then, with our lone customer insisting for the big product release done in days. And my team was asking for weeks to just test it. This was the big launch we have been working for, and if we didn’t get it done on time I knew we’ll lose this customer, and along with them possibly the company. I had spent a horrible day arguing with the lead about how and why I need the testing done fast. It was one of those conversations which ends with both sides feeling they’ve lost the trust they’ve built up over time. I remember the last thing that the lead said, and in front of the rest of the team: “if you release this, this will be your thing only, we will never put our name on a product like this”. The use of the “we” was brutal, but I knew it was felt by everyone. This was the farthest you can go from the concept of a hearty company.

I went back home that day feeling totally lost. This was a time when I haven’t proven that hearty company was even possible. So the feeling of loss was far beyond just the worry that I’ll lose this one customer. It was a feeling that what I had imagined to build as a company wasn’t something that’s possible in the “real” world of business. That little voice in my head kept telling me that companies are the heartless dehumanized beasts they are because that’s what businesses require them to be, to survive.

I remember reading the chapter “Give a dog a good name” in Dale Carnegie’s how to win book that evening. And deciding almost as a last resort that I’ll just blindly try his suggestion of alter casting – “giving a fine reputation to live up to” to persuade people to excel. I went back the next morning straight to the team’s room, and instead of saying “You need to finish testing and ship this by next week” I said “I know it’s hard, but I know you can finish testing and ship this by next week”. Just a play on the words, a substitution really, no change in substance. I was expecting to be shot down right away, I felt really fake saying it. But to my amazement I saw a slightly different reaction to my words than the day before. This gave me the encouragement to continue, I kept to the script of alter casting, making it sound like I knew they would do it, I had the confidence they could. And I couldn’t believe the effect my words had. The same team, the same people, people who are smart and can easily see through my word play and the fact that I was in essence just repeating my words of yesterday, yet the results and the attitude was completely different. Almost immediately I felt that everyone was positive and was willing to at least try. The defensiveness of yesterday was gone. It was all about “let’s try” and “let’s do” as opposed to words like “we can’t”, “it’s impossible” or “never”. To this day I feel angry when I remember this. Why didn’t they teach this absolutely essential life skill? This should be taught in our schools along with our alphabets. This is a power that makes everything possible. A super hero skill that you can pick up in a minute. I felt like screaming.

At the end alter casting wasn’t enough to get us to ship by time, but we did manage to launch with a week’s delay. I am sure that we couldn’t have done that without the help of alter casting. And much more importantly we couldn’t have done it in a way that made everyone energized and happy.

Over the years I’ve invested on learning more of these social psychology science, I guess persuasion strategies is a better but less sexy description. Some of the skills can even be put into a set of simple steps that you have to follow to get the desired results. There is a substantial body of research work in this space done over the past 100 years, so this is very much body of knowledge rather than some pseudo-science or iffy motivation course.

There are many great laymen’s books that you can read to widen your view (starting with Dale Carnegie’s classic). As you learn these new ideas, you’ll find that you are practicing them and enriching your toolbox of persuasion skills with the ideas that work for you. Some of the ideas may rarely work in your context, in your culture or industry. Some are plain wrong, too weird, too sleazy to try. But some are just basic skills that you absolutely must know. The sooner you learn them, the better. You’ll be using them daily. I promise. Here’s my essentials list.

Alter casting

“Give them a fine reputation to live up to, and they will make prodigious efforts rather than see you disillusioned.”

— Dale Carnegie

Alter casting, as with my example, is simply stating that someone already possesses a skill or ability that you want that person to possess. You’ve probably used this on your kids many times with lines like “I know you are good in maths and you’ll ace this exam”. Alter casting works just as well on adults. You may have to tone done the words a bit and make sure that it does’t sound patronizing. It creates not just a positive effect on the person or the group you are targeting but it creates a real positive energy in anyone who hears it. As a leader you start giving an impression of being supportive and full of good vibes. So it’s really a no brainer to use at any chance you get. There are just three things you need to be careful about when you are using it:

a) Make sure you are not sounding patronizing. For obvious reasons, you’ll sound fake and it will also start having a negative effect in that it will feel like the person you are using it on is not capable and needs your encouragement to move forward.

b) Don’t use it over and over on the same issue when there’s been failure in the past. Over using it will just make it useless. When it works it works the first time, when it doesn’t you just need to do something else.

c) For some people it never works at all. So identify that group and never use it on them.

As “science” it came into social psychology 1963 from research work done by sociologists Eugene Weinstein and Paul Deutschberger. But in the everyday use of this technique definitely came from Dale Carnegie’s book.

Yes ladder

The yes ladder is a technique of asking for small commitments and eventually asking for the big one. It works on the simple human behaviour of wanting to stay consistent. It’s known more commonly as the “the foot in the door” principle, since it’s a common sales technique of selling a lower priced product – thus gain a foothold with a customer and then up-selling a bigger priced product. It’s a yes ladder because the act of saying yes to someone leads to saying yes later on in the conversation.

As an idea it must’ve been known through generations of sales people, but as a science it came out during a series of studies in the 1960s done by Stanford scientists Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser (published first in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, in 1966). In one such study, people in a California neighborhood was asked to install a big, unsightly billboard on their front yard with a public service message of driving safety. For obvious reasons less than 17% agreed. But within the same neighborhood another group of people were first requested to put a very small poster for driver safety on their windows and then two weeks later they were requested to put up that large billboard. In this group the people agreeing shot up to 76%. A clear indication that a small yes leads to bigger a yes down the line.

The most common use of the yes ladder in our context is when you are trying to reach consensus in a group. I usually start by asking the group if they agree on something that I know they will agree on, and then over the course of the conversation ask progressively difficult things to agree on to lead the group up the yes ladder of agreement. Let me give an example of how I might use this. A very difficult decision for a software group is to agree if they want to introduce a strict rule of estimating individual tasks in a project. I could try my yes ladder here with a first question of “Do we all hate waterfall?”. No software developer in their right mind would say they like waterfall (the antiquated software development process), so I would get my first yes. I could then discuss a bit about what’s not waterfall and then ask the slightly more difficult question of “Do we want to measure our work output?”. You can only say yes to that, because saying no makes it sound like you don’t care about your efficiency. You can see where this is going, right? I’m getting the group to agree on the obvious, setting their mindsets to say yes on topics that lead to my ultimate ask of “Do we want to put hour estimates on individual task tickets?”. The yes ladder conditions the team to say yes and the little commitments they have made leading to the big ask convinces them to say yes there too.

