Category / leadership

by Nathan Coumbe

Do you know a virtuous person?

Who do you know who is courageous?

Wise?

Disciplined?

Just?

Do you know anyone who embodies all four of these cardinal virtues?

How much better would things be if you had a boss like this? A coworker or employee?

How would the world improve if we had leaders like this?

It’s hard to succeed with only one or two. You need all four to be truly effective.

The German soldiers who steamrolled Europe were courageous and disciplined. But they were brave and disciplined for the most unwise and unjust of reasons.

You can probably think of several people who were incredibly wise… But who lacked the courage to stand up and do the right thing when the time called for action.

We need more virtuous people in the world.

They aren’t born this way. They make themselves so.

by Nathan Coumbe

Some ideas on hiring (Part 3 of “Same job, different pay”)

(This is part 3 in a rant on hiring, salaries, and job postings. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.)

If someone with less experience than I, who didn’t attend college like I did, started today at the company I currently work for, in the same role I hold now—do I think she should be paid the same salary as me?

Absolutely, I do.

The work is the work, and if she is doing the same work as me, to spec, she should earn the same amount I do. My years of experience and educational background do not entitle me to a higher salary if we’re doing the same work.

Can she do the work as is expected of her? That’s all that matters.

And for someone looking for a job like mine, if they can learn how to do it well, then why does it matter how they learned?

So if I’m against education as a prerequisite for entry, how should we go about hiring people?

I have two ideas, and the first is simple: more companies should adopt open hiring practices.

There’s a factory in New York that makes the brownies for Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream. If you want to work at the factory, you put your name on a list.

When a job opens at the factory and you’re next on the list, you get a call asking if you’re still interested in the job. If you are, you report to training, and if you can pass the training, you’re hired.

They don’t care about education, criminal backgrounds, living situation, previous employment, or current skills. If you can learn how to do the job, you get the job at the wage they pay everyone else.

Keep a list of applicants, hire them in order when jobs open up, and train them to do the work.

Why doesn’t every restaurant, coffee shop, and retail establishment in the world already do this?

Simple: They’re scared of making a bad hire. They worry that they’ll hire someone who doesn’t show up to work, arrives late, has a bad attitude, or struggles to perform.

Well… what happens when those same people are hired through traditional (i.e., shitty) job search qualifications?

They get fired.

And if you implement open hiring practices, you spend a lot less money on the recruitment process than you otherwise would, so you lose out on a lot less if you must fire someone.

The absurdity of hiring people through traditional methods of posting job openings, soliciting hundreds of résumés, and holding interviews gives companies a sense of control over who they hire.

But it’s an illusion: either the person will work out or they won’t. And interviewing people with the “right” background on paper isn’t a guarantee that they’re a good hire.

Now, I already know that this idea is so radical for people in knowledge work that it won’t happen anytime soon, even though I firmly believe many companies can hire and train people to perform a significant percentage of the available office jobs out there.

So, what if you’re absolutely certain that you can’t use open hiring due to the nature of the work your company does? Let’s say, because you don’t have the time or resources to train a person to the level you need quickly enough to make it worthwhile.

That’s where my second solution comes into play: contingency hiring.

Time for a story: I was laid off a few months after the COVID-19 pandemic began (from a job I had held for only a few months).

My job search lasted nearly a year (no one was hiring). It was excruciating and terrifying.

But one of the best things that ever happened to me in terms of my career happened near the end: a CEO took a chance on me in an unconventional way.

I’d been studying (and, to some small extent, practicing) marketing for a couple of years before the layoff. I’d spent a lot of time during my unemployment talking to people in the field to get a sense of the jobs available. I wanted to know what skills and knowledge they required so I could make myself more appealing to employers.

A former classmate from university recommended me for her role at a marketing agency when she left to take another job. I went into the interview feeling woefully underqualified, but I knew I had a decent foundation of self-study to build on and could learn the rest of what I needed to know on the job.

