Communicate a simple vision
Sarah Nahm, 29, is founder and CEO of Lever, an applicant-tracking software firm that helps companies reinvent their hiring process. Based in San Francisco, Lever is a startup with high-profile investors such as Marissa Mayer (Yahoo’s CEO).
Executive Leadership: Before launching Lever in 2012, you worked at Google. What was that like?
Nahm: Google was my first job out of college. I literally didn’t know what I’d be doing there until I showed up on the first day. My first job was to work with Marissa Mayer on her speechwriting. That was such an exciting role. From there, I worked with the Google Chrome team to help them launch the browser and take it all the way to hundreds of millions of users. My biggest lesson was thinking big and diving into challenges.
EL: How did you get that job writing Mayer’s speeches?
Nahm: Marissa told me later that what stood out was my having a breadth of experience. I studied engineering at Stanford, but I also studied product design. My minor was in comparative literature. Nowadays, people have this urge to become specialists. When you think about leadership, you start to value cross-functional experience to develop a lot of skills that cross over divides.
EL: There’s risk if you think big and you’re wrong. How can you mitigate that risk?
Nahm: You want to set your compass in the right direction, have a long-term vision and articulate to others what the future may hold. It doesn’t mean the decisions you make tomorrow will be dramatic or drastic.
EL: How do you communicate that vision?
Nahm: I don’t think there’s anything a leader can invest in more than thinking about how you communicate in your team. My No. 1 advice is to make simple, memorable and repeatable. If every single person in your company can say what the company strategy is and what the vision is, and they all tell you the same thing, then you know everyone is working toward the same goal.
EL: How can you reduce a complex strategy to something that’s simple, memorable and repeatable?
Nahm: When I’m seeing we’re getting very complicated when talking about our product or sales strategy, I try to remind myself who our customer is, what value we’re trying to add and what will be different for our customers after we’ve done initiative. Going back to customers is a way to articulate the “why” behind any sort of product, initiative or strategy.
EL: There’s a stereotype that software engineers are arrogant, that they lack empathy and humility. How do you hire technical folks who are also good communicators?
Nahm: At Lever, we’ve built up a training and development program around design thinking . We give everybody, from engineers to customer success managers, the tools to conduct empathetic user interviews, identify problems and needs and do creative brainstorming to come up with new solutions. This is a huge draw for new talent because so many people in the workforce are looking for training and development opportunities. PricewaterhouseCoopers just released its 2015 survey that found that the No. 1 thing that attracts Millennials to new jobs—and 22% of them believe that training and development is a huge reason for them to choose one employer over another.