I have to cover the big question that must be coming up in your mind by now: “Isn’t this plain and simple manipulation?”. The answer is yes. Because you are using techniques, let’s call them what they are: tricks, to reach consensus. This is true for all the persuasion skills I mention here. If you don’t use these without proper judgment you’ll be causing harm – to individuals and to the company. You’ll be pushing your ideas forward at the cost of other possibly better ideas. So just as with any other great power, you need to be careful. Use it when you know persuasion is helpful in making a decision. Use it when your team goes into that hated analysis paralysis mode, or when there are endless meetings without any decisions being reached etc. Use with care.

Use because

The use because principle says that every request you make should include a reason to believe to make it effective. As a leader you might think “do this” is what you have to say to move the group. That is the command and control like leadership an army requires. But in a hearty company you need a consultative leadership – where the leader creates consensus in the decision she takes. And for this situation you need to add a “because” to your line and say: “do this, because”. Now the funny thing is that the part after the because, the actual reason to believe, just doesn’t matter a lot! The fact that you structured you sentence with a reason to believe, that you added a “because” to it, makes it do its magic. Weird, but it is science!

It all started when Harvard scientist Ellen Langer published the results of a study in 1978. Langer experimented with subjects requesting to break in on a line of people waiting to use a Xerox machine at Harvard. Xerox machines made copies of your documents, the hi-tech of those days, and student would line up for a long time to do something which we do instantly with our printers now. The table below shows the lines the subjects used the following requests to go to the front of the line and their success:

Notice the amazing power of the “because”? The last line’s because was not giving any reason at all! But by merely adding the word because the success rate shot up to almost the same level as a case with a real sounding reason.

““These studies taken together support the contention that when the structure of a communication, be it oral or written, semantically sound or senseless, is congruent with one’s past experience, it may occasion behavior mindless of relevant details.””

— Ellen Langer

I know this from my everyday interactions with my teams. The mere addition of a reason to believe changes the team’s motivations. It’s a simple yet powerful technique that is creates inclusive decision making and compliance without pressure. I love the title of Langer 1978 paper that published the result:

“The Mindlessness of Ostensibly Thoughtful Action: The Role of "Placebic" Information in Interpersonal Interaction”

Don’t you just love science? :)

You Frame

Dale Carnegie’s sums it up succinctly when he says: “…the only way on earth to influence people is to talk about what they want”. You frame is framing your requests and instructions in a way that it aligns with what people want. So, for an example, instead of saying the “I frame” of “I need to ship this product” move to the you frame of “We need a break (so we want to ship this product and be done)”.

Dale Carnegie starts his chapter on this idea with story about how he loves strawberries yet when he goes fishing he would never imagine using strawberries as baits. He uses worms because fish loves worms. Obvious isn’t it? We can only convince people if we present the arguments to them with what they want. There is no point of saying what I want, since no one is interested in what I want. I need to find out what the person I’m trying to persuade wants and then try to frame my arguments that fits with his want so that he gets interested and agrees. Carnegie puts this principle as – “arouse in the other person an eager want”.

Of all the persuasion techniques I know, this is the one that I get to use the most. This has never failed for me, mainly because it’s so obvious. And the best thing about this strategy is that it forces you, the leader, to think from the perspective of your team. Sometimes this thinking alone opens up new ideas about how something can be done. However, finding the you frame in typical business wants can be difficult. Let’s face it, most business’ immediate request involves you to work a bit harder so that the business can make some money.

How do you find the you angle in such a situation? I re-purpose an approach taken from Stephen Covey’s famous 7 habits book: begin with the end in mind. I figure out what the win would be like at the end and then work backwards to find the wording that would work to frame the request. I’ll give you an example from a situation that’s very common in my space. As a software team we have to pick up work on new technologies all the time. There’s always some concerns about taking up a completely new technology in the team, people worry about their performance or their ability to meet deadlines. But one of the wins of taking up a new technology is the skill you learn that bumps up career potentials. I’ve always found that the best approach to take here is to make my team visualize what they will gain in their career from a project like this. A new technology is likely to become a high demand skills in a year’s time. So highlighting the fact that individuals will gain a great skill to mention in their CV creates an immediate “eager want”. Much better than saying “We need to use this technology to make our clients happy”!

Social Proof

We like things that other people like. That is the gist of the idea of social proof. If others like it then it must be good, it must be supportable – this is something that’s innately built into us. This is probably another evolutionary hand me downs – we survived more when we followed others. Social proof is the reason why we stay at hotels with more star in their reviews, we buy books that have more recommendations or we wear colors that others say suits us better. Sometimes we know that the social proof is fake, intentionally made up to make us consume or like. The classic one is the “canned laughter” in sitcoms. We know they are pre-recorded laughter, put in the end of jokes to make laugh too. But it works. And there’s enough studies to prove that it works, starting with a Smyth and Fuller (1972) who found consistently that you can make a group laugh at not so funny materials if you just add canned laughter in the mix.

To use this principle in your everyday work of making a team come to an agreement you’ll need to recruit someone as your sidekick. Ask the sidekick to support you at the right time during the conversation. The fact that someone else is approving your idea has an instantaneous effect on the approval of the group.

Another way I use social proof is to think up of examples from the past where my idea has worked and bring that up and point to someone I know who would agree with me. In this strategy you don’t need to have the sidekick setup at all. If you choose the correct story, it should resonate with someone in your team to support you. And you are on your path to social proof.

There is another issue in our everyday work life where this principle is very relevant, but in a very different way. Whenever you have group of people and a risky decision needs to be taken you run into a common human problem of “bystander effect”. This is related to the social proof principle – since no one is taking up the lead and committing everyone feels the social proof that they don’t need to take action either. This is probably the biggest cause of why big companies become slow at responding and reacting. There are just too much social proof of non-risk takers. In smaller organizations with smaller groups it’s hard to get that feeling of anonymity and people don’t get enough social proof to stay unresponsive. There is enough evidence to support this as a science, for example a study done with a staged medical emergency showed that when there’s just one bystander there’s a 85% chance of receiving help compared to 31% when there are five people. As a hearty company you have to address this issue and I cover this in a later section of my series.

The Cookbook: Inspiring and Engaging People

April 25, 2020/ WC

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At the heart of passion is love, this is as true for work as it is for our personal lives. Realizing this fact is key to keep people in your team passionate, engaged and happy.

So, how do you create love for the work? Not an easy question, but you begin to find answers when you realize that we instinctively love our own. It’s an evolutionary trait that has kept our species going. When you get people to see your vision, then make it their own by creating parts of that vision, you latch on to that evolutionary trait and create love (yes, even for that measly project management tool of yours!). And love leads to passion. When you hire people you look for passion for their everyday tasks, their craft and then it is your job to inspire them to be passionate about your product. This is how you do it.

Create a clear vision

The trick to great visions (aka mission statements, aka motto, etc.) is that they are honest. It should ring true. People are smart and if you come up with a vision that sounds phony then you’ll go nowhere with them. My favorite quote for this comes from Michale Hyatt

Leadership is more than influence. It is about reminding people of what it is we are trying to build—and why it matters. It is about painting a picture of a better future. It comes down to pointing the way and saying, “C’mon. We can do this!”

Show and sell everyone your vision

You have a vision, a plan, and a destination to go. It is only in your head. It is not something that’s tangible. It is your job to show people your vision. Convince them. Inspire them. Make it their own vision. In the game of business your view of things is significantly different from someone you are hiring. Fact of life: you are driven by your desire to get things done so that your rewards come to you. You are motivated primarily by pursuing your ideas, your vision and your version of reality. Your rewards are not only the significantly higher monetary benefits (which matters a lot of course) but your psychological need to achieve the success that everyone expects from you. You are already sold to the idea, that’s why you are there. But this is completely different from someone you are hiring. She hasn’t seen your vision yet, she is not sold on the idea that this is almost like the cure for cancer.

The only way to sell your vision is by repetition. Create two versions of the vision, a long one and very short one. The long one you use during speeches and when you elaborate and explain. Use the short one as a mnemonic to remind everyone, every day. Have the short one show up everywhere, on your website, on the walls of the office, on your business card, everywhere. At Kaz our short version vision is super simple: we are the power to make great software. The long version includes our goals of making software development fun and creative and about creating a workplace where we are excited to go every morning.

At the end it doesn’t matter how many times you repeat your goals, unless you really believe it and use it as the principle for everything you do. There’s a great little section about mission statements in that wonderful rebel of a book - Rework by the founders of 37Signals:

Standing for something isn’t just about writing it down. It’s about believing it and living it.

Make it everyone’s vision by participation

Communicating and selling your vision to your team is great but it is still yours. Your job is to make it everyone’s vision. The only way that this will be possible is to ask everyone to participate. When you’ve done your job well in spreading your ideas and goals by repetition you’ll start seeing people who are aligning with your ideas. You will also see people who don’t fully agree or have their own versions of a similar vision. The only way forward is to bring all the ideas together. Adapt your ideas to the new thoughts – include them in the longer version of the vision. As long as overarching vision is not altered there is no reason not to. More ideas bring more honesty into your goals. And in the process of this adaptation what was purely yours becomes everyone’s. Remember – people love their own.

Let everyone define the work scope

As part of creating ownership you have to make sure that the work items, scopes, plans and even the roles for doing those work comes from the team. There should be an overall feeling that we are doing this together rather than this is something we are told to do. This is actually a very easy action item. It saves you from being the big genius who has to come up with everything. You are essentially asking your team to help you structure the work. The moment your team creates its own tasks and work structure they will automatically own it. And by that formula they will love it because it’s their own. Well, it isn’t always like that – what is more likely to happen is that there will be mistakes in the that structuring, there will be disagreements and compromises. But if you expect them, make sure there is scope to change things as the team progresses and realizes what works and what doesn’t work, it will always work out.

Assign roles based on interest and ideas

Once the work structure is in place people need to pick up their tasks. It is extremely important that resources pick up the work they find most interesting. This is what will lead them to engage more with the work and love it. In most work scenarios you’ll find that people are capable of working happily in many areas of the project. But that is not what you are looking for – plain old capability. What you want is love and you get it only in drilling down and finding the right match. A classic example in the software world are full stack developers who can work on pretty much any part of the software development. But every full stack developer I’ve met had a special interest about a particular section of the application. They would have worked effectively in any section but only in that special section will they put in their best effort. And it is not just the best effort that you get out of this, by enabling them to work on areas they love you are bringing in the passion that will get you work outputs that are far beyond the sum of their individual parts.

Keep work goals human sized and own-able

Most giants are not lovable. And most products are giants. They are too big for a single person or a small group to own and identify with. The work needs to be broken down to sizes that individuals or small teams can take over. This way of breaking down a complex work into smaller individual ownership means that the full ownership of work can happen.

Let the team members be the owners of the tasks they do. Which means you create a process where work items and outputs can fully be taken over by a person or a group of people. They define how they get the job done and what they do to deliver the output. The alternative to this would be some kind of central ownership, levels of management where what an individual group does and how they do it is defined by someone outside that group and that is the beginning of the disconnect from the work at hand. In the software world this is actually quite easy, you can always break down that big product of yours to a module that manages data, another which displays the data, etc. But I would argue this model of breakdown is possible in any industry if you are willing to think along those lines. A related theme in this thinking is the concept of keeping the company small even though there are commercial pressure and possibility to be big. Many of the rationales for that theme works for this action item of keeping work structures small, human sized and creating ownership. A classic in this genre is Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big by Bo Burlingham.

Create opportunities to show off work

It’s important, for human psychology, to show off the output of you passion. It makes us proud, it rationalizes the seemingly irrational passion have for what we do. It creates pride – one of the biggest signs of a hearty company.

Create as many opportunities you can to show off work. These could be in meetings with the management, a little internal seminar to showcase features, a page in the intranet for the group, posts in the blog. Make one off events to show off major successes. These act both as an opportunity to show off and also as closure for the teams.

Celebrate Victories

Celebrating major wins and deliveries signals the team the importance of their work. This reinforces the feeling that what they are doing is valuable and so their love for their work is justified. In human relationships, love may not need external justification but for work it is essential. There is a constant need for encouragement and reinforcement for a team to feel that they are doing the right thing. Celebrating major deliveries is a big encouragement. The celebrations don’t need to be anything big, a surprise pizza or a team dinner treat might be just perfect. At Kaz we have small celebrations like pizzas for a big bug fix along with bigger ones like small break at the beach for a big launch.

Use we and us and never you and them

With all the talk of smaller teams and individual ownership there is a chance of creating a feeling of little islands within a product team. So you as the leader need to make sure that doesn’t get out of control. At the end the teams or individuals need to feel that together they are achieving their goal. That they all have a common love. The most important way this feeling of commonality spreads and stays is by the simple use of the pronouns everyone use in everyday conversation. You as the leader will need to monitor this and nudge it in the right direction. Always stay in the inclusive us, our and we and never you, their and them. If you hear you or them fix them right away, this cannot wait. If someone says “they created the bug” immediately repeat that sentence, with an inclusive pronoun, like “we have a bug we need to fix”. As you practice this you’ll find that it’s pretty easy, most of the time replacing the pronouns and slightly modifying the sentence so that it doesn’t sound that you are correcting someone directly works just fine.

The Cookbook: Finding and Hiring People (part 2)

April 21, 2020/ WC

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This is the part 2 in the section about finding and hiring talent in a hearty company. Check out the previous section with the button above. And click here read from the start.

People are passionate only about jobs they love. And jobs they love are the jobs their personality, intellect, skill, habits, worldview and most importantly their mindset is a good fit for. Every job role has a certain fit. Some people fit it, some don’t. What you hope to find is the closest fit amongst the people you get sufficiently interested to apply for the role.

#1 and #2 are about pinning down the requirements for the fit. When you need to hire people your first action should be to define the job role. Create a detailed list of tasks that the person doing the job will do. Without this list the job advertisement will be wrong, which will lead to the wrong people applying (or too many applying) and at the end you will not be able to test the candidates for the fit.

#3 of having a filter in the application process is a neat trick to check for the fit earlier on in the application process. There are many ways to do this and you need to think of one that works for your industry or job role. Our trick in a typical software job post would be to ask the applicant to solve a certain programming problem and apply with the answer to the problem, or for quality assurance job posts we might put in some typos and ask them to tell us what was wrong with the job post. The beauty of this filtering tricks is that it immediately cuts out people I call the “robo-applicants”, people who are not really interested about your job in particular (hence pretty good chance they are not a good fit) but are applying just because it’s easy to send an email. This early filtering also gives you hints about the candidates who might be a good fit but would otherwise have been rejected for their poorly construed resume or cover letter. This is usually a big problem in engineering and technical jobs. One of the best developers we ever hired at Kaz was someone who had sent a poorly formatted Word document CV that misspelled most of the technologies he had worked in. Yet his email had the right subject line deciphered from our cryptic instructions of how to submit the CV, which I give below:

Please email with your resume with a short description of why this job is right for you ZW1haWwgc3ViamVjdCBzaG91bGQgYmU6ICJOZXh0IFN0ZXZlIEpvYnMi

This may look like some kind of error in the copy but to the people we were interested in it was just a base64 encrypted string that said - email subject should be: "Next Steve Jobs". All they had to do was use an online decoder to find that string and put that into the email subject. An instant free and crowdsourced filtering for us! Obviously base64 encrypted instruction might not be the right thing for your industry but you can always think of something similar that does this kind of filter early on in the application process.

The audio only interview of #4 is important for a low cost filtering but also more importantly to assess someone without any visual ques. We get biased by visual factors, how a candidate looks, how she dresses, how she smiles, etc. There are considerable data to prove that we tend to like and thus hire people who look or behave like us. A classic in this area is chapter on liking in Robert Cialdini’s book Influence the psychology of persuasion where he relates:

In one study, done in the early 1970s when young people tended to dress either in “hippie” or “straight” fashion, experimenters donned hippie or straight attire and asked college students on campus for a dime to make a phone call. When the experimenter was dressed in the same way as the student, the request was granted in more than two thirds of the instances; but when the student and requester were dissimilarly dressed, the dime was provided less than half the time. [The dime-request experiment was conducted by Emswiller et al. (1971)]

Impressive clothing, posture or even sometimes perfume can bias our decisions. An audio interview reduces the chances of this bias during the initial phases of filtering candidates.

#5 is about avoiding the classic mistake many make. The candidate you are considering must actually do the tasks she is supposed to do during the interview rather than talk about those tasks. This is the only way to really judge if the candidate is a good fit or not. It’s easy to say how you would do something theoretically, answer interview questions that are mostly leaked on sites out there but unless the candidate actually does some of the tasks, you will never know how good or bad she is at doing them. Joel Spolskey sums it up nicely when says “Would you hire a magician without asking them to show you some magic tricks?” in his superb Smart and gets things done… book. The ideal way you should do it is get them to do a simple task in front of everyone and then give them a bigger task to do where the candidates gets some time to finish it by themselves. The first simple task is so that you can see quickly in a granular way if that person’s work style and thinking fits with the rest of the team. It also lets you check the confidence level and the ability to take in stress while actually doing a typical task. At Kaz we sometime ask the candidate to solve simple programming problem like sorting an array of numbers by writing it out on a whiteboard. Great way to see how she is thinking about it, how focused she can be with the stress of people staring at her work, how she handles the stress of writing the code without the help of an IDE which would help her with the syntax of the code, etc. The longer task is more to test a normal situation and see what the end result is both in terms of time it took and the quality of this relatively stress free task. If you are from the software world, Joel’s book or his blog is a must read in this space.

