At the Golden Globes, Jeff Bridges accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award, and gave an acceptance speech that made us want whatever he was smoking.

— Read on www.thecut.com/2019/01/golden-globes-2019-we-want-what-jeff-bridges-was-smoking.html

It’s hard to nail down exactly what it means to “have your shit together,” but you know when you may have met someone who does.

These people are functional and competent, but never pretentious or elitist. They make their beds and do their jobs and always seem to be level-headed about all the nonsense the rest of us conflate into huge crises.

No matter what your personal goals are, at the root of them all, you just want to have your shit together too.

But, while this might be hard to believe, the truth is that nobody really has it all together — not entirely, not all the time. But aspiring to function well in your life, own personal responsibility, have real diplomacy and social grace, a healthy temperament, and other similar traits are definitely noble, if not crucial to being well-received by the world.

Therefore, here is your official cheat sheet to getting your shit together… or at the very least, convincing everyone else that you do.

1. Have a uniform style.

Decide what you love and then wear it often. Either has a signature scent, accessory or color scheme that sets you apart. When people see you, your appearance should align with who you say you are and what you say you care about. Your style should match your personality, and it should stay as consistent as possible. Think of CEOs who wear the same thing every day or cartoon characters who stay in the same clothes. People respond well to consistency.

2. Don’t flaunt your weaknesses.

If you don’t want people thinking that your life is a hot mess, then stop talking about it being a hot mess on every platform, at every chance that you can. There’s a huge, enormous, world-altering difference between being authentic and capitalizing on your struggles to earn sympathy or whatever else some dark corner of your mind thinks you’re achieving by complaining every hour of the day. You can keep it real without overemphasizing what you’re not that great at. What you share is what builds other people’s image of you.

3. Stop oversharing.

On the same note, realize that the 2012–2014 era of confessional essays is over. It’s done. Not every single person online and in your personal life needs to know every single TMI detail about your life. Not only that, but they don’t even want to know. If you feel truly moved to share your struggle in some part of your life in the hopes that it will be therapeutic and help another person going through it, amazing, please do that. But if you are just constantly telling people way more information than would ever be appropriate to share, it makes you seem as though you don’t understand healthy boundaries.

4. Keep things clean.

This might seem really obvious, but it’s totally overlooked: people who have their shit together have the one really simple thing in common… they are always clean. They clean themselves, their spaces and their belongings. They take care of themselves, their spaces and their belongings. This doesn’t require much money, and really only minimal effort. Keep your life a little more cleanly and organized, and it will go a really long way.

5. Assume that what you say in private is what you say in public.

I’m not saying that nobody is trustworthy, but I am saying that we are all dealing with something I’m going to call the “one person” phenomena. Every single time you tell a secret or important information to someone, if it’s interesting enough, they will tell their one person. Then that person will their one person. Ultimately, what you tell one person is what you tell everyone at the end of the day, so don’t say anything in private you do not want to be repeated in public.

6. Minimize drama.

Instead of being someone who creates drama and issues, be someone who problem-solves and innovates with new ideas. Instead of creating more chaos around a disagreement or issue, create a solution.

7. Talk about things that aren’t other people.

Other people and their lives are not topics of conversation. This is a lazy way to forge a connection with others if you have nothing more important or interesting to discuss. Ultimately though, being a gossip isn’t a good look. It makes you seem vindictive and judgmental. Find things to talk about that aren’t other people’s business. Your relationships will be better for it.

8. Be clear about what you do.

For people to respect you, they first have to understand you, and that really begins with your language and approach to explaining yourself, both online and in person. In general, you should have a single sentence explanation that adequately sums up what you do professionally, and then another that sums up what you’re interested in personally. If you can’t sum it up clearly, that means you are assuming your life is so complex and nuanced that it couldn’t ever be simply explained — but you’re achieving the opposite effect that you desire because really, you just seem to be sort of lost.

9. Don’t act like an authority on topics for which you are absolutely not an authority.

We do one another a disservice by insisting that, when having a conversation — and especially an argument— we have to answer immediately and impulsively. This is not how brains work. This is also not how intelligent people behave. Instead of spewing out whatever thing first comes to mind when you’re questioned about something, pause, think about what you want to say, and calmly express that you haven’t done enough research or hold enough expertise in the field to speak on it with authority, but you’d like to share your opinion or viewpoint anyway. As for what isn’t in your authority? Anything you’re not an actual expert in or have personal, direct experience with. So, most things you talk about — but that’s okay. The point is to try to share opinions with one another to generate more conversation, not convince one other about what’s absolute fact.

10. Keep your composure.

People who fly off the handle at every little thing do not seem strong and tough, they seem weak and of very weak will. Anger is like gasoline when there’s some kind of friction between people: it raises people’s defenses and pushes a resolution farther away. If nobody else can manage it, be the person in the room who can keep their composure and speak clearly and calmly.

