Another silver bullet MAP story
by Miki SaxonThis is the story of one of the most brilliant and talented guys I knew during my 20+ years as a headhunter in Silicon Valley. I’ll call him Jim and he was a client for over a decade starting in late 1970s.
The time frame is important, because the world and MAP changed significantly during that time.
When I met Jim he was engineering manager for in a startup, with a grand total of five people. It was a hot startup and his department grew rapidly. I did a lot of his staffing and he was a joy to work with.
Jim didn’t look for exact experience—he wanted people who could learn on their feet; he wasn’t worried about multiple jobs as long as the reason for changing wasn’t just money. Schools and grades didn’t impress him; they were just part of the package. The only things Jim really cared about were attitude, passion, smarts and commitment.
The company was successful, the department grew to more than 100 and Jim grew with it, continually promoted until he was engineering VP. He became one of the most respected managers around, known for the diversity of his people in an area where diversity was the norm.
We became good friends and over dinner eight years later Jim asked me if I could help him find a job. He said that now that his kids had grown he and his wife had made the decision to move back to the Midwest.
I was surprised and said so. I also asked him what else was behind the decision.
Jim’s response caught me way off guard.
He said that he was exhausted from managing such a diverse group. He said that the strain from having to think in the terms of multiple cultures, different genders, US regional differences and widely divergent ages had just worn him down. The mental agility it took to keep everyone happy and motivated had been challenging and fun when the group was small, but as they grew he found himself having to find ways to instill that flexibility into other managers.
Jim said he was shocked the first time that a manager baulked at making an offer to a top candidate with seven years of varied experience and a degree from a state college saying that he would prefer to hold out for someone from a “good” school. But he stopped being shocked as he heard similar ‘buts’ from other managers—but female, <ethnicity>, gay, tall, short, fat, southern accent—the list went on and on.
He said that although it had changed for the better over those eight years it hadn’t changed enough. Many of the attitudes were buried deeper and harder to find during interviews, while many managers didn’t look, assuming, as he had, that those attitudes didn’t exist any more.
I asked Jim where he wanted to move and he said they wanted an urban area, but where the workforce diversity wasn’t as great. He eventually found what he wanted in Minneapolis as it was back then.
However, when Jim retired they chose another area known for its enormous diversity. As he said when he told me where they were moving, “diversity is great when I don’t have to manage it.”
Image credit: sxc.hu
