The Professional Hierarchy of Needs

My friend?Cameron Marlow?first introduced me to the idea that there’s a professional hierarchy of needs that looks something like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Each level has some important parts to get right;

1. Comp: Comp must be calibrated to be competitive to the market — you can’t say you hire the best people when you’re not paying the best. Comp also needs to be calibrated to stage and role; earlier stage folks should expect more equity and less cash, and variable como vs equity tradeoffs are important for sales.
2. Stability and Resources: People need to have an honest sense of stability in their company, product and team. If there is too much existential risk, too much pivoting around and changing direction, or too much churn on the team, it’s just hard to focus and get things done. They also have to have the proper resources available to meet their goals or it’s demoralizing. Everyone likes to be pushed to do things they may not have thought they could do, but nobody likes to know they’re setup to fail in an impossible game. For example we can work extra hard but we can’t always figure out a way to do ten times the volume of work for a team out size. We can be extra creative but we can’t always generate tons of new customers without much budget for marketing and sales.
3. Awesome Team: People need to have an emotional sense of community among their team, and this comes when the personal and professional aspects of the team are all healthy. We’re all capable, and any performance issues are being dealt with, so there’s no tension where we see some weaker members of the team that we might like as people but that we know are holding us back. We’re all excited to learn from each other because everyone is amazing and bringing something slightly different to the table. We don’t have toxic narcissists and assholes around causing chaos and making people feel bad. People work hard but don’t burn themselves out too badly — we have lives outside work.
4. Winning: We all understand the company’s goals, the team’s goals, and our individual goals, and how we win at all levels. It’s important to never have a culture of esteem being defined in ways other than winning — if people are trained to derive internal status and recognition from things other than winning, then you’re just providing incentive to do things that aren’t focused on your goals. There are almost always optically pleasing things to do that are easier with shorter term payout than the often unglamorous things required in doing the primary work required to win.
5. Personal Growth: Hiring hungry people with an ownership mindset means that everyone wants to grow and take on more responsibility. I take comp, stability, and team as givens — any good companies and managers need to do this well. This means that the most important way that great companies and managers differentiate are #1 winning, and #2 personal growth. So personal growth is the next highest priority for managers behind winning, and should therefore be the second most discussed topic in 1:1s. Managers are constantly helping their team find the work that jointly optimizes for winning and growing into new challenges.