The CEO agreed, but was still somewhat reluctant to fully commit to this neophyte in the marketing world (and who wouldn’t be?). So he offered me a deal:

He said that he would let me work for the agency for four weeks in exchange for a single lump-sum payment to see if I could do—or learn how to do—the work required for the role.

After that, we would reconvene, and depending on the results, either he would hire me full-time, or we would part ways with no hard feelings and gratitude for giving the company my time and skill.

It was one of the most generous and thoughtful offers I’d ever gotten.1

If I were starting my own business today, this is exactly how I would hire someone. I’d post a job opening, and then I would select an applicant to work with me on a contingency basis.

Rather than conducting an interview (which only tells me if she’s good at interviewing), I would work on a project with her that I already needed to complete for the business, and I would pay her for her time.

If, at the end of the project, we found it was a good fit (and she still wanted to work for me, because she would also get to try out the business), I would extend a full-time offer to her.

Why doesn’t every company do this all the time? They get work done, can assess whether the person is a good fit for the role (which isn’t always apparent from an interview), and the applicant not only gets paid but also gets to test whether it’s a role they actually want.

I can’t fix the hiring process simply by writing and ranting about it. But I do know that it’s 100% broken right now.

Social media (LinkedIn) has made it worse, not better.

AI and ridiculous job requirements for college degrees and 30 years of experience have reduced the job search to months or years of misery, frustration, and indignity.

But these simple tweaks—from removing degree requirements to contingency hiring—could go a long way to fixing a broken system.

  1. I didn’t end up accepting his offer. I asked him to give me a day or two to think about it and discuss it with my wife, which he happily agreed to.

    Literally, that same day, after I got home from the interview, I got a call from another company I’d had a few interviews with. They had a firm offer for me for full-time remote work with benefits.

    I called him that evening to let him know I was taking the other job offer, which he completely understood. But he also let me know that the offer was still on the table if it didn’t work out. ↩︎
by Nathan Coumbe

On the frivolousness of educational requirements in job postings (Part 2 of “Same job, different pay”)

I anticipated some of the pushback I’d receive from yesterday’s post, and I wanted to address it here.

Some might argue that certain jobs require graduate or other advanced education to obtain them. And I agree some should: I’d much rather have a surgeon who went to medical school operate on me than one who learned from YouTube.

And we’re all better off with engineers who went to school for the subject than relying on amateurs to build our bridges.

But doctors, engineers, nurses, and other “professional” roles all require specialized education simply to learn and carry out the basics of their jobs.1

This isn’t the reality for many knowledge or service sector jobs, which comprise a significant portion of our modern workforce. However, you might point out that many of these jobs require a college or even graduate education, as indicated in their job postings. Isn’t that at odds with what I’m saying?

No—because these jobs don’t actually need you to have a degree. It’s a tool to keep you from applying for them.

Hiring managers simply use that to make their lives easier and weed out 90% of otherwise qualified applicants without ever having to look at their applications. It reduces their workload.

For the vast majority of us working in the knowledge sector, a college education neither prepares us for specific jobs, such as those professional jobs listed previously, nor does it actually equip us with most of the skills required for knowledge work. We learn on the job and through self-education.

You don’t need a master’s degree in computer science from MIT to work as a software developer. You simply need to know how to program (and be damn good at it). You can learn on Codecademy or attend a bootcamp, gaining enough knowledge to get a job. You’ll have to learn the specifics of the role when you start working, anyway.

I work in learning and development, so I’m somewhat biased in my thinking on this. The shift in L&D now is toward skills-based training and qualifications. Essentially, we’re trying to answer this question:

Leaving aside formal education, what specific skills does a person either need to possess—or need to learn—to be qualified for this specific job?

You don’t consider their past college education (or lack thereof); you only consider what they’re capable of. This approach doesn’t harm people who attend school for specific fields because, as long as they’re qualified by their skills, they can still get the job. However, it also doesn’t prevent those who didn’t attend a formal school, but who do possess the necessary skills, from securing work for which they’re qualified.

Again, why do we need someone who is applying for a job in marketing or customer success to have a college degree? If they have the skill, or can learn it outside of a university, shouldn’t that be enough?

For most knowledge work jobs, it’s simply ridiculous to require a college degree (and I have two of them, neither of which I’ve ever used in my knowledge work jobs).

So I suppose I’m arguing two things:

  1. Eliminate degree requirements for most jobs.
  2. Pay the same wages (and good ones) for the same work, regardless of educational background or years of experience.2

Only the quality and the results of the work should matter. Not how much education someone has.

And for God’s sake, not based on how good someone is at negotiating. Not everyone is comfortable negotiating salaries or demanding raises, especially when they think their boss will just fire them and hire someone cheaper if they try.

We are obsessed with meritocracy in this country, often to our detriment. And we obsess over it in such a way that it harms people who may be just as capable at a job as someone else, but who don’t have the courage or the skills to negotiate with someone in a position of power above them.

Does this mean that I think another L&D specialist at my company who hypothetically started today should make the same amount of money I make after nearly four years of raises?

Absolutely, I believe that. But I’ll save that rant for Part 3 tomorrow.

  1. I have a holdup about including lawyers in this list for one very specific reason: Until sometime in the 20th century, you did not have to go to law school to practice law. You simply needed to pass the bar exam for the state(s) in which you intended to practice.

    Walter Gordon, a native of my home state of Mississippi (who was one of the main characters in Band of Brothers), passed the bar exam after the war while still in law school and was allowed to practice even without his diploma.

    At some point, law schools realized they could make a lot more money if they collaborated with the American Bar Association to require would-be lawyers to attend their schools, thereby creating a somewhat arbitrary barrier to entry into the field.

    Are lawyers who attend law school objectively better off? I don’t know, nor do I feel qualified to say. However, it does seem similar to what we encounter in knowledge work job searches.

    Are all hiring managers part of some cabal to make it difficult to get jobs? No. It’s simply easier for them and also just “how things are done around here.” The status quo is the status quo for a reason. ↩︎
  2. What if someone in the same role as someone else is objectively better at the job than the other person? Personally, I believe this issue can be easily resolved with bonuses or commissions.

    I don’t mean paying people crappy wages and hoping that they’ll make it up in bonuses (looking at you, restaurants paying servers $2.13 an hour). I mean that if two people are doing the same job, but one of them has been outstanding for just one quarter or year or whatever, pay that person some sort of bonus to show your appreciation.

    But don’t punish the other person who is doing good work—to spec, doing what needs to be done and is asked of her—by paying her less for arbitrary reasons. ↩︎
by Nathan Coumbe

You can’t lead everyone

Which means one of two things:

1. You must either improve your leadership abilities so that people will follow you where you want to go.

    Or, if you already have the skill…

    2. You must find the right people willing to go on the journey with you. 

    The right skills or the right people—figure out which one is holding you back.

    by Nathan Coumbe

    Courage comes first

    All other virtues depend on courage in their execution.

    To some extent, all worthwhile endeavors require going against the status quo or doing something difficult. This requires bravery.

    Being a courageous politician sometimes means opposing a tyrannical leader, even if that figure has mass appeal. But doing the right thing requires courage in this case.

    Acting justly (i.e., doing the right thing) is often unpopular. (How depressing!)

    Persisting in the face of opposition requires courage.

    Doing the right thing often requires someone “going first,’ also known as leading! You must be courageous to lead, as you must be willing to fail.

    by Nathan Coumbe

    Impresarios make softball happen

    The MLB is investing in the Athletes Unlimited Softball League, a long-overdue organization for the United States’ outstanding softball players.

    I’m sharing this article here, not because the MLB is investing in it, but for a different reason entirely.

    As I read this, all I could think was, “A group of impresarios made this happen.”

    Impresario: someone who organizes something, who brings the right people together to connect and make things happen that need to happen.

