YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeff Hunter

lines on the record: 120
first: 2020-01-21
most recent: 2020-01-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“A team that's engaged in that work is just going to compound and get better over time. And I think a lot of people, as an example, look at Bridgewater and sort of walk away with a lot of things. But one of the things I can absolutely can verify is that when Ray goes out and talks about how critical the culture was to their success, I believe that is true. And I believe that the culture of recognizing problems and using them using those lemons to make lemonade and help people get to clarity and constantly learning and compounding that learning, that's mostly a cultural attribute. It's a culture that gets demonstrated by the leader, that gets lived by the people, and that in absence of that, I think you're based. Banking on luck.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Communications from the leader, you'd see somebody who is revered inside the organization who is not hiding from mistakes, is bringing them to light, is engaging in feedback in the way that I talked about, and is helping people make sense of what this means and how they can get better in their investment in portfolio management decisions going forward.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I believe, and obviously I've worked in at least one world-class financial institution. We have a number of clients right now who are investors, private equity, venture capital, alternatives and partners. What I say is like more so than anything else, any other business I've ever seen. You guys are trying to beat your own minds. Because your own minds are what lead you into bad investments, your own biases, et cetera. And so how can we use that to improve and get better at noticing our blind spots and designing effectively so that we can make ever better investment decisions? So practically the way you'd see that is you'd see”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, if I was looking at data externally, like not talking to people, what I would be looking for is patterns of leadership, A, taking responsibility for what's happening, and B, clarifying and using bad outcomes to drive future improvements.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This must be why so I think it's a really good point you're bringing up that the more time gap there gets between a cause and effect the worse human beings are at diagnosing it.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Yeah, that's such another cool point. There's this other cognitive, it's a little bit related, the recency thing, but. The more distance there is between cause and effect, the worse we are thinking about it. And you see this in big things like climate change, right, where it's little things that a lot of little things add up to a big catastrophic change or where I buy my SUV today and it isn't 15 years until that's polluted enough to make me concern. You see this all the time when people are trying to make sense of things that if there's a gap between when they do something and the feedback they get on that or the result they get on that their mind wants to make excuses about why things happen because it can't make sense of like, okay, let's go back a couple of weeks when we did that. That's really what happened. Our mind is very bad at that. It's very good in the moment. It's very good like, oh, I'm experiencing this thing.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In many different ways. And so getting to the root of like, what is it about the way I communicate that is ineffective? What is that thing? And we aren't in that proposing like you learn the skill of effective communication or you got to do that. We're just saying like just that's a reality given the goal you have you don't do this well And so now what can we do so we can go find strengths that you have that we can leverage so you can achieve the goal in a different way ignoring that sort of underlying root cause of the ongoing dysfunction or the ongoing problem, I think is a path of failing to get better, failing to unleash your potential. Just keep experiencing the same reality at different forms and being surprised that the same thing keeps happening to you. Well, that's a very different definition of being in stasis.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Yeah, so that's another, it's a beautiful segue into the deeper thing, which is, and this is something, again, I'm grateful for Bridgewater because it's very much embedded in their thinking, is like a lot of stuff is just a pattern that keeps emerging. Like it's the same thing again and again, just taking different forms. And so what you really want to get is to the root of the thing that's driving those different bad outcomes. There's so many different examples of this, but if you're in a situation where you're like, you know, I've talked to the, I keep talking to my employees and they keep not getting what I'm saying and they keep, you know, messing up and not delivering on time. A, that's not about them. That's about you. And B, that's not like a bunch of different instances. That's one instance repeating it.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's an entire week, you know, if there's a week between coaching sessions, there's an entire week of experience there. What is the most important thing that's happened that I could use this coaching session and this coach's expertise to help me get to turn that confusion into productive learning and clarity?”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do you deal with the biases that are inherent in that? You know, recency bias is one we deal with all the time. We coach a lot of people, a lot of executives. We found over time gathering lots and lots of data on this is that the problems that our clients bring to us in the coaching session often is completely biased by recency. So something happens just before they enter the room and then that's what they want to talk about. And it's an authentic problem. It's a real thing that they're dealing with, but often it's not the most important thing. So again, if you want to be involved in unleashing your potential good critical judgment, good critical thinking, you have to be aware of things like what is the most important thing to bring to this situation? Because it can't just be like the thing that happens two to three hours before I walk into the room.