11. Stop complaining.

Complaining isn’t venting. Venting is what you do when you need to get something off your chest. If you have to vent every single time you see one of your friends, there’s something wrong with your life or how you think about your life. Otherwise, you’re just in the habit of complaining, and you need to get out of it. It’s ungrateful, and a lot of the time, short-sighted. If you really think about it, you have a lot more to appreciate that you have to stress about… but emphasizing the latter will make your life seem worse than it is, and that’s not what you want.

12. Have principles so you aren’t thrown around by impulses.

Principles are the rules are guidelines by which you govern and manage your life. If you value relationships, prioritize them by principle. If you want to improve your self-care, do it regularly, by principle. No, you will not always want to wash your face, put on moisturizer, or drink another glass of water when you really need to. But if you succumb to your impulses all the time, you’ll end up a shell of the person you’re meant to be, all because you don’t have principles.

13. Receive help when you need help.

Behaving as though you can do absolutely everything yourself limits you. When you need help, you need help. Ask for it and understand that it does not make you less dignified.

14. But understand that you’re not a charity case.

You are ultimately responsible for whatever experience of life you want to have. You are responsible for your electric bill, for how well you keep up with current events, for how you interact with others, for how well you do at work, for how much you sleep. You have to take an active role in your life, not a passive one. Stop thinking and acting like life is just happening to you and you have to accept it and start taking some creative control.

15. Compliment others.

Your willingness to uplift others is a sign of real confidence. People who are not happy with themselves cannot be happy with others. And there’s even more beneficial to you, because the more you are willing to affirm and love others, the more you are going to see yourself with more love and appreciation. Remember: your relationships with others are reflections of your greatest relationship, which is the one you have with yourself.

16. Organize your paperwork, clean your linens, and know how to cook at least one meal.

Absolutely no adult is beyond this.

17. Check in on your finances regularly.

If you don’t want to be the person who questions whether or not their card will be declined somewhere, make sure you’re checking in on your accounts before you actually go out and spend money you don’t have. You should know your debts, your incomes, and your goals. You shouldn’t be in the dark about your financial health.

18. Know your limits.

Feed yourself when you’re hungry, rest when you’re tired, know how to gracefully bow out of a social situation, relationship, house party or job when you need to. If you wait until you’ve passed your limits, you’re going to burn out and burn bridges at the same time.

19. Stop thinking everyone’s thinking about you.

In the age of social media, it’s easy to the victim to the spotlight complex, which is the idea that everyone is thinking about you and evaluating your life decisions frequently. They aren’t. Everyone is thinking about themselves all the time, in the same way, that you are thinking about yourself all the time. Those coincidences you’re so sure to mean everyone deeply cares about the intricacies of your life? It’s probably confirmation bias or your brain’s way of filtering information that affirms what it already believes. The first step to being self-aware is recognizing that other people’s thoughts do not revolve around you.

20. Keep it simple.

People who are able to simplify their lives come across as sophisticated. People who complicate their lives do not. People who have their shit together are able to live simply, to enjoy simple things, to show up as they are and to sort through issues with clarity. People who do not have their shit together cannot do this.

Most importantly, remember that the point of getting your shit together is to make your life easier, and more enjoyable… not to impress anyone else. But like anything else, getting your shit together is a matter of faking it until you make it… and this is the best place to start.

There is a common perception among management that if you can’t handle the small things, you probably aren’t well suited to handle larger responsibility.
— Read on www.inc.com/quora/how-you-dress-at-work-is-way-more-important-than-you-think.html

A number of years ago, Jeff Bezos stopped by our office and spent about 90 minutes with us talking product strategy. Before he left, he spent about 45 minutes taking general Q&A from everyone at the…
— Read on m.signalvnoise.com/some-advice-from-jeff-bezos-4ee95086c76b

The Case for Prioritizing Talent Leadership in High-Growth Companies

Ask any CEO, and they’ll say their most critical responsibility is ensuring they have the right people in the business. Yet, when reviewing the “Our Team” section of many early-stage or high-growth technology companies, it’s rare to find a Chief People Officer, Chief Talent Officer, or an equivalent executive role dedicated to talent and culture.

This gap reveals a common mistake founders make: they prioritize Product, Technology, Marketing, Sales, and Finance but overlook the foundation of these functions—people. Without the right talent, these functions underperform or stagnate. Founders must recognize that building a strong Talent, People, and Culture function is just as crucial as these core business areas, if not more so.

The Misconception: HR vs. Talent Leadership

A common misunderstanding lies in equating Human Resources (HR) with Talent and People leadership. Traditional HR often focuses on administrative tasks, managing employees post-hire, and reporting to the CFO. However, a forward-thinking CEO knows the value of having a senior-level People/Talent leader on the executive team, reporting directly to them.

This leader is far more than an HR generalist—they serve as the guardian of company culture, the architect of the Employee Value Proposition (EVP), and a strategic partner to other executives. Their role spans understanding the company’s trajectory across all key functions—Operations, Finance, Marketing, Technology, Sales, and Product—while building a scalable, data-driven Talent organization.

