How to survive a recession: Make your team unhirable

I’ve spent much of Q4 of this year speaking with investors, founders and economic experts, and if I were to summarize it all into any kind of forecast, it’s this:

If 2022 was a rough bit of road for the metaphorical company vehicle, 2023’s road map is likely taking us off the road well traveled. We’re leaving the smooth blacktop for a rutted-out, forgotten logging road. You should check the tires, too, because companies without great traction are going to slip and possibly be left behind.  

I am not exaggerating.

Think of this—Amazon has more cash on hand than nearly any company in the world, and they’re cutting costs to prepare for economic times that are even worse than they imagined. Amazon has more economists on its payroll than any other company (totaling in the hundreds). Only the US government has more economists. 

If one of the richest companies in the world is preparing for battle, it’s fair to say the rest of us should at least be in the war room. I have been personally for GoWild, ensuring we are ready for what’s ahead. While I have a lot of founders who read this newsletter, I think it strikes a broader audience to speak generally to leadership, which is what I’m going to do today. 

2023 is going to be bumpy. A few possibilities:

• Marketing teams may face budget cuts, and layoffs will continue, especially during the first of the year once Q4’s holiday sales are put to bed (I am not saying it’s right—marketing is always one of the first hit, though. It’s often foolish, since great marketers have the most impact on revenue).

• Teams with indirect impact on the bottom line will be downsized. Pressured CEOs may not care about customer service, task traffic or HR as much (long-term gains) if sales are declining (short-term pains), for example.

• Turnover will likely cause some stagnation in your tech product, which may cause some of your company’s tech talent to leave. Without a strong culture and a personal bond to the mission, A+ talent is just not going to ride that out. 

These scenarios are just examples of what could come. I’m just trying to get you thinking about the hammer that may drop. This kind of turbulence will put strain on cultures, especially in a post-layoff landscape. Lean teams will feel it the most, and may even see a second exodus after the layoffs. In fact, CEOs sometimes bet on this, factoring that whatever percent of the company they layoff, half of that percent will quit (so if the company lays off 10%, they’re expecting 5% to quit in the following weeks). 

Just because you aren’t a founder doesn’t mean you can’t start to prepare your team now. If I were a leader in any company, and especially if I was the founder of a startup, I would be highly focused on making my team “unhirable.”

My long-time followers know exactly what I’m talking about, because this is the core of how I manage teams. 

Fret not, new readers. I will share my seemingly counterintuitive mindset. 

The term "unhirable” was not coined by me—it was my team at GoWild who started to say it. At various moments of being themselves, caught in the comfort of being around people they trust, someone would stop and say “this is why I’m unhirable—I can’t go back to a stuffy office where I can’t just say your idea sucks.”

(Side note: I’ll say this right now before anyone even has the chance to get there—I’m not talking about building workplaces that let racism, bigotry, sexism or whatever other -ism run rampant. If you can’t be yourself without being a bigot, you aren’t going to work with me.)

The founders of GoWild have focused heavily on ensuring our company operates flat, has fun, hires bold employees, encourages restless minds to alway ask “why?” and to make sure everyone contributes. It’s created a really sticky culture—we’ve only had two people leave (on their own), and one of them came back within that same year. 

All of this boils down to making competitive employers "intolerable.” Or in other words, once you’ve worked at a place where you’re free to be yourself and become comfortable, you’re simply not going to step back into a cultural dead zone. 2020 expedited the rate at which large companies are becoming soulless cubicle farms, which I also see as my advantage. 

Leaders, if you take nothing else from today’s post, remember this—culture doesn't just attract talent, it keeps it. That’s going to be more important as this long winter settles in.