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“why I react in certain ways and certain situations. What is the information I've missed in the past? How would missing that information apply to this situation? All elements of what I would broadly call personal mastery, a sense that I think have been celebrated in many cultures and many disciplines, including martial arts and other things, about understanding that your mind is the ultimate tool you have to deploy in sharpening that tool, not through a skills perspective, but from a getting to know the tool and understanding what it's good at and what it's not good at and what it misses and is insufficient for and it's sufficient for. It's sort of that experimental curiosity sort of way. That is to me the root of all good critical thinking. And then the second step is”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is going to be important to achieving your goal or unleashing your potential. That's a good question. But you're missing something. And so if you don't start from the perspective of the way I'm perceiving the world is a artifact of the way my mind works, it's not reality. I'm not perceiving reality. I'm perceiving what my mind lets me perceive or sort of lets through the perceptual filters. And so the better I can build a sense of myself.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just the basic mechanics of cognition as far as I understand it is the world is this incredibly complex and our mind is filtering out tons of information all the time. And part of that is just literally the way they're perceptions system is designed. And part of that is like you got to take in gigabytes upon gigabytes of information per second and you can only process megabytes. And so a lot of it's going to go somewhere, but it ain't going to go into critical thinking. And so the first thing you really have to do is start with that reality of yourself. You are missing something. Every time you move forward in the world and try to take something, you're missing something. Absolutely positively. Whether the thing you're missing,”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Different people have very different experiences there, but for me, I don't think that I could have achieved that without going through that experience. And the other thing is I think Bridgewater is just a great place to learn how to think. Most of us just don't think that well. School does not teach us how to think. School teaches us how to take tests. And so most of the times we're confronted with the wrong data or too much data or we don't know how to sort things out. We don't know how to describe things. All these sort of cognitive thinking or critical thinking problems and bridgewater just invested a huge amount of time in helping me get better at that. So those are the two big things I learned and I'm grateful for both.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Bridgewater was an incredible experience and one I'm very grateful for. So the first, probably unsurprisingly consistent with what I've been saying, I learned so much about myself in that context and that environment. You've heard me use the word confusion, umpteen times so far in our conversation. That really struck me while I was at Bridgewater because I was confused about a lot of stuff. And when I realized that it was my confusion, it was the incident.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“could have gone better redesigning and just turning that loop constantly. And if you do that well and you compound that knowledge, you will achieve big goals in record time. And if you don't do that and instead just jump into it and start flailing around, you'll either won't achieve the goal or it'll take a lot more time, money, and attention than you thought.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when people jump in and start doing stuff and then they produce, they get lucky and they produce a few good outcomes or they get unlucky and they start freaking out, they start moving faster, right? They make carebrain decisions. They start moving faster. There's no learning. There's no improving. As you said so correctly, there's no compounding of this. You're just active. And then if you achieve the goal at all, it's going to be late because it's just so much waste, so much wasted effort. And as things go on, the waste and the confusion compounds and builds upon itself. What you want to do is be learning really well. You want to always be in a place where you are making sense of your confusion, figuring out what was insufficient in your model, what are you learning about?”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Yeah. So something I talk to people a lot about is don't confuse time on task with speed to goal. And what I mean by that is let's say we sort of pick a goal out in the future and we get right to work. We just we're working and we're doing stuff. And then we produce a few small wins. So we feel great about that. Well, the thing you're measuring against is how long does it take to get to the goal, which is many weeks or months in the future. It's not how long it took to get to the first win. You want to actually learn really well in the beginning so you can go increasingly faster over time.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of extra time to talk about what really is the design and can you imagine the different ways this will go wrong and can we improve that before we actually go to production and how does this team work together in what kinds of standards will we hold and all those kinds of things and the American companies would be like we got to get metal in the press as fast as possible and they do it and then of course like there'd be all sorts of line quality problems or things that don't work and you know the people are against each other they're confused they're not dealing with it and so low quality cars went out the other side and as a proud owner of an American car i'll just say i think they've solved those problems talking about the 80s here so i don't get angry letters from ford”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I love the way you're saying that when I was, yeah, I don't know, maybe late 80s or something, I was talking to someone. And at that point in time, Japanese car companies were just killing the American car companies. Remember the late 70s through the 80s. There was this whole problem where the import cars were just so superior in terms of quality and efficiency. I talked to a professor who studied a lot of that and they said, here's the secret. The Japanese companies released cars just as fast as the American companies do, but they released them at lower cost and higher quality. And the way they do that is they go really slow in the beginning so they can go really fast at the end. And American companies go really fast in the beginning and always have to go slow at the end. And I said, can you tell me what that means? He said, sure. So the Japanese companies will take...”