    A group of people (mostly strong, driven women) said, “Why isn’t there a professional softball league? Why aren’t softball players making a career of this after dominating in college like all the men in MLB get to do?”

    So what did they do? They made it happen themselves. Eventually, other groups, such as ESPN and MLB, took notice and decided to invest. But that isn’t the impressive part.

    What’s impressive is that a small group of people decided that something that didn’t exist should exist. And they made it happen, without permission, by bringing the best and the brightest softballers together to build something great.

    This is the work of an impresario.

    This is leadership.

    by Nathan Coumbe

    Leadership = Applied History

    There’s a line on the History Major page at the US Naval Academy:

    Effective leadership is applied history.

    Leadership, more than anything, is decision-making—specifically decision-making that affects other people, not only you.

    By studying history, you can examine the minds of other leaders and understand their actions and the resulting outcomes (good and bad).

    You can learn lessons from other people’s experiences rather than from your own failures and setbacks. This will not only save you time, money, and emotional labor—in some cases, it might save lives.

    As General James Mattis said:

    “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.”

    Learn lessons from others by studying history. Don’t repeat their mistakes when you can simply read a book.

    by Nathan Coumbe

    You are the one you’ve been waiting for

    At the end of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (spoiler alert), Harry stands near the lake waiting for his father to appear and ward off the dementors attacking Sirius’s, Hermione’s, and his past selves.

    After waiting for an agonizing amount of time, he realizes that he was the person who conjured the Patronus and drove the creatures away, not his father. He was the person he’d been waiting for all along.

    Even without time travel, this is a relevant lesson to us. We often sit around waiting for someone to swoop in and save the day. We wait for someone else to act.

    The problem is that everyone else is doing the same thing—they are all waiting around for someone else to rescue them from whatever the problem may be.

    At some point, you must wake up and realize you are the hero of your story. You are the person everyone else is waiting for to act.

    Someone eventually has to take a stand, so it might need to be you.

    by Nathan Coumbe

    Who decides?

    The person who experiences the consequences should make the decision.” —James Clear

    How different would society be if this were true?

    Which wars would be fought if the soldiers who did the fighting made the decision whether or not to fight, rather than the politicians and generals thousands of miles away from the battlefield?

    Which social policies would be enacted (or cut) if the decision were up to the people reliant on those policies rather than the lawmakers who have only an academic understanding of what they’re implementing?

    The visceral reality of a decision changes when you are the person affected.

    by Nathan Coumbe

    Bringing about our own extinction

    David Meerman Scott published a fascinating article a few days ago. It compares modern AI companies to Enron and that company’s financial scandal that broke in 2001. 

    But one paragraph in particular stood out to me that warrants quoting in full:

    Altman says there’s a chance that so-called Artificial General Intelligence (which is still years or decades away) has the possibility of turning against humans. “I think that whether the chance of existential calamity is 0.5 percent or 50 percent, we should still take it seriously,” Altman says. “I don’t have an exact number, but I’m closer to the 0.5 than the 50.” (Source)

    Terrifying, right?

    I would argue that if you are creating something that has anything other than a 0% chance of wiping out humanity, you probably shouldn’t do it. 

    For example: marketing Pepsi to be consumed in massive amounts, while definitely bad for humans, doesn’t run the risk of causing mass extinction.

    On the other hand, bringing Tyrannosaurus rex back to life definitely has a greater than 0% chance of doing just that.

    Now, I’m not a doomsday prepper by any stretch of the imagination… But when someone tells me there’s even a small chance that what they’re making could turn out like The Matrix, I start to worry. 

    It’s as if they never watched I, Robot or read Jurassic Park (which is actually about runaway technology, not dinosaurs). 

    These companies have a responsibility to guarantee that this doesn’t happen. We already made this mistake with nuclear weapons. And that threat still looms large over our heads, especially right now during the Russo-Ukraine War. 

    We have enough threats to deal with. Let’s not create more of our own volition.

    I’ll leave you with my favorite quote from Jurassic Park:

    “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

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