Let Me Speak To A Manager

Over the past 25 years, Frank and Ian have hired hundreds of people. Some were exceptional while others were spectacularly terrible. In this podcast, we break down our hiring miscues in hopes that you might avoid some of our pain.

• Your best employees won’t necessarily be your best friends
• How the “Just Like Me Bias” leads to poor hiring
• Fighting your first impression which rarely translates to a good hiring decision
• Is there any value in being known as a “tough interviewer?”
• Two parties need to make a decision in an interview. Act as if you are being evaluated as the interviewer.
• The problem with focusing on GPA as an interviewer
• What happens when interviews don’t consider how well someone might fit in with your culture
• What can we learn about someone who was “too loyal” to their company?
• Are you diluting the effectiveness of your interview by looking for too many attributes?
• It’s about the answers, not your questions
• How to ask paired questions to better understand a candidate’s true default behaviors

Frank Cava runs a vastly profitable and growing real estate business. But when he left a cushy executive job in 2010, he had an old truck, a couple of townhome rentals in Charlottesville, and plenty of free time. In this episode, we explore what Frank might have done differently when starting his business, based on what he knows today.

• Frank’s first advice for startup founders – Find somewhere to go every day and get out of your house
• Set up regular business expenses to motivate you to find revenue
• Don’t discount your experiences just because they happened at a large company
• How quickly should you hire employees?
• How Frank would think differently about finances if starting over
• You are not really in business until you can consistently generate and convert leads
• What the first months feel like when you leave a big company to start your own thing (what really happens)
• The only type of people you should take advice from when you start
• Why it is easier for others to see your problems than seeing them yourself as a startup founder
• Enjoy the slow moments when you are starting out (you will miss them)
• Pace is less important than direction when starting a business
• “Do for a decade what others won’t and you will live the rest of your life the way others can’t”

A theme that Frank and Ian notice in successful people is a propensity for action. Rather than tinkering forever on the creative process, they get to a 70% solution and test. Seth Godin calls this endless tinkering loop a “failure to ship.” In this podcast, we explore the psychology behind procrastination and talk through the real-world ramifications and rewards of mastering this problem.

• Great music albums are rarely over-produced and neither are careers
• Colin Powell’s “40/70” rule
• The importance of simple rules – “Is it built in wood or brick?”
• The most important factor before investing in a startup
• Stop studying and start believing in yourself
• Evaluating risk with your personal capital at stake
• The difference between a novice and a professional
• Doing more of anything makes doing it once seem less daunting
• If you are going to flop, you might as well do it quickly
• Done is better than perfect

We started with a podcast about “dumb things we’ve said as managers,” but quickly realized the content would fill an entire season. So we went with an equally important topic about the things we weren’t confident or perceptually aware enough to say as young managers.

• Why new managers try to hide problems from their boss
• The stigma behind saying “I don’t know” as a manager
• The difference between a receptive and a proactive manager
• Why all new managers struggle with delegating
• How a manager should think about their time in terms of paygrade
• Don’t fixate on numbers, concentrate on resistance
• People are able to receive feedback on vastly different schedules
• Why it is OK to tell someone you are disappointed
• The difference between “I’m frustrated” and “I’m disappointed”
• How to trust your gut when you sense something is off with an employee
• The most underused management tool
• Can you overdo appreciation?

In this show, we use an example of Ian’s horrendously bad golf game to illustrate a common problem people face in their careers. Self–handicapping is a cognitive strategy by which people avoid effort in the hopes of keeping potential failure from hurting self-esteem.

• You can’t change if you won’t admit that you are unhappy
• Are you self-handicapping or just controlling the narrative?
• Your network can’t help you if you are not honest about what you want
• Why people say silly things like “Money doesn’t buy happiness.”
• Do you spend time around people who think small?
• How much of your professional network resides within the same company?
• Your network won’t help you until you agree to be vulnerable
• Why your ego is more important than your goal
• It is easier to list your accomplishments than articulate your goals (rearview versus dashboard)
• If you are not willing to share your goal, you’re not serious about it
• The power of making public predictions