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, sure, no, you can. See, yeah, here's the thing about life. There is such a thing as luck. It just really screws us up because you go to the Google ad, you click on it, you find this great recruiter, you're like, oh my gosh, it's like, no, you just got lucky. You beat the odds.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Detail again, look for patterns and evidence of persons the recruiter's been successful hiring for that kind of position, get as much evidence as you can about that, make the match, and then invest in the relationship to see if you guys can really become excellent together.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did that in a timely and effective way? Can you talk to the hiring managers those recruiters have worked with and see whether those employees stuck? They were the one of five or two of five. And so I think it's just that process. A lot of times, again, it's all just another one of those as Ray Dalio would say. A lot of times, we're confused about what we want. We sort of rush out and pick the first available thing. We're then disappointed in the results, but can't really get clear on where we failed in that. And we just keep cycling through. We're not clear on our goals. We're not clear on the measures, any of those things. So I think the best advice I have is you just have to take the extra cycles to really be specific about those things.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's not much different than trying to hire a person. So a lot of the previous advice holds, like, are you clear on what you're hiring for? Are you clear that this person has been successful hiring that kind of person? Not just, I see a whole bunch of mistakes made when managers say, oh, I got to go hire a software engineer. So I'm going to go to somebody who's hired software engineers. That's too general. Like you're looking for specific skill classes. You're looking for different ranges of experiences. You're looking for something that's much more particular than just a software engineer. I think it's worth the extra time both to visualize what that is more in depth as well as when you're talking to recruiters to ask questions about whether they've actually do they have evidence they've filled those jobs that they”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then the recruiter is going to get better and better. I think if you go out and just try to pick a recruiter and hope they're going to deliver value to you, it's again like hiring. One out of five chances it's going to be great. Two out of five, it's going to be, you're going to need to work on it. you know, two out of five chances is going to be a disaster. Again, having hired lots and lots of”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That not everybody can do that, not everybody wants to do that. And I understand that. Listen, I think that there are recruiters who think of it like hiring. There's people who you want to have a relationship with over an extended period of time. And you want to invest in them so that you can unleash their greatness and so they can get to know you. And I think all good vendor relationships, whatever they may be, have that quality. You're forming a partnership with that person over the long period of time. And that as that partnership is built and trust is built in that through putting a job into the queue and watching what happens and giving feedback and doing what I think all good high quality relationships and partnerships do.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it's very difficult. So first of all, I just want to state that when I was a part of the recruiting organization at Electronic Arts and ran, you know, recruiting was part of my remit at Dolby or I ran recruiting a bridgewater. I sort of thought that being able to recruit people was something that we should be good at and we shouldn't depend on people outside the organization. So the way I approach that is different than how a lot of people approach that. I would build those what we call sourcing organizations inside the businesses.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can have an objective sort of sense of your own reality. Don't get caught up in everything that's going on. Try to make sense of it. Try to look down upon yourself and see what you're going through and see how it feels and try to make sense of that and get others to help you make sense of it. And so I'd say, you know, from that perspective, from very early age, that was a core part of how I talk to them as a parent. Again, when I was being a good parent and I had plenty of times where I was just as confused and overwhelmed by trying to raise successful, happy, healthy, and productive adults as any other human being on the face of the earth.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At different stages of their life, right? So when their toddlers, the way you help make sense of the world is you keep them alive, don't go in the street. You're not trying to like help them make sense of like physics and why cars are bad for you. You're just like, hey, you got to stay on the street. But as they get older, you're increasingly stepping into that sense maker role and helping them sort of put together the picture so they can navigate, make sense of it themselves. But from my kids and I my kids still talk about this from a very, very early age when they were, I don't know, preschool, I would tell them, you are not your mind. And of course, a parent saying that somebody in preschool, they looked at me with blank stares, but it was something I repeated frequently throughout their life. And what I was trying to tell them is.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have two daughters and a son That's fine. But in case my son John ever listens to this, I want to let him know I cleared the record up. Yeah. It's just a compulsion for me. And obviously, look, being a parent, I have three grown children and they're each adults out in the world making their mark in the world, figuring things out. Anybody who gets through that process of bringing children to adulthood should be suitably humble because it's a really hard job. And so I cannot claim to be an expert in anything around parenting. What I can tell you is that the things I'm speaking to you about, I did try to do as a parent. I tried to help my kids. When I was being a good parent and I was not always a good parent, but when I was being a good parent, I was trying to help them make sense of the world. And that takes different forms.