Accelerate Your Career #3: Superpowers of a Top Performer

What's up everyone, this is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder's Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. This week on Founder's Journal, we're doing things a little differently. It's our very first mini series, and it's all about helping you accelerate your career. And instead of just one episode today and Friday, this week, we're giving you two: a new show you won't want to miss, plus a classic episode you might not have heard before.

Put it all together, and you're getting a mini curriculum on taking your career to the next level. If you missed number one and number two in the series from Monday, go back and check those out. And we can't wait to find out what you think of this whole series, it's totally new for us. Now, today, I am talking about the traits of top performers in companies. If you're a manager or a founder, these are things for you to look for when hiring, if you're a manager or an employee, these are things to think about when trying to accelerate self in your career. Let's hop into. So over the last six years of building Morning Brew and for about a year and a half working in financial services before that, I have had the operation of working with so many different people in my journey.

I've worked with a lot of great people. I've worked with a lot of not great people. But the number of exceptional people, true all-stars, that I have worked with, I can count it on two hands. And that's because the bar is super high, but all of these people, all these exceptional professionals, have the same foundational things in common. And whether you're a manager or a founder or an employee, this episode is for you. If you're a founder or a manager, the things I'm about to read off are what you should be looking for as you build your business. As Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix, talked about in No Rules Rules, which is his book, one of the ways that Netflix evolved from a small DVD rental company to a $250 billion behemoth, is by maintaining what is called talent density in the company.

Talent density basically means having a shit ton of high performing individuals, and Reed's idea is that performance is infectious. If you only have high performers in your company, and you're super strict about maintaining this bar, everyone will perform highly. And so as I go through these characteristics, these are some of the things for you to look out for if you want to build talent density in your company. Now, if you're an employee, these are the, you should aspire for to kill it in your career. I want to start by reading a recent tweet by a buddy of mine, his name is Mateo and he is the co-founder of Eight Sleep, which is a fast-growing mattress company.

Quality Thinking

And the tweet he had on August 21st was, "Greatness equals quality of thinking plus bias for action. Top performers combine these two qualities and surprise you by achieving more than what you believed was possible." And this took me down memory lane, reflecting on some of the best people I've ever worked with. And as I was thinking about Mateo's quote, what I first thought about was that 80% of the things that make people special professionals are things that they demonstrate irrespective of seniority—that no matter whether you're a SVP or an analyst, it is essential to have.

20% are the traits that are important based on your seniority—if you're a manager versus if you're a junior entry into a company. But going back to Mateo's tweet, I think that he has the two biggest buckets covered, but I'd actually argue that pretty much everything about being an exceptional employee sits in the first bucket, which is quality of thinking, so that's where I want to go deeper. And obviously this show as I start it every single time is about how do you think better in order to build better, and quality thinking is the best way to be a great employee, a great business builder, and the thing to look for as a founder or a manager.

At the highest level quality thinking means that you have discipline in how you use your brain. Now, I want to walk you through the five keys to being a quality thinker, because, like I said, being a quality thinker is the number one determinant of being an exceptional employee. 

Understand Your Circles of Competence

The first trait is understanding your circles of competence. So, just to give some props to my co-founder Austin for a second, this is what he is really great at. He understands that he is only really good at a few things: planning, delegating, operating. And so he delegates most things that need to be done in our business to other people. It's why we have a best in class senior leadership team. We have great content leaders, great sales leaders, great growth leaders, great product leaders, great operations leaders, great people leaders. 

And to juxtapose that this is the biggest blind spot that I see in most junior employees. In the early days of Morning Brew, we had so many hungry, all star athletes, is what I would call them. People who are Swiss army knives, who did so many things. They were doing really well in their roles, they were junior, but they were escalating really quickly. But what they don't realize, or what they didn't, is that as you escalate fast in a company, more skills, more experience, and more knowledge is required of you for you to be able to perform at a high level.

And the best way to not be able to acquire those things is to not be aware that you're missing them in the first place. And so that's what I've seen in employees that don't reach this level of excellence is they simply don't have an awareness of what they're really great at, what they're not great at, and so they don't know how to either delegate or to actually build new muscles based on where they're black spots are. 

For me personally, I know that I'm only great at a few things. I'm a great relationship builder, I'm a great storyteller, and I'm a great creative thinker. Anything else, I'm not really great at? There is someone better. And so then I need to make the decision throughout my career: Do I delegate that to someone who is excellent or is it a skill that's holding me back that I need to work on?So that's the first trait of quality thinking and being a top employee, is understanding your circles of competence. 

Know When It’s Time to Stop Thinking 

The second is, kind of ironically, knowing when it's time to stop thinking. And this is basically going back to Mateo from Eight Sleep's tweet. This is the bias to action characteristic that he called out as the second thing. There is nothing more important in business than momentum. And one of the greatest ways to kill momentum is by overthinking and underdoing. I've actually noticed this most with senior employees at companies where, because they are responsible for creating longer term plans and big hiring plans, they believe that things need to be perfect.

