Self Accountability is Every Hiring Manager's Dream 🛌
Everyone wants employees that can diagnose and solve problems, here's how to find them
Self Accountability is Every Hiring Manager's Dream 🛌
Hey Everyone,
Last week I wrote about curiosity, a trait I prize in candidates.
As a reminder, I’m going in-depth on the specific traits that I look for in a salesperson. Here are my goals:
Provide a bit more insight into how I evaluate a candidate’s traits so you can set up your system for the roles you hire for.
Help you evaluate candidates for sales positions (if you ever have the need).
Keep me honest (I’ve been interviewing A LOT of Account Executives lately, so it doesn’t hurt to remind myself of the process).
Here’s a brief reminder of the three top traits I look for in salespeople/Account Executives:
Curiosity-Is this person genuinely curious about other people and organizations? Are they eager to learn, and do they ask great second and third-level questions to understand the prospect?
Self Accountability - Can this person diagnose areas for improvement, design systems to help them improve, and successfully apply, their system?
Coachability - Can this person accept and, more importantly, apply feedback? Can they do so judiciously (i.e., can they determine what feedback is valuable and isn’t?)
That’s it. Yes, there are other things I look for and measure, but they’re not nearly as important as those three.
This week we’re on to self-accountability - the trait that consistently delivers the most varied candidate answers.
Self Accountability is Every Hiring Manager's Dream 🛌
Pretend you’d like to improve something. What would you do? What steps would you take?
If you’re a hiring manager, wouldn’t it be great if your employees could accurately diagnose problems and construct solutions?
Well, my goal with this post is to discuss how I measure a candidate’s ability to think critically about their own improvement. I call this trait self-accountability, and if you’re like me, you’ll love it.
Why prize self-accountability?🏆
I’ll level with you; I prize self-accountability because it makes my life easier. That’s right; my motivations for evaluating this trait are entirely selfish.
Working is hard, managing people is harder, and managing a team in hyper-growth mode is hardest. Effectively managing people is a tremendous commitment, and even if you want to, you probably don’t have the time and energy to do it as well as you would like (at least without burning yourself out first).
Enter self-accountability. If you can hire people who can successfully diagnose their deficiencies and, even better, overcome them, they'll do some of the work for you. It’s every overstretched manager’s dream come true!
Evaluating Self Accountability✅
Evaluating self-accountability is relatively simple. During the interview process, I will ask the candidate a version of the same question I posed at the beginning of this post.
What is something that you wanted to improve, personally or professionally? Walk me through how you went about deciding it was something you wanted to improve, how you improved it, and the outcome. I’m interested in learning about your process more than anything else.1
Here’s what I’m looking for in the candidate’s answer:
They clearly state what they wanted to improve and why
They sought out experts
They built or tapped into a community for support and accountability
They used data to refine their approach and improve the probability of a good outcome
This one is rare, but if they failed, I want them to be able to articulate why they failed and what they learned. Often you can do everything right and you won’t succeed - that’s just life, and someone who can separate the outcome from the process has a healthy amount of abstraction and perception.
What it looks like👀
Here’s an example of what a great answer looks like:
I’m not a runner, but I decided to run a marathon a few years ago. So I went on YouTube, googled a marathon training plan that seemed doable, and joined a weekly running club that met near my house with some of my friends. Before running, I could barely break a 10-minute mile, but now a 10-minute mile is my “easy” pace.
Oddly enough, I didn’t end up running the marathon I was training for because I got hurt. But I enjoyed the process, got smart about recovery, and run at least two half or full marathons a year.
Typically I’d follow an answer with some clarifying questions to investigate how deeply the candidate thinks about their process. Specifically, I want to know about setbacks, times when they didn’t improve, or when they lacked discipline - but overall, an answer like the one above only happens about 10% of the time.
Keep in mind🧠
Determining someone’s self-accountability can be my favorite part of an interview. Here are a few stray observations from my experience:
Note that the example answer above is relatively short. One interesting aspect of self-accountability is that those who practice it well tend to be quick and straightforward about their experience and process. Meanwhile, those that miss this question will ramble for minutes.
The better answers are almost always personal. I don’t know why, but maybe it’s because the candidates are closer to the improvement or feel more pride?
Some strong candidates will drone aimlessly, and some weak ones will nail it. A poor answer to this question does not disqualify a candidate from the job, but it lets me know they may need more help diagnosing issues and crafting solutions.
If you prize self-accountable workers, you also have to be very clear on your mission and values. Otherwise, you risk your team being too autonomous and making bad decisions that conflict with your organization's ideals.2
This is a great question to ask candidates that may not have much work experience. I once mock interviewed two middle schoolers who absolutely nailed this answer (after a bit of prodding) and blew me away with their resourcefulness.
Recently I interviewed a woman who had the best answer I’ve ever heard. A couple of years ago, she decided that learning how to think more like a product manager would help her career - a few months later, she launched a company with what she had learned!
As always, thank you for reading! Next week I’ll discuss coachability, another very telling trait with a high degree of answer variance.
Finally, I’m genuinely curious about what traits you look for in the candidates you’re evaluating. If you have any that you feel strongly about please send them my way!
In my experience, you must be explicitly clear about what you want to learn, which is why I ask specifically about the candidate’s process rather than just the outcome. Everyone can get lucky and notch some wins without a process, but a process ensures that they’ll win consistently.