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obviously, easier because it's positive as opposed to negative, but you're being explicit about the standard and you're holding that experience up to them and you're helping them make sense of not only what they did that was great, but why it was great and why it mattered. And in that, that positive feedback starts to help people get clear as you form a pattern of those things over time. It helps them start to get clear about what they're good at, really good at. And in that, you're actually doing one of the most valuable things you can do, which is helping that person unleash their potential. So I think you give good feedback in the same way you give bad feedback. But the problem isn't that we don't know how to do that. The problem is that we just avoid, we just assume that people know they're good at stuff and they often don't.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most managers will ignore it. That's terrible. Some managers will say, hey, that was a really good job. And that's way better than ignoring it. But that's still not great. What Great looks like is you'll sit down with a person and say, you know, here are my expectations. Here's what my standards were. Here's what I thought. Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense. Here's what I experienced. I just experienced you doing something far better than that in the following ways. I thought, you know, that the report would be here on Tuesday and you got it to us on Monday, which gave us an entire extra day. That 24-hour early delivery made a big difference to us. So you're explaining your experience.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it becomes a sort of endemic blind spot in management that we think that because somebody's doing something well, they, A, know that's what good looks like and B or exceeds what good looks like and B, the person knows they're good at it. It's a terrible blind spot. People don't actually often know what they're good at and they don't actually know how superior they are at it. So if you see your job as a manager to actually find and unleash a person's potential through clarity in the service of achieving our shared goals, then you want to spend a lot of time figuring out what people are good at and calling that out. Now, how do you do that? I believe the way you do that is very similar. So, in the example we gave before, let's say somebody does something really great.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, most organizations either give no feedback or give negative feedback in giving the negative feedback they do it poorly and the way I described before. Used that American Idol example I used before. There's that bucket of people, there's a group of people who think they're terrible singers and they're actually great singers. They're confused, right? They expect, they believe about themselves that they're bad at something, they're actually good at. I think most managers ignore the fact that a lot of us are in that bucket. A lot of us believe that we are bad at things that we're actually good at. And we as managers are depending on that person to find that greatness and unleash it in the service of achieving the goals that we all share.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Review and saying, Oh, by the way, you're not really a culture fit. It is a weekly sort of event where you're connecting confusion and mistakes and bad outcomes back to that culture statement and back to your beliefs about the behaviors and outcomes that will be rewarded, punished, and accepted.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let's say a person comes in and they've had a lifelong experience on Wall Street and they were a trader on Wall Street. And so they decide that they want to get into the therapeutic massage. And so that's the job. So they go into therapeutic massage. And the first time somebody gets on the table, the Wall Street trader says, you know, hey, listen, I'm not going to massage you because you're gross. That's a culture. That's a culture problem, right? That's a behavior that is not what you expect inside that environment. So you have to be explicit in watching the outcomes of attaching a bad outcome to culture. And that's where the real learning happens. It's not just giving them the statement. And it's definitely not waiting for a year-end performance.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More important than that, that's important, but more important than that is you put somebody in the job and you watch them do stuff, right? They go do their job and you want them to do their job. You want them to actually start experiencing things. Like I said, you want them to get into it and start to go, how does this feel? When a mistake is made, whatever that quote unquote mistake is, like you expected one thing and you got another, that confusion we talked about. You have to use culture as one of the lenses to diagnose or make sense of that.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Culture is one of those elements that I believe you have to be explicit about. And when I'm, so there's two elements to that explicitness. One is actually taking people through a culture statement per the prior part of our conversation that culture statement, I think has to be an authentic representation of what really happens around here, not an aspiration or marketing document.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That a quick check in is sufficient, you're getting to know each other, so you got to take it's like, you know, in the beginning of any relationship, you got to spend extra time to actually make sure you're in sync and to make sure you're speaking about the same thing. So with onboarding, it all just starts with a like don't give in to that desire on your part, that confusion as a manager to believe the job's done because you just hired someone's job's just beginning.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Clarity and you can't do that if you buy into your own confusion. The job is done because you hired someone. The job's just beginning. Hiring the person is actually, if you're thinking about the whole span of management, hiring the person was the easiest part. Managing is much harder than hiring. And it should be because it's a day in and day out thing of committing to somebody else's greatness and their potential. It's not a transaction. It's an ongoing relationship. So onboarding has to start with being by their side, asking good questions when you see them make mistakes, being explicit about standards, explicit about your vision of what good looks like and how things should work, over indexing on the quality of feedback and communication, taking extra time to have good conversations.