Definition
Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice.
Explained by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy
So, anybody who’s been a part of building something big, and world class, and hard, knows it’s never the result of an individual. It’s always a great team, but teams consist of great people and by great, I mean, many of the leadership principles we’ve just been talking about.
It’s people who are smart and people who are right a lot and people who are inventive and people who are strategic and think big. People who are able to get into the details and who are able to move quickly and have high ownership and, you know, people that are able to be obsessed about what matters for customers. That’s what we mean by great people.
And those are the people we’re trying to find and those are the people that deliver the best results for customers. It’s part of the reason, by the way, that when we do hiring loops, the individual interviewers each take a leadership principle. That’s how we define great people.
And when you’re in a hiring loop and you’re in a hiring meeting, you have to ask yourself and the team has to keep asking, is this person at the bar? Do they raise the bar? And if the answer is no, you should not hire. Even if you have time pressure to hire people to get moving on a project, do not lower the bar.
The thing that matters most for customers and what we get done for the business and frankly, for a lot of all of us who are inspired by the people we work with is to work with people we respect and admire. Do not lower the bar. Who we hire is one of the most important decisions we make every day, every week, every year.
The reality is that one half of the hire and develop leadership principle is about hiring. The other is really about developing people. And as a manager, you have to be organized and thoughtful about what a person does well and what they need to grow.
One of the interesting things that’s happened over the last several years is that I think for a lot of companies and for a lot of people, it’s been harder to give people more critical feedback. It’s really much more popular to tell people what they’re great at and what their superpowers are.
And by the way, that is really important to recognize. But if you have great people and you have people who are truly hungry to learn and be curious and get better, they want to know they need to know what their growth areas are and leaders and managers have to be good at coaching.
It’s not a right for you to be a manager. You could be a really good individual contributor, but it doesn’t mean that you should be a manager. It’s a privilege to be a manager. And part of that privilege comes with the responsibility for thinking about and actively developing the people on your team and coaching them.
And I can tell you that at least myself and I know many people would say the same thing. The managers I worked for who had the biggest impact in my career were not necessarily the ones that were the nicest to me. I like when people are nice to me, don’t get me wrong. But what really made the difference were those leaders who recognized what I was good at but really identified where I needed to grow, to get to where I wanted to get and to realize my full potential.
And that’s what we have to do as managers of people. We want to help people grow and learn and get to their full potential.