Jason Cohen

But how do you do that?

Like, how do I hire a pancreatic surgeon?

I don't know, right?

And so interestingly, as a leader, you have this puzzle always of having to hire the pancreatic surgeon.

So again, no silver bullet, but here's some tips you can use, especially in interviewing, to try to suss this out, even though you're not the expert.

First of all, when you get off the call with them, you should be giddy with, oh my god, they said they would do this, and they've done that.

Even if we don't hire them, we've got to do some of these things, you guys.

I took notes like crazy.

We've got to do this.

If that's your feeling, you literally have notes you want to go do, that's a good sign.

course since you're not a pancreatic surgeon you don't really know if you're right about that maybe they weren't such good ideas you don't know that but the fact that you're excited and want to do it means it is a culture fit and a skill fit and a process fit for your company that's good that's a good that's a good step so it's more likely to work because as long as they're not completely dumb ideas which are probably not this is more likely to work at your company so that's actually pretty good

Another question you can ask yourself is, do I think this person's going to up-level all of us?

Not just the people on their team, but their peers, because they've seen this or done this, or who knows why.

You could even ask questions about that.

So maybe they're good at metrics, and no one's good at metrics.

And so although they're in support, they're going to help everybody, more or less.

Good sign that it's going to make everyone better.

another signal of an executive, as opposed to, say, a manager, where you don't expect the manager to up-level the person next to them.

An executive, that's exactly part of the job description.

It's about us, the company, not just the department that you're responsible for.