3 - Knowing What You Need with Workspace's Erin Roeder

Masters Of Employee Development

Hiring the right people is one of the most challenging things for any leader - and when you’re an emerging company, it gets even more complicated. Erin Roeder is the COO at Workspace, an enterprise SaaS company for commercial real estate. She joins Mike in this episode of Masters of Employee Development to share the pointers to building effective leadership skills. Erin and Mike talk about hiring people who align with the company’s overall vision and objective, the challenges faced in the early years of your leadership and how to overcome them. Listen in!

EPISODE 03 SUMMARY & HIGHLIGHTS

Do you have any advice for someone in the early phase of hiring or developing someone?

4:49

For someone in the early phase of hiring, they've got to know what they need. As a manager, if you don't know clearly why you're hiring, it's very hard to see succeed. Because you can't hold yourself accountable for a person gaining the skills to contribute in that way. So figure out what you need, and what success in a role looks like. And then back into the steps to get there. What are some of the major challenges experienced on developing leadership?

6:42

One of the challenges is to cultivate creativity and vision. You need to find a way to execute your idea, find smaller building blocks, and enable those who display that vision and creativity. What do you mean by finding your vision?

8:38

If you think about the job of a leader, a super important non-negotiable component is that the leader should get everything done. And that's sometimes harder than you would think. The other job of the leader is to follow through on the promises, build the systems, tools and processes to get it done. We have to find our vision for the organization in five years. Tell us about your leadership pipeline, how you are identifying people with a vision and creativity.

10:37

I believe that the best individual contributor should be on a path to management or leadership, and they can be the same or two different things. In the development of leadership, we're looking for some core skills - judgment, ability to motivate a team, ability to listen to multiple perspectives with an open mind, and then come to your own conclusion, an understanding of accountability. Those are some of the things that we think about in coachability because so much of leadership and management depends on being able to learn and adapt based on the feedback that you get from the people you work with. Things to look for in a team.

14:02

One thing is to be specific. There's a baseline intellectualism that we look for. We have a standard tool called a Wonderlic that we use as a first screening mechanism. If you don't score a certain score as a baseline on the intellectual component of the Wonderlic, we stop there. We have exercises for different roles that are designed to assess things like problem-solving, writing skills, communication skills, technical skills. So depending on the role, we may look at that. The other thing that's important for us to know is what it means to be a fit with a company. We evaluate how a candidate maps against those five values. And that one is a little bit more of a feel, and a little bit less evidence based. Do you have any closing advice for our listeners?

21:48

I’d say invest in yourself. Find other people who are managing teams or processes in a different way that you can learn from. Find a coach or peer but make sure you keep moving too because that's how you can best sustain growth in the team, in any organization.

KEY QUOTES:

2:41-2:48

“I think the first three months we set ou,t as we do with all our employees merely is -what you're responsible for doing is learning.”

4:10-4:16

“We break our organizational planning into quarterly periods into 3, 6, 9 and 12 month intervals and goals.”

5:30-5:49

“We look at the scorecard, both as a hiring tool and throughout the employee lifecycle. So before we go to hire anybody, we have a scorecard that says, Okay, here are the outcomes, not the attributes, not the process. Here are the outcomes that this room needs to be achieving..

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