Creating a team of unhirables at GoWild is a lot of things. While our culture is focused on our core values, it’s also empowering other micro-cultural gestations, or basically it’s allowing other fun reasons to work at GoWild to develop:  

• Wear what you want (we’ve had people absorb this so much that they showed up on day one with flip flops)

• Have all the tattoos (or none—you do you)

• Get that head-turning haircut (Brayden lives this) or beard (ahem, my cofounder Zack)

• Start early so you can leave early to go fish (Jacob did this last week)

• Get to that task at 10 pm because you're a night owl

• Work remote for the day without asking for permission

• Work remote for, well, forever—25% of our team is remote

• Be yourself without worrying about offending someone

• Swear in the meeting when you're frustrated (it's OK, just let it out)

• Do a task that wasn't assigned to you because you wanted to help

• Tell us if you think your priorities need adjusting or are unrealistic

• Tell me specifically when you think I’m making a rash decision 

This list goes on and on.

These things matter, and our team recognizes it.

Bad cultures taught us how to build a better one

The GoWild cofounders have all worked at companies with bad cultures. In March, I plan to write more about this on the 10 year anniversary of being fired from a place with horrible leadership. As a result of these hard knocks, we’ve intentionally designed a fun-loving culture of respect and love.

This is not fluffy or woke millennial leadership—this is the bond that is going to get our team through hard times, like what may lay ahead in 2023. When the fit hits the shan, adversity can take a toll on teams. Those who work best in these environments are the ones who have practiced autonomy and product ownership (strongly recommend this book if you don’t take my word for it).  

Or put a little simpler, nothing will make you recognize the power of a team that cares more than stress. 

The stress is coming, too. 

When the panic sets in for leadership, they’ll start to pull levers that measure the wrong metrics. We’re already seeing this with fat cat CEOs demanding workers return to the office. I think this is either because they’re trying to force people to quit prior to layoffs (which doesn’t require unemployment) or they truly have no clue how to measure success. 

When hard times hit, companies that measure input, not output, are going to be limited in what they can change. That difference for the employee is being told "You didn't put in 8 hours in the office today" VS. "This is not the quality of work it could have been, please do better.” One is about an arbitrary input, another is a qualitative performance review. One will send people running for the door, and another makes the team better.  

Start thinking through your culture now. Learn to be more flexible with the inputs, and focus on the outputs. If times are tight and you have team members who aren’t strong contributors to outputs, learn how to evaluate them fairly and make a prompt decision on if they should stay or go. It’s not cruel—it’s strengthening your team to perform efficiently, as I’ve written about before in why I find it merciful to fire fast. And most of all, don’t forget that people generally quit bad leaders, not bad companies. Get your house in order, and focus on removing the friction from your team’s day to day, and you’ll navigate the rough roads ahead just fine. 

3 tips to navigating tough times as a leader

1) Don’t start tolerating under performers—it’s never feels like a good time to fire

Keeping under performers on your team during tough times is not generous, it’s actually going to weigh on your top performers and make a tough time even tougher. Under-performers put more stress on your A+ talent, which is going to impact their job joy. Cut the dead weight sooner rather than later.

2) Learn to measure outputs

I’m not saying to let your team work a 4 hour work week, but learn to pay less attention to what time people log on or off or when they arrive and leave, and focus on the quality of the work they accomplish. Don’t become a pushover, but learn to better map out periodic expectations and deliverables (sprints for engineers, deadlines for marketers, etc.) and to stop simply looking for butts in seats. This creates autonomy for team members, which is a pillar to career happiness among most mature and skilled employees. 

3) Adopt candor as your first language 

Find a way to build candor into your daily work. I keep seeing Tweets asking “How do you tell someone ‘this is bullshit’ professionally?” Do you know how we do that at GoWild? “This is BS.” We are always respectful, but our team welcomes candor and would much prefer that to having to navigate sensitive feelings. The sooner you can teach your team to separate themselves from the work, the sooner you can speak with candor and learn to work through the bad ideas, the sooner the output quality and quantity will increase. Once your team operates this way, in combination with No. 1 and No. 2, you will have created your own “unhirables.”

Who I’m listening to: Charles Wesley Godwin

What I’m reading: “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life” by Walter Isaacson

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