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you hire someone, you have to be by their side for a period of time. And by their side, I mean, you got to pay attention. You got to be explicit about what you expect. You have to watch them make mistakes and then give them feedback in the way we just talked about. You have to help them make sense of their environment. You have to help them get to clarity. You got to set the job up so they're moving into it in a way where you're not just drowning them with a fire hose. And then surprised that they couldn't handle it. So my number one piece of advice there is human beings get confused in new environments. Your new hire is going to be confused. It's almost a guarantee. You as the manager are responsible for getting them to.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so what you see a significant amount of time is a manager is in pain, they rush the higher, once the person's in place, it's a relief, like the pain is gone. Somebody's doing the job and the manager disappears. So that's a behavior pattern you most often see in fast growth environments. And so right at the very point when a person is entering a new environment, a new culture, new context, working with new people, the most important person to guide them through that new terrain, through that new territory, splits. And so I can't tell you how many times I've seen this. It's a common occurrence. So with regards to onboarding, my first piece of advice is don't do that.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And what evidence do you have that they actually have done that before? Or at least reasonably can be assumed to do that job in the future?”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so similarly as an interview, what you're doing is saying, okay, like how big was the group? How big was the group when you started? How big was the end when you ended? What was your manager like? What would describe a conflict you had with your manager? You're just asking very fundamental questions about what you did, how you did it, why you did it, so that then you can take that and pattern match it into that specification that you wrote in the first step.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's hard to do, but there are methods you can use to do it. And so you don't ask opinions. You don't ask questions. You don't ask people in an interview for their opinion on things because opinions are often born of confusion. It could sound great or sexy in the moment, but then wasn't really germane to like how they do their job day to day. I think what you want to look at is when a person ask a person like, what was their greatest success? And they'll give you an answer. And it'll be interesting what answer they gave you because many people have lots of successes. So what did they pick that one? And then you just sort of think of yourself like a detective, not an interviewer. And a detective won't sit there and go, well, you know, how did it feel to be at the scene of the crime? They're going to say, okay, what was the person wearing and what time of day was it? They're trying to get facts, right?”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then in the assessment, I think what you have to do is you have to gather evidence about the kinds of decisions and behaviors people have made and exhibited in prior circumstances that are similar to what you believe they'll be stepping into in your job.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That and depending on people who have been good at it to help you is another big step we can take as hiring managers to try to overcome that. Most hiring managers don't understand that. They don't see that in themselves. I meet with somebody, I like them. That's good enough. I can't tell you how many CEOs I've worked with who have hired. They tell me they just hired their next great person because they met them at the gym. And then, of course, three months later, they're like, oh, this person's terrible. I'm like, maybe, you know, the gym isn't the perfect context to get to know somebody when you're trying to make them your CFO. So there's this, you know, A is like being taking the extra turn to really good on the specification, future visualizing it. B is to understand whether you're going to be good at this or not.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One is taking the extra time with the manager to actually understand the specification as we talked about huge amount of, it really is worth the extra effort to visualize that thing and imagine that thing out in the future as opposed to just get stuck with the same old job description. You can make a really big dent in your hiring success with that by doing that. And the second thing is you got to understand how good the hiring manager is. The hiring manager If you're a hiring manager and you've never hired anybody before you've never hired anybody of that particular responsibility or role type, you're not going to do it well. You're not. You're going to be blind to all sorts of things. You don't have any sort of valid intuition about what's good and what's bad. You don't have enough information to be able to base your decision on. And so understanding.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's such a good question. There's, for many, many years, there's been a number of different tools we could use to try to make predictions. People use Myers Briggs or workplace inventory or predictive index or Hogan. There's lots of different assessments we could use. And each of those assessments will make claims about how predictive they are and being able to tell you this person's going to work or this person's not. And I think those sorts of assessments can yield lots of really interesting data. But the only two things I've ever seen that really substantially increase your confidence in hiring are two things.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's always a bet. You cannot look at any higher and say, for sure, this person will be extraordinary. You can just state your belief that you think they will. And so, A, you could be clear on that. And then you just run your process consistent with that. Do you want to find somebody who is going to be in the two out of five? They're not going to be perfect, but they could be great over time. But, you know, you don't know. Or do you want to find that like one in five, in which case you're probably going to be taking a bet.”
2020-01-21 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT