Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / GEMS: Lessons in Hiring & Firing with Three Ships Beauty's co-founder Connie Lo

Transcript

GEMS: Lessons in Hiring & Firing with Three Ships Beauty's co-founder Connie Lo · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:08
  I feel like we could blend this into the biggest lesson when we think about hiring and firing. You had mentioned, you know, you hire this really senior person and you've also grown the team a lot over the last couple of years, but you've also had to go through that kind of other process that is just part of entrepreneurship of letting people go and kind of like reducing headcount when it's required. Yes. What have you kind of learned in those lessons and how did you kind of, I don't know, how did you approach that?
• 0:38
  Oh, I think hiring firing is one of the hardest things that anyone can go through. And even when I talk to founders of companies that are like hundreds of millions of dollars in sales or a CEO that's 40 years in their career, they always say like, oh, it's the people that's the hardest. So, you know, for anyone out there listening, who's having these problems, just know you're not alone and you're not doing anything wrong per se. Yeah.
• 1:01
  I think that there's several like mistakes that we can get into or challenges of hiring and firing as a startup founder. One is when your early employees don't scale with the company and what the needs are. That's one that we can get into. Another is hiring too senior too quickly. And yeah.
• 1:20
  not listening to your gut around that. Yeah, let's get into both of those. They both sound great. Okay, so the first one with regards to team members not scaling. So I think something people don't talk about as founders is when you're starting out, unless you fundraise a lot or you have a lot of money or you're still up that has like a lot of cash in the bank,
• 1:39
  you don't have a lot of money in the start to hire really senior people. So unless you're able to hire someone super senior that really believes in your company and just wants equity, which is so rare, especially as a first-time founder, most of the time you're hiring someone more junior that still believes in the company and is willing to take a small salary. Yeah.
• 1:59
  And then the goal is that this team member is able to grow with you. So when you go from 1 million in sales to 10 million and above, they're leveling up their skills. They're leveling up their networks.
• 2:10
  But sometimes they don't. And that's not your problem. It's also not their problem. Maybe it's just not a fit. But what the mistake I made was, was not being candid enough with previous employees that were early employees and trying to be too coachy, if that makes sense, and trying to coach them through their personality that wasn't a fit for the company. Yeah.
• 2:34
  clarify that. The mistake I made was giving too much leeway with early employees who weren't actually growing with the company and trying to coach them into being able to grow the company when it was clear from the start that they weren't the right fit and they didn't want to grow in that way. And it was my fault in that aspect because I wasn't practicing radical candor.
• 2:55
  And since then, since making these mistakes, I'm like a huge fan of radical candor and just being really transparent with people, but still in a very compassionate way. So it was my fault because I was trying to coach people when it was just clear it wasn't the right fit and then ultimately had to fire them anyway, which was just not good for either of us. So if I were to do it again,
• 3:15
  and I were hiring an early employee, I would make it really clear from the start, like, hey, right now we're at a million in sales. When we're at five, this is where I'm hoping you would be in your career. Does that align with what you're wanting? Do you actually want to grow into this manager? Or do you actually want to stay as an individual contributor? And if so, does that work for us as a company? We didn't have those conversations because it was my first time doing it. So that was like one of the mistakes I've made. I don't know if you want to get into that. I mean, I would love to, please.
• 3:44
  So since then, what I've learned is when an employee is not showing growth in the speed or in the area that is needed for the company, we start having those conversations a lot earlier. And what I mean by that is don't wait. Don't wait until a performance review or until you need to give a performance improvement plan, like a PIP for someone to be like, oh my God, I had no idea I was doing badly. Instead, like...
• 4:10
  Now what I do is I have one-on-ones weekly. I've always had one-on-ones weekly from my team. But if there's something like a feedback point that I need to share, I will save it for a call that I have live with them in a weekly one-on-one and share it right away instead of waiting. And also on the flip side, if there's positive feedback, I'll always share it right away. But don't share it via Slack or via email because it can be misconstrued. You just want to give it live.
• 4:30
  And I also think there's power in like just building that trust that you're able to share things ongoing, whether it is a good thing or a bad thing, so that there's more like transparency in a relationship that it's, again, you're not waiting six months to bring it up and it's then festered like inside of you where you're then more bothered and things like that. It's just kind of like. Exactly. In the moment, well, not in the moment, but, you know, in those weekly calls and things like that, just.
• 4:54
  Yeah, more talking, more communicating about where things are going so it doesn't expand into something weird and big. And I think that in the past, I was just so focused on trying to make people feel comfortable and make them like me that it was, what's that term, like ruinous empathy? Oh, I haven't heard that. So I was just trying to be too kind. So there's a book. Here, let me grab it for you. Please do. Love a rec. Yeah.
• 5:21
  Radical Candor. I wonder if you recommended this in the last episode. Okay, yeah. So you can see there's a lot of bookmarks here. But this is an amazing book. And what Kim Scott, the author, talks about is
• 5:34
  Usually people either are on like two ends of the spectrum. One is ruinous empathy when you're just trying to be so kind and make everyone love you. And like you don't give hard feedback because you just want everyone to like be happy. And then there's a flip side where people are just like straight up assholes and are just like constantly giving like really critical feedback that's not constructive.
• 5:53
  And where she says you should ideally be is like the section called radical candor, which is you are practicing compassion when you are giving feedback. You are thinking about the other person's perspective, but you're also giving feedback that is constructive because then they can ultimately grow in their careers.
• 6:11
  And what I was doing in the past was I was just too worried about making them feel comfortable and safe. And I wasn't giving them the feedback that they would need to grow. And then when they weren't the right fit or when things didn't work out, then I had to let them go, which was just not good, again, for either of us. So very big learning.
• 6:28
  Radical candor, being way more transparent with feedback. And we've made a lot of changes in the company to also allow for this. So we do quarterly anonymous pulse checks with the team where everyone on the team is required to give upwards feedback to Laura and me. And also they give feedback to us and the team about anything. And it's all anonymous, so they can share whatever they want.
• 6:48
  Our EA and people operations person, she actually scores us every quarterly anonymous pulse check to see what the team morale score was. We always try to stay at least above an A to A to 10. Another thing we do, my co-founder and I, every month we do something called a founder feedback session where it's a call we never skip. We give each other two positive feedback points and one response.
• 7:10
  um, like point that we can work on from the past month, if there was anything. And I just find, again, like you said, things don't fester, uh, especially if something was misconstrued so often, it was just like a misunderstanding and it's so much better to clear it up in the moment than wait. Oh my gosh. Absolutely. I love all of that. You've got so many good little gems in here that I'm like, Ooh, yeah, cool. Nice. Very good. Oh, good snippets for Instagram. I'm sure. Yeah. Good snippets.
• 7:39
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 8:03
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• 8:26
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