From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

How can a company retain employees?

From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

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How can a company retain employees?

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(techno music) - As a leader, how do you retain, not just grow and develop but also retain good people? - I fall into the bucket of people who subscribe to the tour of duty model where it says look if you're here for a bit of time, awesome, let's do something amazing together. And hopefully we are making it such an awesome place that you want to stay. That you are growing because it's so great. But if not, you should go somewhere else and maybe you come back, maybe we do something later. It's a more fluid argument. In the teams I work with, we really have three rules that we have when we're looking for a new talent or bringing on somebody or thinking about how do they go on as we iterate and build the team. The first is, and it's easy to say this is in the Silicon Valley mindset which is would I give a decent chunk of my equity to you? Another way you can say it, is would I give a big chunk of my salary to you, but why? Because I know that by bringing you onboard, we are going to disproportionately do better overall. Maybe it's our bonuses, whatever. But it's just a proxy to think of it in the mental model of you've brought somebody onto the team that you can trust implicitly. It's so good and you know that they're going to give you such value in return that you'd be like yes, please take some chunk of my earnings to be here. Two is will you knock the socks off of the organization in 90 days, maybe 60 days? But will you just totally wow the company. It's saying we are going to massively commit to making you successful so you blow the socks off the organization in 90 days. And you are committed to working aggressively fast on key problems and show how you are going to disproportionately make value and impress everybody. The third one is in four to six years, will you be doing something amazing, amazing? Because we want to be around people that foster the culture of intellectual honesty, curiosity. But also, we want to be around people that are going to go chase for the stars. When I left LinkedIn, that was part of the idea also. It was like look, I'm off to go do something, I'm going to walk this path. In my case, the first time I did it, I had a colossal failure right out of the bat. The first thing I went and did, I had a spectacular failure. But then I got back up and we tried it again. And that's where we started to grow, like start galvanizing not only the science community, but then created RelateIQ and all these other things. It doesn't mean it has to be a straight always linear success story. But you can go around and around as you kind of iterate and test in all those people. And many of those people who've gone off from our teams here and then people I've been able to work with have gone on to do phenomenal things. And by the way, every one of those people when they came on, it was like would I give them a big chunk of my equity? In a heartbeat, because they are so good. Would I be, did they knock the socks off of the company? Oh, absolutely. And many of the things they, ideas came up with, became mainstay projects or products in many cases or ideas that transformed the trajectory of everything we've worked on. (techno music)

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