And so there's an anxiety around sharing these plans and putting them into action , until they're perfect. But when you think about it, the irony here is that it's impossible to have a perfect plan. You never know if the decisions you make today are right, and by taking too long, you actually lose the confidence of your team that anything will ever get done. What the best employees do is they give themselves an ambitious deadline to set a plan, they hold themselves accountable to it. And within that deadline, they create drafts, they get opinions from people that they trust, and then they set the plan. Once the plan is set, they put it into action, and that is actually when the learning starts.

Once they execute on the plan, once they get punched in the gut a few times, that's when they make the changes they need to make to actually evolve whatever their strategy is. And so this is something I'm even seeing today with our content org. You know, I feel so incredibly excited about the future of Morning Brew's content because our content leaders have put into place a plan. A plan that we know we're going to put content out into the world, not all of it is going to be perfect, there's going to be stuff that falls flat on its face, but we know 100% content is going to exist in the world in six months, that doesn't exist now. So that is the second quality of quality thinking, which is know when to think and know when to stop thinking.

Think About Priorities First 

The third is thinking about priorities first. Very simply the best employees get the most important things done. It is that simple. For more junior employees, the most important things tend to be those things that your boss asks you to do. And as a boss within Morning Brew for the longest time, the best junior employees have always been those that understand what's most important, and you can basically go to sleep for two weeks and you feel total confidence that the things that you asked for will be done and will be done well. I've talked about this a lot in the past, but people like to busy themselves with tasks. They like to do a lot of things, cross things off the checklist and great employees, busy themselves with the most important things, even if the most important things means it's only one task.

And so if you want to go deeper on just this specific point about the best employees thinking about priorities first, you should actually check out the episode that I did on how to prioritize, and the whole concept of this episode was, "What are frameworks that we can use to do the most important things first, since we have a tendency to effort rather than be effective." So I'll just drop that episode in the show notes.

Be a Hyperactive Thinker 

 Now the fourth quality of being a quality thinker and being an exceptional employee is this idea of being a hyperactive thinker. And I want to preface this by saying, being a hyperactive thinker isn't a great quality in all aspects of life. It comes with some baggage, but at the end of the day, the best employees, the best founders, the best managers, they think constantly. They have hyperactive brains. And I think it's simply a math thing. You have 24 hours in a day. The more that your brain is spending time thinking about your work, the more likely you are to think about everything I spoke about, like prioritizing understanding your circles of competence, knowing when to act versus think, et cetera.

 Obviously burnout is always a risk and I'm not suggesting that you shouldn't take breaks. But honestly, what I have found is that hyperactive thinkers don't choose to be a hyperactive, it's not an active choice. They just find the work that they're doing to be really interesting, they take themselves and their careers very seriously, and their brains just default to thinking about it. And as I think about it, I actually would say, this is the number one determinant of predicting future employee and founder success. 

Every single exceptional employee that I've worked with has thought about things before I ask, and they end up being proactive and building upon what I ask them because their brain forces them to constantly think about what more can they do and what are they not thinking about? And the other way to think about this is I actually would put a title on these types of people and I call it, like, the bomb sniffing dog of business, someone who sniffs out issues and opportunities before anyone else. You need these people in business, and they are proactive because they're always thinking before you have to prompt them. That is the fourth quality of quality thinking. 

Make your Boss or Team’s Life Better 

The fifth and final quality of quality thinking is find people who think, "How can I make my boss or team's life better?" Something that I've always talked about with my co-founder Austin is how there is no better feeling than when you manage someone who you really don't have to manage, who you don't have to actually do their work for them or tell them what to do. But instead you end up managing by asking questions and that's kind of it because you implicitly trust that someone is going to make your life easier because they know what you want them to do, and they know what the team needs to get done.

TL;DR

Finding great employees that are always thinking about others first, and how can they make the team's life easier and add value to everyone else first end up being exceptional employees. So those are the five qualities of quality thinking. And like I said, quality thinking is the best determinant of being an exceptional employee. We had understanding your circles of competence, knowing when it's time to stop thinking, thinking about priorities first, being an obsessive thinker and thinking, "How can I make my boss or team's life better?" 

I Want to Hear from You

Now I'd love to hear from you. Those are the things that I believe determine how you find an exceptional employee or how you become an exceptional employee yourself. But I would love to hear, what do you think I am missing from this equation that you have found to either lead to your own success or lead to the success of people you hire? Send an email to alex@morningbrew.com or DM me on Twitter @businessbarista with any characteristics that you think I'm missing. As always, thank you so much for listening to Founder's Journal. If you enjoyed it, please let others know who you think would enjoy the show as well. Thanks again, and I'll catch you next time.