274 - Coachability - Hiring

And testing it out

We’re doing a lot of hiring at Mayday at the moment. It feels like a great time to write about the subject, both to share my learnings, as well as organise my thinking for practical application.

I listened to a talk recently where the speaker talked about looking for four things when hiring: intelligence, integrity, hunger and coachability. The first three I’ve covered in other posts. The latter is the focus of this post.

Omniscience is not possible. Even if it were, environmental changes require the constant updating of knowledge. There is then the subjective side of how to apply that knowledge within your startup’s industry and team. This is all by way of saying that a good amount of coaching will be required for any hire. A person’s coachability is perfectly correlated with their capacity for growth. And your capacity for growth as a startup is the product of the capacity for growth of your team.

There are two elements to coachability: 1) the inherent whether that person is coachable, doesn’t hold themselves too tightly, is eager to learn, 2) whether your style of coaching is compatible with them.

The two elements can be tested in the same way. This is why I always make a point as part of the hiring process to deliver some considered constructive criticism. So I get real life data from which to form a view.