When do founders "truly need" senior executives?

Every founder of a growing-stage company hopes to recruit top talents. But in reality, few founders can successfully find five or six genuine executives, build a real executive team, and elevate the company to a higher level.

Is it because there are almost no outstanding talents in the market?

What problems and responsibilities may the founder have?

Is it possible that the founder is just paying lip service to "genuine executives" and does not "truly need" them?

My observation is: One of the important reasons why many founders cannot find five or six genuine executives is that most of them do not actually "truly need" genuine executives in the first place.

Below, I list several scenarios that may trigger the founder's demand for genuine executives, but do not yet constitute a "genuine need":

◉The current No.1 subordinate is overloaded with tasks beyond his capacity, struggling to get things done. The founder can clearly see opportunities slipping away and gets extremely frustrated, so he does want to recruit some outstanding genuine executives. Especially after hearing how other companies' executive teams operate at private director meetings, he gets even more upset when he gets back. But is this a real need at this moment? Not necessarily. Once the frustration fades away, he thinks of the hard work the current No.1 subordinate has put in, recalls the days they went through together, has a heavy drinking session, and then the idea of recruiting new executives fades away. More often, his attention is diverted by other more important matters, and he does not realize the severity of this problem again until six months later.

◉ In the early stage of entrepreneurship, the founder has to make decisions on all major and minor matters. The current No.1 subordinates are all creative executors, making little contribution to directional decision-making. This is completely normal. But now the company has entered the growth stage, and the founder can no longer keep up with the workload all by himself. At this moment, he is particularly eager to find some "genuine executives" who are good at setting directions independently. However, although making decisions on every trivial matter is very tiring, it also brings a sense of achievement that "I feel I am becoming more and more brilliant". He swings between the two emotions: on the one hand, his temper gets worse and his voice gets louder, on the other hand, the middle and senior level staff cater to his wishes more and more. The two sides can stay in this state for an extremely long time.

◉ The company has grown larger and more complex, and the requirements for professional competence of personnel have risen rapidly. The existing No.1 subordinates are in charge of several directions, have a basic understanding of each direction but lack in-depth expertise. These No.1 subordinates also want to learn and progress, and the founder is willing to pay for their training, but their learning and growth are far too slow. At this time, the founder starts to think about recruiting genuine executives again. However, after meeting some so-called highly professional professional managers, especially feeling their pursuit of work-life balance and their slow, deliberate pace of planning everything for the long term, and hearing stories of failed external executive recruitment in other companies, he can't help but back down. He chooses to settle for second best, recruit some people to serve as professional deputy positions, and let them become the nourishment for the existing No.1 subordinates to grow up.

◉ Previously the founder did not see the point, was unwilling to pay high salaries, and thought those so-called "genuine executives" were not worth the high pay. Recently he has changed his mind (especially after hearing the compensation packages other companies offer to executives at private director meetings), so he decides that he will offer not only job titles, but also generous pay and stock options. In this case, the founder often believes that "genuine executives" will come pouring in, and all troubles will be solved easily. In essence, in the founder's mind, this problem is still something that can be solved just by spending more money — just like a man who thinks that as long as he is rich, he can find a perfect wife.

◉ Previously the HR team was incompetent, and not good at attracting high-caliber talents. The new head of HR has rich experience in large well-known companies, has great exposure, and presents well, so he can bring me better candidates. Such a head of HR can indeed let the founder meet more outstanding people, but this does not mean that the founder "truly needs" genuine executives. Even for a very long period of time, the founder will attribute the poor performance of executives to HR's poor recruitment, and is reluctant to start his own transformation.

All the situations listed above are superficial triggers that make founders "feel they need genuine executives".

But at this stage, most founders are far from being mentally prepared at the fundamental level.

As a result, they act rather casually — they use practice as training, and start the "playboy/playgirl" style of recruiting, testing, and dismissing people.

Three to five years pass, only a very small number of founders can get through this swamp, and often at the cost of countless sacrifices for one final success. Most people, even after paying the price of countless failures, cannot achieve the final success. Quite a number of founders, after experiencing setbacks and disappointments, become more distrustful of others and full of resentment towards the world.

So when is the time that the founder "truly needs" genuine executives?

Below I will describe five conditions.

Condition 1: When the founder is truly willing to be led.

The premise of being willing to be led is to know what you do not know, and be able to admit that you do not know.

Is it hard to "admit you don't know"? It is very difficult. And with the development of AI, it has become even harder. AI prolongs the time that "leaders think they know everything", because information and opinions can be obtained very quickly.

To be psychologically "willing to be led", the underlying difficulty is not only the clear awareness of one's own ability limitations, but more importantly, the difficulty of "sharing power", learning to lose partial control, and improving the "ability to be led" — the person you want to recruit is no longer just a doer, but someone who may lead you.

At the same time, "being willing to be led" does not mean "abdicating power" or "letting go completely". Let's look at a real scenario: How can the founder and the No.1 executive reach an agreement on the organizational design of the department? Many founders either completely ignore the matter and leave it alone, or demand that everything must follow their will, without an intermediate state of co-creation.

