1 Managing for Values
At Quickskill, we shun the hubris of thinking we can find a way to peer into the character of a person to see what is there and what’s missing. No personality is stagnant and primordial, anyway. A person is always changing and what becomes of a person is largely about the interplay between the unknowable innateness of that person and how those qualities interact with the culture and environment at large.
Instead, we believe that the culture and workforce should be built upon corporate values that are fanatically guarded by management. A year ago, Quickskill’s leadership started honing our recruitment process by distilling those values. We looked at what had gotten us off the ground and what had delayed our growth. We found five key values that seemed common to everyone who had significantly contributed to our progress:
- Commitment – Jumping in with two feet. No hedging. Giving it one’s all. No toe dipping.
- Ownership – None of the work is beneath any of us and every part of the business is of concern to all of us. All the work is all of ours.
- Integrity – Trust in each other and trust from our members is everything so we need to ALWAYS do the right thing, even when difficult to do so.
- Learning – Continually up our game, innovate, and find intrinsic value in knowing about each other and the work lives of our members.
- Service – To each other and to our members.
To be sure, there are other key qualities that often come up. We work cross-border and among several cultures. So, for example, we also value something called “code switching,” the ability to speak at ease with many different sorts of people, from our most aggressive executive member to our most humble PA.
But the key values that we call our “COILS” are what we always come back to.
2Values in Recruiting
And here is how that plays into our recruiting: We are not necessarily out there looking for people who today exude those values. If they do, they are probably already in a good place. Instead, we go looking for people who are ready to embrace our values and develop themselves around them.
When we do recruiting well, we don’t find ourselves turning down people so much as encouraging people to self-select out.
Those who sign on are sold on the opportunity of working with Quickskill. So when it doesn’t work out, they are unlikely to quit without much equivocation. But when we’ve sat them down and gotten them to look honestly at the situation, it is like a breath of fresh oxygen for all parties. Generally, the employee will acknowledge that it was not the right fit to begin with and, again, self-select out.
