Keith Lucas

And so I find that starting here keeps everyone thinking about the mission athlete, the strategic impact of the role rather than a checklist and a plug and chug sort of approach.

If you have this, you can hand this off to anyone to really write the job description because they have what they need.

And the vision doc also can help craft a really good interview funnel.

And finally, case in point, in my experience, I've used these to hire executives and I've gotten really good feedback on it from the people who came on board who said they had a lot of clarity and space to operate because they had this kind of document to guide them early on and allow them to develop ownership of their own role.

Yeah, the biggest mistake I've seen is when startups are too rigid in setting compensation.

And like we said before with org structure, what this means is that the principle is that the compensation plan has to serve the team and the mission, not the other way around.

And so my favorite example of this is a real world example.

I was advising a company a while back and I met with

an individual contributor who I heard was amazing.

They were this can't-lose employee.

And the trouble was that when I met with her, she wasn't very happy.

She told me that she had gotten a raise or hadn't gotten a raise in over two years because she had maxed out her salary band for the role.

And even though the company was cash conscious, it wasn't cash free.

It could have given her a raise.

So as a result, she felt underappreciated and wasn't sure she'd be around in a year.

And to me, this is crazy.

It clearly places people in mission second to rules and charts and bureaucracy.

And that's a company killer.

So instead, the company should have made her an exception because she was exceptional.

And that's ultimately what they did.