#6 point of creating at least one stress situation is all about testing the candidate for their ability to handle stress. Most interviews tend to be a very congenial affair, which is expected – we meet people we don’t know at all in business settings. So people stay nice and reserved. But most jobs are not like that, you absolutely need to know how this polite and nice guy will react when he is under stress. That is why you have to ensure that your interview team creates a stress test of some kind. Without your instruction or plan that just won’t happen. An easy way we do this at Kaz is by having one of us be the bad guy and try opposing everything that the candidate is saying – intentionally being wrong in some cases to see if and how the candidate counters this. This tactics only works well if you do this after breaking the ice a bit, so that the candidate feels comfortable voicing their concerns. In the software world this is relatively easy as you can say something that is obviously technically wrong and see how the candidate responds to that.

#7 is the take home task which lead to the possibility of seeing, if the stress of the onsite interview and the time constraints are taken off, how the candidate performs. In some sense this mimics a typical situation for the candidate after she has joined the company and have become more relaxed as she becomes familiar with the work and the teammates. This also tests a bit of how remote work might work out with this person.

#8 is to ensure that everyone agrees on the fit. Decisions on fit is always difficult, and it’s easy to be biased. I, for example, always like someone who can think of quick ways of fixing things in a programming problem. Great trait for sure for a startup trying to get their first prototype up but not a good fit when you are building a software that needs to be very stable. As a person it’s very hard for me to change my tests for fit and not be biased. This is why having multiple interviewers helps address that issue. And putting a rule that everyone needs to agree about a candidate for a hire ensures that a dominating bias doesn’t dominate hiring decisions. But when I say multiple how many do I mean? We’ve settled for a maximum of three. Keeping the number odd helps us from getting ties. But there are some interesting research work available in this front. For example in a study to find how many reviewers it took to achieve good decisions on candidates it was found that with a group of three the chances of making a wrong decision falls to just 6%. So that number of interviewers doesn’t have to be too big.

#9 is also about avoiding bias. References in a resume are pretty much guaranteed to tell positive things about a candidate. Listening to that feedback before the actual interview skews your view of the candidate and prevents you from independently making an assessment. So if you do want to check references (we rarely do), check after you’ve found the candidate to be a good fit and you are just checking to find if there are anything that you might have missed.

#10 is a bit controversial, but makes sense if you think about how much time and energy you’ll save by choosing a candidate early. The goal of the hiring process is finding the fit. If you find a fit it’s usually good enough. Yes there is always a chance that there might be someone “fitter” in your list but most of the times the benefits of choosing the current fit offsets the risk of losing out on a talent you haven’t interviewed yet. Obviously for this to work your test for fit needs to be good, but if you followed all the others in this list you should be there!

Once you have found the person you want to hire you have to make him an offer he can’t refuse. But what is that offer supposed to be? Having a fair reward structure is core to keeping people happy and content – the cardinal goal of a hearty company. People are not solely money driven, so happy people doesn’t necessarily mean the most paid people. Money obviously matters but it is only part of the fairness equation. People need to feel that they getting paid fairly for the value they add to the company but they also need to feel that their pay is consistent with others around them. Having a consistent pay scale that you stick to no matter what is much more important than being the highest payer in the block. I would argue that being branded the highest payer is actually detrimental to the concept of the hearty company because you then highlight money as core value and also attract the wrong set of people.

#1 and #2 are about the concept that a hearty company should not highlight money. Money should always feel like it’s a side benefit of following your passion. Conversations about your company should not lead to the fact that you are the top payer or that your benefits packages are the best. Don’t get me wrong here, you should definitely try to be the top payer – that is your insurance for hiring and retaining the top talents – but you never advertise it as such. You should absolutely make sure that you never mention money internal conversations. People should never feel like that the only reason they are with you is that you pay well. The reason for this is simple, money is single dimensional. It’s a number and anyone new in the block can increase that number and take away your spot. If that number is your only advantage, if that is what your people feel is the only reason to be with you then you will always lose. Aside for this simple business logic, there is something about the single dimensionality of money that destroys the feeling of belonging in a group. It reduces the bonds that hold a team together and reduces the feeling of passion people bring in. It is one thing that destroys the feeling of a hearty company the quickest. In the context of hiring, when you offer someone a job she should feel that she is getting the chance to become a part of a family where she can feel safe and add value. Part of that feeling will come from the offer you place in front of her but part of it should come from your existing reputation as an organization, from stories she has heard about your company and from the experience she herself has gone through during the interviewing process.

#3 and #4 is the most important action you can take to create a feeling of fairness. Fact of life: people will know the salaries the company pays whether you keep it a secret or not. If you have structured scale where people are paid by the value they add then it all feels fair. Having a scale also means that there is no fun in a discussion of salaries since it pretty obvious. The trick is to make sure you put people in the right spot in the scale. The key to putting people on the right spot is to assess, fairly, what value they add and make sure that the person is in spot in the scale where others in that same spot adds similar value. This is very hard. Try to make this value calculation as objective as you can. This is where you need to come up with your methods. In the software world it’s relatively easy, if the hiring process is good then people coming in would have the same kind of skill for a given number of years of experience. So you can, almost, place them purely on the number of years of experience. This probably works for most industries. However, remember there are more dimensions to the value a person adds than just her number of years of experience. Some people are just plain and simple geniuses in their abilities, the value they bring cannot be just a function of years of experience. In multiple studies over the years it’s proven that “there are order-of-magnitude differences among programmers" (Great read in this area for the software world - Code complete 2), here’s quote the original study from the 60s [Sackman, Erikson, and Grant (1968)]

“Impressive clothing, posture or even sometimes perfume can bias our decisions. An audio interview reduces the chances of this bias during the initial phases of filtering candidates.”

