#Leadership : A CEO Shares the Letter he Sends to Every Job Candidate before Making an Offer…You are Receiving this Letter Because we Believe You are the Right Person to Lead our Much-Needed Growth at this Important Stage of our Organization, & We are Honored you are Considering Joining the Possible team.
A few years ago, I Read a Letter a Social Entrepreneur Sent to Every Candidate Before he Made an Offer. It had a profound impact on me even as someone who wasn’t considering joining his team, so we started the practice at Possible.
Mark Arnoldy, CEO of Possible.
I wanted to share the letter we use in hopes that it will encourage others to do the same. We’ve found that potential team members appreciate getting this candid, longer-form “inside look” at the implicit expectations of how we operate.
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As a result, there are fewer surprises on both sides, and we find people who are able to immediately evangelize for our culture from the moment they enter the organization.
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Dear John,
You are receiving this letter because we believe you are the right person to lead our much-needed growth at this important stage of our organization, and we are honored you are considering joining the Possible team.
Please know this is not an invitation we dole out liberally. Quite to the contrary, an extraordinary amount of time and energy has been put into identifying and recruiting the very special type of committed individual it takes to do this work, to put our patients first, and to advance our for-impact culture.
The purpose of this letter and the two documents that come along with it is to give you an inside look at the organization as you consider an upcoming offer from us.
Often, it is very difficult to get a sense of certain elements of an organization — elements like core values, management style, implicit expectations, and culture.
And second, we’ve taken the time to clarify our approach to management — including the goals, tools, and techniques we use. Please also make sure you’ve taken the time to read about The Role of Management at Possible. Please take the time to read through our For-Impact Culture Code, and make certain the principles we operate on resonate with you.
Even after reading these two documents, I think there is a lot of value in you seeing the long-form of a few ideas that are really influential in our organization.
Efficiency as a moral must
It is the job of all team members to turn time into resources and opportunity for our patients. Thus, there is a critical and constant push towards making our individual and organizational systems as efficient as possible. There is a belief here that purpose ought to triumph over profit, thus the need to have clear expectations, 100% follow-through, and efficient systems of management and operations is considered greater than in the private sector.
We aren’t perfect, but that’s the framework we work within. We value hard work and long hours. But we value smart work, productivity hacks, and incredibly well-run meetings even more. We don’t need you to be a martyr or live an extraordinarily austere lifestyle to fit in. We just need you to care about getting the most important work done most efficiently and pushing everyone to be better at doing the same. To keep it simple, a bit crass, and put into popular parlance of the times — we have a “get s— done” culture where concision and results are king.
Deep mission integrity
We ensure that what we think is what we say, and what we say is what we do. We constantly worry about our actual impact rather than appearances, and thus select goals that represent truly meaningful progress, even if they are difficult to achieve or market.
You will pick up a sense of skepticism from team members in regards to work, internally or externally by others, that seems driven too much by hero stories, ego, magic bullets, or marketability without impact. We avoid that and are authentic about our successes and shortcomings. This is why we believe so deeply in … (see next section).
Transparency
We believe in being transparent until it hurts. It is an accountability guarantee against our own human frailties, and it is a way to shift an important global paradigm. We also do not believe that, over the long-term, it serves our movement to make this work appear easier than it actually is.
Hiding challenges and failures for fear of punishment from the media or funders hurts the ability of our own organization and others to learn, iterate, and improve. It also disguises and delays the roll-out of truly effective solutions. The things we believe are most important to be transparent about are our impact data, finances, and failures.
Sense of humility and respect
It takes a special commitment to do this work. We value those who are part of this community and have a commitment to curiosity in order to learn from other individuals and organizations. In any debate or question that comes up within the team, our mission and data provide the metric for the answer, and discussion is founded upon a respect for one another.
Possibility
We bring a sense of possibility to this work and act as if it is within our control to achieve something great and world-changing. Everything is impossible until it isn’t.
Lastly, here are a couple of hints about how we try to operate in terms of decision-making and delegation of responsibility.
Possible
Hierarchy vs. collaboration
While we have an extremely collaborative and inclusive culture — with a lot of information made available to the entire team and even the public — for any given project there should always be one clear decision-maker. Taking this philosophy from Apple, we call this person the “DRI” (or directly responsible individual).
That person will typically listen to all views and then make the best decision they can. We call this “consult and decide.” For this working strategy to be effective, there is an informal social contract that has to be followed by each party.
The ‘decider’ must create an efficient and clear architecture for feedback, listen to understand, and be willing to change. The ‘consulter’ has to respect the decision, regardless of initial personal views, and be committed to implement it with excellence. We cannot have people spending time butting heads on small day-to-day or week-to-week issues or else we sacrifice efficiency and results for the sake of collaboration. We do invite respectful conflicts on big and important issues at sessions and forums dedicated to vision and strategy.
Welcome feedback. Only offer it “in real life” (IRL)
Everyone requires a healthy amount of steady feedback to continue to learn, grow, and produce higher quality work. We’ve set a few ground rules about how that feedback should occur:
- Don’t give long-winded feedback on small matters. Lions can catch, kill, and eat mice, but they will die doing so because this is a calorie-negative activity. Instead, they have to hunt antelopes. Give time-intensive feedback on the organizational antelopes, not the mice.
- More broadly, we ask that any critical feedback that is unsolicited not be sent over email. Despite any attempts at clarification that can be made, history has shown that there are too many misinterpretations through this chain. The only way we give critical feedback is ‘IRL’ (in real life — call or in-person) unless an individual asks for critical feedback over email specifically. The space for feedback is structured into weekly one-on-one meetings between managers and team members.
- Those giving feedback must have the humility to know they could be wrong or that their feedback won’t always manifest in the next decision by the decision-maker.
Responsibility is earned and mission-driven
Possible is a meritocracy — within our contracts, everyone’s responsibilities and work are determined by both our capabilities to do an excellent job and by the organization’s needs. Our own particular desires for what we’d like to accomplish play a role, but only within those constraints. We look for people who have the right kind of ambition: ambition for the organization’s success, as defined by remarkable results for our patients.
I look forward to transforming healthcare with you.
Sincerely,
Mark
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Mark Arnoldy is the CEO of Possible, a nonprofit healthcare company that delivers high-quality, low-cost healthcare in rural Nepal. To date we’ve treated over 275,000 patients, and most recently announced our commitment to rebuild the healthcare system in one of the worst-hit districts since the devastating earthquakes this spring.
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Businessinsider.com | August 21, 2015 | Medium