If you don’t have the right talent, your company cannot survive or prosper. You cannot put in place talent recruitment, development, compensation, and exit plans until you know what the talent requirements are.
This document focuses on management and staff, excluding the board of directors, founders/C-Suite, and advisory board. The following is a broad framework. You need to customize it for your specific situation.
To succeed, a company’s target customers must perceive they are obtaining competitively differentiated value over time.
The four 4 questions you must answer are:
#1 What is that competitively differentiated value?
#2 Which components of the business framework1 are required to deliver that value?
#3 What roles are required, and how will each role help deliver that value?
#4 What are the characteristics of the person in that role?
The answers to the 4 key questions depend upon the specific situation of the company.
Where is the company now, what’s the future direction, and what are the upcoming challenges? Some of the possible situations include:
Startup has no MVP2 (Minimum Viable Product) yet, is targeting a major market, and hopes to grow to 100+ employees.
#1 What is that competitively differentiated value?
At this point the founders are still figuring this out.
#2 Which components of the business framework1 are required to deliver that value?
The startup is focused on just a few components of business framework, and only a few pieces of the business model – who are target customers, what are their needs?
#3 What roles are required, and how will each role help deliver that value?
There are no detailed role descriptions. Everyone working on everything.
#4 What are the characteristics of the person in that role?
Everyone must be comfortable in chaos, dealing with daily new problems, have the ability to make rapid personal changes, and be relentless in overcoming obstacles.
Startup, has Product/Market Fit3, a small niche market, and will grow to a handful of employees.
#1 What is that competitively differentiated value?
The founders have determined this.
#2 Which components of the business framework1 are required to deliver that value?
The founders have identified and documented this.
#3 What roles are required, and how will each role help deliver that value?
There must be clearly defined roles for a stable business. The days of chaos should be over.
#4 What are the characteristics of the person in that role?
What are the necessary skills, experience, values, morals, and ethics to carry out that role? Each person must have the ability to learn and change over time as the company continues to evolve.
Large company, with Product/Market Fit.
#1 What is that competitively differentiated value?
This must be documented.
#2 Which components of the business framework1 are required to deliver that value?
All the components are required for continued success.
#3 What roles are required and how will each role help deliver that value?
For each role, there must be a clear definition of the future challenges, issues, changes, obstacles to overcome and expected outcomes for that role.
#4 What are the characteristics of the person in that role?
Focus on the skills, experience, values, morals, and ethics to carry out the role. Every company has a small number of roles that enable the bulk of competitively differentiated value. These roles are not based on management hierarchy. You must identify and target these roles.
Large company that has lost Product/Market Fit, the market is shrinking, there is intense competition, and the company must be transformed.
#1 What is that competitively differentiated value?
At this point the company does not have competitively differentiated value with a large percentage of customers recommending the company to others. The leadership must rethink who the target customers are, what their problems are, and how the company can provide a solution which solves those problems. In some cases, such as many paper-based publications, there is no future value and the company will disappear at some point.
#2 Which components of the business framework1 are required to deliver that value?
All components are required. It’s likely all components will undergo major changes.
#3 What roles are required, and how will each role help deliver that value?
First there must be the right board of directors and CEO. The current board and directors got the company into this situation. Leadership transformation begins at the top.
#4 What are the characteristics of the person in that role?
The board of directors and CEO are dealing with the same issues as an early stage startup. Everyone must be comfortable in chaos, dealing with daily new problems, have the ability to make rapid personal changes, and be relentless in overcoming obstacles.
Some of the challenges in determining talent requirements include:
#A Many large companies do not realize they no longer have Product/Market Fit, and are hiring the talent based on invalid historical requirements.
#B Many startups attempting to scale don’t understand that the talent that got the company to this point is not what is going to help them create a successful future
#C Many startups simply do not have the CEO and founder talent to succeed. There is some combination of the founders: not understanding the customers problems, not understanding what solution is required, and not able to attract the necessary talent and help that talent work together.
Your next steps:
Define your current situation, based upon facts. Your advisory board can challenge your thinking and help you understand your company’s situation.
Footnotes
1 Business Framework has inter-related 10 components:
#1 What can only the CEO do
#2 Company purpose
#3 Values, morals, and ethics
#4 Customer perceived value proposition
#5 Business model
#6 Talent management
#7 Capital and cash management
#8 Investor management
#9 Exit management
#10 Governance
2 A product or service with just enough features to delight early customers, and to provide feedback for future development.
3 Product/Market Fit. Marc Andreessen’s definition of product/market fit:
“The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You’re hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can.” On product/market fit for startups
Koor and Associates 