— Steve McConnell (from Code Complete)

Another not so easy to pin down value is the emotional quotient of people. Some people are just great at bringing a group together, they are good communicators or good people to inspire the team to go through hard times. These are very tangible values that needs to be factored into your calculations. When you find people with exceptional qualities, you put them at a higher point on your scale to reward them for the value they bring in. You are still sticking to your scale, but your calculation for the value is just multidimensional. It’s easy to get things wrong here, and create a feeling of unfairness in this space. A common situation is where similarly experienced resources are suddenly in different points of the scale which creates dissatisfaction. You need to do two things to address this, a) you make sure that only exceptionally gifted resources are moved up the scale and not just a bump up to make the offer better for someone, b) make everyone aware, in whatever way it feels right, that this person is exceptionally gifted and so that everyone knows about the possible bump in the salary. Not easy, but doable. There is one way to avoid this problem completely: only hire exceptional people, then you can stick to the scale religiously on some single dimension!

#5 may not feel right for a lot of people. We are used to “bonuses”, “cash incentives” even little plaques and prizes for good work. But my own experience and a lot of research in this space shows that such performance tied rewards are actually detrimental to the quality of work. Rewards bring out the feeling of money that we try to avoid in a hearty company. Again – you are doing what you do because you love doing it and because you are helping your friends at work and your company in the process. This is what you were hired to do, and you were hired because you are good at this. So success is expected, good work is by default. Reward is also guaranteed by the salary you received. No external reward should dangle in front of you to make you work harder, you work hard because you want to. Putting special bonuses destroys this and makes the bonus the main objective. When there is no bonus it starts to feel less important. These external rewards are also demeaning to the people as it starts to treat them as children whom you can bribe with toy here and there. There are also ample research data that supports this point. A great read for a summary of these research work is Punished by reward by Alfie Kohn.

“For nearly half a century, research has raised troubling questions about the practice of dangling rewards in front of people to get them to do what we want. It doesn’t matter whether the people in question are male or female, children or adults. It doesn’t matter whether the rewards are stickers, food, grades, or money. It doesn’t matter whether the goal is to get them to work harder, learn better, act nicely, or lose weight. What the studies keep telling us is that rewards, like punishments, tend not only to be ineffective — particularly over the long haul — but often to undermine the very thing we’re trying to promote.”

— Alfie Khon (Punished by Reward)

#6 is about not giving the feeling to the candidate that you are trying to give her a bad deal. Offering the best offer you can afford (and with a scale in place that’s easy) right away sets the tone of a resources involvement with your company. They feel that they are being valued, and there is no feeling of distrust where you trying to con them into a lower salary. At the end of the day the little that you might have saved in giving a lower salary you would lose a hundred times over by the loss of trust that you create. You will pay a compound interest on that loss of trust over the full length of the time that resource is with you – in lost enthusiasm for work, in feelings of not being safe and most importantly in the distrust in your words and vision. Every resource should feel like you are doing the best you can within the business economics you are restricted in.

#7 is again about avoiding money driven individuals I hinted about in #1 and #2. I bring up the point again because after the initial offer you will have an early test of how money driven this person is. If the only matrix the person is interested is money then it should be an easy decision on your part to not go forward with the hiring. With the action of #6 you already don’t have an option to change the salary – the only option you have is to re-evaluate the spot in the scale. You can always check if you have missed any experience or some exceptional skills of the resource during your calculations. But also test how money driven that person is during this phase. Remember that a money driven person will always be on the lookout for another opening out there offering even more money. A hearty company can never be built with this mindset.

#8 is about making sure that the investment in time and energy you made in choosing candidates do not all go waste when you fail to hire someone. Always keep the options open to hire that person somewhere down the line. Stay connected. Put them in your mailing list. Drip market them with stories about your company – about how good you are doing or what great things you are making. Passionate people will always be interested to re-consider – maybe not right away but at point in the future. And when they do reconsider you save a lot by bypassing most of the hiring process. Some of the best employees at Kaz are people we couldn’t entice the first time round but came back to us later. One of them seven years after the first offer!

The Cookbook: Finding and Hiring People (part 1)

April 10, 2020/ WC

< Preface

Next Chapter >

Ingredient: Passion

Passion comes from the people. So getting this ingredient right is really about hiring the right people and keeping them motivated, engaged and inspired.

When you are building your team and hiring people, you are really hiring their passion. You’d think hiring someone with the right resume, the right experience and skill should be your goal. But it is not. Your goal is to find the person who has the passion to do what you want her to do. Without that passion all those certificates, skills and references mean nothing. Passion is what makes us do things right, it is what makes us not just finish a task but make sure that it really solves the problem that it is supposed to solve.

Fact of life is whatever you are making, it is probably not the cure for cancer. You may stay awake thinking about how your software platform will change the way people will manage projects in the future, but someone you are hiring will not be so enthused. So your job is to find the people who are passionate about their craft, everyday work – the immediate little task they have to do. That’s how you start and then if you take the right of steps you’ll be inspire them to see your version of reality, sell them your vision that will lead them to be passionate for your product. This is the end goal. But this second level of passion doesn’t happen without the first, the more granular level of passion for every day work. The good news is that the first level of passion is easy to identify if you follow some steps. And then once you have the right set of people, the second level is once again just as easy. I will go over the list of steps to achieve both those levels in this section. But first let’s take the fuzziness out of the word “passion” in this context (once again, my promise in this cookbook is to take out all the hand wavy things and make them as concrete as possible).

People with passion for what they do are simply people who are a good fit for those tasks.

This essentially means that for any set of tasks there’s a certain type of personality, mindset and skill required to make someone be passionate of those tasks. That is the good fit you are looking for. If you find the fit, you are guaranteed to have found the passion. This also means that someone who is passionate for some parts of the work that needs to be done will not necessarily be passionate about other parts. So you will always have to balance your test for good fit (aka passion) so that your team as a group has passion for everything you need them to do. Classic example in my world: someone who is passionate about the look and feel of a website may completely hate working on the server side codes that generates the data that shows up on that website. And for me to succeed I need both these types of passion.

OK, enough of theory. Let’s get to those action items I promised. I’m going to break down this ingredient into a series of topics and then put in the actions within those topics.