The intermediate state of co-creation is exactly the state where "leadership" and "the ability to be led" are balanced. This balance requires the founder to cultivate himself, and at the same time learn to find and judge those genuine executives who are good at balancing "leadership" and "the ability to be led". Otherwise, you can't clap with one hand.

There is another practical test for being willing to be led: Does the founder want to recruit a department head, or a company executive? If he only wants to recruit a department head, essentially he does not need a genuine executive, but just a "senior middle manager", and should not expect that person to take the initiative to assume cross-departmental collaborative responsibilities.

Condition 2: When the founder is able to handle old affections and complex relationships.

If the founder cannot deal with low-performing key No.1 subordinates in a timely manner, cannot adjust complex relationships, and cannot cut off ties with former subordinates, why would outstanding talents want to wade into this muddy water?

Outstanding talents know that in many scenarios with complex relationships, years of hard work can be overturned by a single sentence like "blood is thicker than water" or "family relationships come first".

Excellent founders should take the initiative to remove non-performance-related obstacles for genuine executives, instead of taking all these complex relationships as part of executives' normal work and normal expectations.

Condition 3: When the founder has a sufficiently grand vision.

What does a sufficiently grand vision mean? When the company is just founded, thinking too much can easily lead to aiming too high beyond actual capabilities. When the company has developed to a certain scale, if there is no mission, vision and values, it is easy to get lost in opportunities and growth, and fall into opportunism in talent recruitment.

Apart from whether the enterprise itself has a vision, whether the founder himself wants to become an entrepreneur is more critical. To become an entrepreneur, he needs to go through several rounds of transformation on the basis of existing small achievements. For example, he cannot pursue absolute emotional freedom, he needs to transfer power to processes, mechanisms and systems, build the organization, prioritize justice over benevolence, take more social responsibilities, and so on. Every hurdle is not easy to cross.

When the vision is not grand enough, the founder does not need to ask for trouble and wade into the muddy water of "genuine executives". A group of familiar, obedient and reliable people is enough. There is no need to invite several "hard-to-please masters" to serve, or hurt each other.

When the vision is not grand enough, everyone seems to be a problem in the founder's eyes. When the vision is grand enough, his perspective will change subtly: compared to that goal, each of us has a big gap to fill. How can we ordinary people leverage each other's strengths to achieve extraordinary things together? Everyone becomes a co-founding partner who learns and explores together, instead of indulging in blaming others for being imperfect.

Condition 4: When the founder has figured out what he can offer to high-caliber talents.

If the founder is addicted to achievement motivation and does not transform to influence motivation, from "I want to win" to "I want more people to win", then even if he recruits outstanding top talents, they will easily fall into a competitive PK relationship. In this PK, the founder is obviously in a favorable position, and can quickly verify that "I am better than you".

In addition, the idea that "if I offer high salary, profit sharing and stock options, others should work wholeheartedly for me" is still a sign of unclear thinking. Some entrepreneurs are willing to pay money, but are unwilling to give power and recognition.

Genuine executives definitely do not want to be treated as mere tools. What they want is shared alignment on mission and vision, sufficient space and power to get things done, opportunities for self-fulfillment, equal respect in interpersonal relationships, rather than just a job with high pay.

Condition 5: When the founder can face up to his own aesthetic standards and preferences for talents.

Talent aesthetic standards do not refer to what kind of people you appreciate, but what kind of people you are capable of managing and leading.

If the founder cannot examine and face up to his own talent aesthetic standards, a common phenomenon will easily occur: he recruits a group of top talents with very different traits, who cannot collaborate with each other, and he himself cannot manage them well. As a result, everything is in a mess and ends in disappointment.

Some people look excellent, but they are not suitable for you. The founder must have in-depth conversations with himself, deeply understand his own strengths and limitations, and then judge what kind of people can complement each other to achieve greater results, what kind of people cannot go very far with him, what kind of people are easy to form a purely transactional relationship with him, and what kind of people are easy to end up with misplaced devotion.

The above five conditions can also be directly transformed into five self-inspection questions for founders:

Am I willing to be led?

Can I remove the obstacles of complex relationships for the success of genuine executives?

Do I truly want to become an "entrepreneur"?

Can I provide opportunities for self-fulfillment for genuine executives?

What kind of people am I capable of managing and leading?

Learning to get along with genuine executives is an odyssey that every founder must go through. No founder is born with the ability to attract, develop and retain genuine executives.

The core point of this article is: There is still a long way to go from feeling that you need something to truly needing it.

And "truly needing, and making others feel that they are truly needed", is the key to finding those five or six genuine executives.

We hope that every founder of a growing-stage company can take fewer detours and avoid wasting human resources, build his own genuine executive team faster, and elevate the company to a higher level.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Chief Organization Officer" (ID: COO-STRATEGY), Author: Fang Shengtao, published with authorization from 36Kr.