The Difference Between Hiring Managers and Hiring Leaders

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Full Transcript

Liza: I like to be an innovator in the space of how we think about what we do and how we approach our managers. I think I love to challenge the status quo. So we shouldn't be talking about managing people anymore, I think the millennials, and you're probably one, the millennials have taught us that over the last decade. Millennials now are approaching 40, so they're in those leadership roles there you go. And the younger ones are approaching 30 but they're still moving into leadership roles. And they taught us that they didn't want to be managed, you taught us that you didn't want to be managed. So we manage projects, we manage budgets, we manage deliverables, whatever the financials, whatever that is, but we have to lead people. And I think I was inspired by that, I don't think I know.

I want to go back, it was probably seven years ago at Coca-Cola. We were doing a leadership meeting and our head of HR I was working with her in a breakout room and we used a snippet of General Colin Powell, where he was asked at a Harvard, and you can find it on YouTube. He was asked about leadership and his perspective on leadership, and he said it in the most eloquent way. He said he learned everything he knows about leadership, I'm not quoting him because I know I don't remember everything, but he said I learned everything he knew about leadership in basic training. That no matter how cold you are, no matter how scared you are, no matter how hungry you are, you have to go down that dark alley and you have to turn that corner and they will follow you if for no other reason than curiosity.

Joe: I just got goosebumps.

Liza: It's an awesome piece look it up on YouTube, Colin Powell on leadership. It made me want to be the type of leader that people would follow me just to see what else I would do, what's she going to do next, right? And then that sort of just rolled in my brain for a while and I started to want to hold when we talk about TA being responsible for retention, which we are not, or everyone is talking about quality of hire, but nobody's ever really defined it in any really quantifiable way. And the truth of the matter is that your leaders are responsible for the hiring choices they make not your recruiters, not your external recruiters and not your internal recruiters. So at what point do we really charge them with the people leadership piece and hold them accountable for the choices they make and how they articulate what they need on their team in order to be successful. And that's where it came from for me.

Joe: I love it. I have said this before too, I wish that every hiring leader, especially those that are in larger organizations would just spend like a month working for a startup company, a smaller organization where you are ultimately responsible for really everything on your team. It's the finding of talent, it's the hiring of talent, it's the onboarding of talent, it's the growth of talent. And it's ultimately what is your impact of your teams on the bottom line? And that's how I think a lot of people, hiring leaders in smaller organizations, it's very apparent. And they get it, they just get it because they don't have all of the other resources to lean into and no one else to blame. I don't know if that's necessarily what's happening, but I think it's-

Liza: No, that's very true, I think it's about you. If I bring you in and you don't work out, I feel it, I feel the pain. If I'm in a larger organization I can bury you somewhere and not have to deal with you, right? And let somebody else deal with you, so that's managing. Leading is genuinely knowing that your job is not to sit on top of the people that report to you to make sure that they're doing their jobs, your job is to give them inspiration, motivation, coaching, and development so that they can continue to grow and therefore evolve your team, your job is to lead them through the darkness and down that alley and around that corner.

Joe: Thanks for watching another episode of Talent Acquisition Talks. And if you're looking for more content just like this, make sure you head over to brazen.com/tatalks and sign up for our weekly video newsletter. We've got interviews with some of the top minds in TA, and we don't want you to miss it. So again, head over to brazen.com/tatalks, sign up now. And I'll see you next week.

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