Finding and hiring people

Hiring decisions are the most important decisions you will make in an organization. It is the single most significant factor that determines chances of success for an enterprise. This is one place you cannot cut corners or take a short cut. Save time or money on other things, skip a few meetings, get rid of the free coffee if you absolutely must (actually scrap that, it’s a really bad idea) but don’t skimp on the hiring process. If you don’t get the right people you’ll never get the right product. And if you hire someone who is not a good fit, then firing her is way more expensive (cost, loss in productivity and the hit in morale) than the cost of running a good hiring process.

#1 and #2 are about making sure that you and your team choose the person you are hiring. Hire directly and let the team, which is the hire for, make the final decision on the hire. Why? Because a third party such as an agency or even your HR department, will never have a proper understanding about your team’s needs and culture. They will always go by certain metrics like certificates, degrees and experience of a candidate. Good agencies may even try to understand your work culture and try the fit but it will never be as good as your judgement. Work relationships are dependent on human relationships. Only your team will be able feel if of a person will fit with them or not. Not just in work habits but also as a person. Some companies try to counter this point by saying that they let the agency just filter out people so that they can choose from a selected few. But isn’t that just the same? An agency will never be able to identify a candidate who can spot a single weird bug in a page code in a minute, when she has no formal education in software. A candidate like that will be lost during most third party filtering effort.

#3 point about a face to face onsite interview is extremely important. We use much more than our voice to communicate. A face to face interview brings those nonverbal modes of communication out for a check by the team. How your face changes when someone challenges you in a technical debate has huge implications as to if you’d play a good part in that debate or if you’d intimidate (or be intimidated) and reduce the value of the debate. It’s important to test these reactions during the onsite interview.

#4 and #5 is to ensure that the team understands the importance of the hiring process and gives it enough attention. The hiring process takes time and energy of the team. It’s also very distracting, taking the team away from important work at hand. And the worst of all it’s a pain and no one likes to do it. Hence, you as the leader need to make this the priority task. Pushing everything out of the way and making this the most important task is the only way you’ll get the team motivated enough to concentrate on the hiring process. It is definitely bad for the project at hand, in the short term, delaying things but you know that in the long term it is the best thing for the team. So this prioritization is correct.

#6 is all about making the sometimes tedious interview process more enjoyable. When you running a hiring process a team could be spending days going through resumes, interviewing, checking results of a test, etc. If you don’t make it fun for the team somehow there is no way this will run in full steam. Remember you team was never a good fit for running interviews! So they will never have the passion for this. So think of ways of making it interesting. Throw in a few pizzas in the process or even a little party celebrating a good hire This is one area that you should read up to get ideas, there are a lot of books on hiring that goes over this topic, my personal favorite is chapter 8 in Building Great Software Engineering Teams.

#7 is about not settling for a sub optimal fit just to get out of the hiring process – a shortcut. Sometimes you’ll find that none of the candidates fit the role. You’d be tempted to compromise but every time I’ve made that compromise I’ve regretted later on. It is much better to not hire, suffer the consequences of delays and more interviewees than to hire someone who is not the right person for a role and hope things will work out.

Great resources are always in demand. And since they love what they do they are very unlikely to move jobs a lot. Combine those two facts and you’ll realize that the chances of you finding great resources are very slim. You have to take definite action to attract the attention of great resources, create interest and keep them interested so that when the time comes they feel they should try out a new job opening at your place. Chapter 2 in Joel’s book is a must read (or the blog article where it came from) for this if you are in the software world. Here’s a great quote from there:

Instead of thinking as recruiting as a “gather resumes, filter resumes” procedure, you’re going to have to think of it as a “track down the winners and make them talk to you” procedure.

#1 is all about creating assets that will work for you to attract talents to your company. These days these assets probably are platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin but obviously new platforms and modes are coming up and you have to be aware where your target talents are. Posting interesting and informative posts on our Facebook and Linkedin pages has been one of the best ways to create interest in the developer community about us. This has gone to a point where sometime we don’t even advertise a job at all on job sites – a post on our page gets us the very filtered, interested and engaged resources we want to consider. And the beauty of using a social media asset is that the candidates are already convinced that they want to work for you. Remember that you have to have a plan on social media posting. You’ll first need to identify the topics that would interest your target talents. Then use that to create interesting post that people will engage with. It will take some time, but it is absolutely essential.

#2 and #3 is an extension to the idea of creating an interest in your target group that goes beyond some posts in social media. By contributing and building your company’s image in the community you are investing in your branding and helping create the right perception in your target talents. In the software space this could be creating an open source project that is used by a developers all over the world or helping a school for the under privileged like we do. Being active in online forums (and obviously offline ones) takes up time. So this has to be part of the job responsibility of someone in your team, ideally you.

#4 is about creating great content that helps your target group. This content could be in a blog that people visit or videos that you host on youtube, etc. The goal is to make the content become really useful part of daily work of people you want to hire. The value of this in creating a positive impression about your company and registering to stay updated is significant.

#5 is the best option you have if you are fine with accepting fresh new candidates. An internship process is really an extended interview, or it should be. Your goal for an internship program should never be to get some cheap labor to do some of your grunt work. It is a complete waste of everyone’s time that way. You should instead think of the intern as a possible hire, whom you are helping to achieve the fit you require and in that process evaluating her success and ability to learn. Since they are possible hires, all interns should go through a filtering process, so that you only start with the most likely hires.

#6 is to ensure that you always have a way for people to send you’re their resumes at any time. If you do your social outreach properly you’ll find that people remember you and they reach out to you when they want to switch jobs or just want you to consider them. This is a great way for you to build up your library of resumes and also to find great talents you might have missed.

OK, I’ll stop here today, watch out for part 2 where I go over the list of ideas and actions for finding the best fit and what to offer them.

Stay safe, stay home, we will win against this coronavirus.

The cookbook for a hearty company

March 31, 2020/ WC

Staying at home when there's a beautiful day waiting just outside the window is never my thing. But that's my reality, our reality, now with this coronavirus in the air. I woke up this morning and decided that now is my only chance to write that little cookbook I always wanted to write. A book that I wish I had when I started my company sixteen years ago. A handbook that would not be a lot of theory but would give me clear actionable ideas for creating a great company, that is compassionate during good times and resilient during bad times.

When I started my company, I assumed that there would be a bunch of books like that telling me what I needed to do to make such a strong company. Like a cookbook that I follow to make a hearty soup, I would just follow the recipe step by step and end up with a hearty company. A place where people would actually love to work. A company built to last.

My hope of finding such a book was not unexpected. As a software developer all my life I was used to "missing manuals", "cookbooks", "cheat sheets" for learning a new technology and getting things done quickly. I was extremely surprised to find that there were no such "cookbooks" around. Sure, there were great books on teamwork, about company culture, HR or organizational behavior, even software teams but none that would cover the wide range of issues that a new entrepreneur faces every day. None that would give her the answers to her questions quickly and with facts and data to support those answers when she needed the rationale. The fact of life is that when you are in the whirlwind of creating a new business you just do not have the time or energy to read through and assimilate theoretical books about company structure or project management. At times like those, you want, just as I did, a cookbook that just gives you the steps. You want someone else to have read through, try and test all the theories and just let you know what worked, why it worked and what you should do if you want it to work for you.

I didn't have that.

I had to, just like millions of others before and after me, plod through with whatever I knew, whatever I could read up and whatever my mentors could tell me. I made a lot of mistakes and learnt from them. But I also did a lot of things right. Today, Kaz is a company that is widely admired for its workplace culture, for the quality of our work and most importantly for the bond between its people. I am happy with what I have achieved. Yet I feel I've lost a lot of time doing things that others before me have done and failed. If I had only known, if I had that book I would have been miles ahead. I could've achieved even more in this time.

So that is what I want to write. That missing cookbook.

I want my handbook to be exactly the way I wish I had it. In each chapter I will start with a section - Ideas that will be the summary of the principles that matter and the actions you take to fulfill that principle. This would be what I'd have used when I was on the run and just wanted to quickly check what I needed to do in a certain situation. A good example is:

Idea: People need to feel safe to feel trusted.

Actions:

Place the seats where there is a wall at the back and someone can only be approached from the front.
...

I will then have a section to explain those ideas properly - Explanation. This is for when you have more time to understand the rationale behind the ideas. This is where I will try convincing the reader why these ideas matter, why they work. I will share my own experience and any data I have to support the idea.

And lastly I will have a section for further reading - this is for people, like me, who are always skeptical about anything they read and want to form their own opinions (when they have the time to read up!).

The hearty company

Let me first define what I’m trying achieve, what do I mean when I say a hearty company.

The hearty company is an organization which has the following qualities,

Happiness: a hearty company is an organization where the people are happy to work. Happiness starts from the point where an employee feels excited and happy in the morning to go to work. It continues in her experience in working on projects at the company, in her conversations with her colleagues, in her interactions over the digital space. Happy is the workplace where the employees actually bond outside of the company's time.
Resilience: a hearty company does not break down during bad times. It's easy to be strong when the business is good but being able to survive when the business is bad, when resources are difficult is the biggest test. That is resilience and it is the biggest insurance that a company has to survive hardship.
Strength: a hearty company is strong. It has the strength to take on new challenges, it is confident that it will deliver and it will always win. You see that strength everywhere you go within the company, in every conversation you have. People feel like they know exactly what they are doing and what they are supposed to do. They feel they and their team has the ability to pull anything off and they have control over their work.
Fearlessness: a hearty company is fearless in it's actions. It can change directions quickly and move to new things and take up new challenges. People in such companies brag about how open and relaxed the work environment is. How they can voice their concerns without worrying about repercussions. You don't hear that there are political struggles going on in such organizations.
Flexibility: a hearty company is not rigid about it's rules and modes of operation. It knows that there are no perfect set of rules that a company can run by and it knows that rules that worked in the past may not work as the time and context changes. So it adapts, adjusts and transforms itself without a lot of red tape. The changes it makes to itself can also be to adapt to the changes in the business landscape.
Pride: and at the end a hearty company is proud of itself. People feel good working at the company. They feel good to tell their friends and family what they do and the company they work. They share with pride how they are different from others around them.

The recipe

The secret to a hearty company is simple.

A hearty company is made of just four ingredients in equal amounts. Get those ingredients right, get them balanced and you are guaranteed to get great results. It is at the end one of those recipes you just can’t get wrong if you have the ingredients right and do the steps right. It's been proven time and time, over hundreds of thousands of companies all around the world. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, no need to do a doctorate in organizational behavior. Just follow the steps to make sure you've got the four ingredients covered and you've got a winner.

So here are those ingredients.

In the rest of the posts on this thread I'm going to go through each of these ingredients and give you the exact steps that you need to take to make sure you have the full portion of that ingredient in your mix.

Looking forward to meeting you on my next post where I start with my favorite ingredient Passion.

Stay safe in these uncertain times. Stay home!

Next Chapter >

Top Software Company in Bangladesh | Kaz Software

Top Software Company in Bangladesh | Kaz Software

Kaz Software Blog

Top Software Company in Bangladesh | Kaz Software

The Cookbook: Persuasion

Alter casting

Yes ladder

Use because

You Frame

Social Proof

Further Reading

The Cookbook: Inspiring and Engaging People

Create a clear vision

Show and sell everyone your vision

Make it everyone’s vision by participation

Let everyone define the work scope

Assign roles based on interest and ideas

Keep work goals human sized and own-able

Create opportunities to show off work

Celebrate Victories

Use we and us and never you and them

Further Reading

The Cookbook: Finding and Hiring People (part 2)

Further Reading

The Cookbook: Finding and Hiring People (part 1)

Ingredient: Passion

Finding and hiring people

Further Reading

The cookbook for a hearty company

The hearty company

The recipe

KAZ SOFTWARE

Kaz Software Blog

Alter casting

Yes ladder

Use because

You Frame

Social Proof

Further Reading

Create a clear vision

Show and sell everyone your vision

Make it everyone’s vision by participation

Let everyone define the work scope

Assign roles based on interest and ideas

Keep work goals human sized and own-able

Create opportunities to show off work

Celebrate Victories

Use we and us and never you and them

Further Reading

Further Reading

Ingredient: Passion

Finding and hiring people

Further Reading

The hearty company

The recipe

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