The Cost of Overlooking Talent Leadership

High-growth companies often hire HR generalists, assuming they can also manage recruiting and talent acquisition. This is a mistake. Recruiting is highly specialized and requires a strategic, process-driven approach. HR generalists, no matter how skilled, often lack the expertise to build an effective recruiting engine or manage large-scale hiring goals.

This gap becomes painfully evident as the business scales. For example, hiring 100 employees in 6–12 months is a full-time job requiring a high-impact recruiting team. Without a dedicated Talent function, the business risks delays, poor hiring decisions, and damage to its employer brand.

Why Founders Need a Talent Executive Early

Investing in an experienced Talent Executive early pays dividends. This leader can develop a scalable, repeatable hiring process, create a strong recruiting brand, and establish the systems needed to attract and retain top talent. Here’s how to build a sustainable Talent function:

1. Hire Talent Acquisition Specialists, Not HR Generalists
   Build a senior, well-compensated in-house recruiting team focused on talent acquisition. Use external recruiters selectively for niche or executive roles but avoid over-relying on them as a default solution.
2. Partner Strategically with Professional Firms
   Work with 2–3 trusted recruiting firms for challenging middle-management or niche roles. Align on processes and style to ensure consistency.
3. Make Recruiting a Priority
   Adopt an “Always Be Recruiting” mindset. CEOs should champion recruiting as a core business activity. Create an Employee Referral Program (ERP) to leverage existing networks and attract high-quality candidates.
4. Invest in Technology
   Implement recruitment technology such as Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), LinkedIn Recruiter, and HRIS integrations. These tools streamline hiring, improve scalability, and enable data-driven decision-making.
5. Create a Superior Candidate Experience
   Treat candidates as guests. Ensure the interview process is organized, respectful, and transparent. Provide interview guides, agendas, and timely feedback. A positive experience not only attracts top talent but enhances your employer brand.
6. Prioritize Culture and Branding
   The Talent leader should actively shape the company’s EVP and ensure the culture is compelling and authentic. Remember, tools like Glassdoor give candidates unparalleled visibility into your company’s internal environment.

Final Thoughts

The People and Talent function is not a cost center—it’s a critical investment in your company’s success. By hiring a dedicated Talent Executive early and building a strong recruiting engine, CEOs can ensure their company is positioned to scale with the right people, processes, and culture in place. Getting this right isn’t optional in a high-growth environment—it’s essential.

About:

Michael is a Partner at True Search, where he specializes in managing Retained Executive Search processes for venture-backed, emerging growth, private equity, and disruptive technology companies.

With extensive experience in executive search and professional services, combined with first-hand expertise in entrepreneurial, founder-led, high-growth SaaS businesses, Michael offers a nuanced understanding of the skills, mindset, and leadership qualities essential for success in dynamic, venture, and private equity-funded SaaS and technology environments.

He collaborates closely with investors to build high-performing leadership teams across portfolio companies, focusing on CEO and C-level roles spanning Operations, Marketing, Sales, Finance, and Technology.

Getting Human Resources Right

The news out of Uber last weekend was horrifying. A woman engineer was unable to get human resources to deal quickly and appropriately with a sexual harassment claim. I don’t know anything more than what I learned in her blog post. Uber is investigating and the full story will likely emerge in due course. I am not interested in piling on Uber right now. Plenty of people doing that.

But it does raise a great question which is how to get human resources right in a fast growing tech company. Growing from 50 to 500 to 5,000 to tens of thousands of employees is hard. Operating systems and processes that work in a 500 person company don’t work in a 5,000 company. The same is true of every growth spurt. Systems break down and stuff gets messed up.

A well designed and implemented human resources organization can help. A messed up human resources organization will hurt. As Uber has found out.

So what have I seen work and what do I recommend?

Here are some things you can do to increase the chances that your human resources organization will be a force for good in your company:

1. Hire a human resources (HR) leader EARLY in the development of your company and “level up” your HR leader as needed as your company grows. The right HR leader in a company of 50 is not likely the right HR in a company of 5,000. Of course there are exceptions to this rule, but in general you will need more experience in the HR leadership function as your company grows.
2. Have your HR leader report directly to the CEO. Do not tuck the HR leader underneath your COO, VP Ops, CFO, GC, or VP Admin. The CEO has a hard enough time figuring out what is going on in her company as it is. Putting someone between them and their cultural leader/thermostat is a bad idea. Plus the optics are terrible. Your management hierarchy says a lot about what you value and what you do not. Actions speak louder than words, always.
3. Do not make your HR function a recruiting function. Of course HR needs to help the company hire. And it certainly needs to help transition out people who have to leave the organization. But HR orgs that function mostly as an I/O pipe are bad HR orgs.
4. Do make your HR organization about culture and leadership first and foremost. I have heard many HR leaders called “our culture carrier.” That’s good. And HR orgs should be making sure everyone is getting feedback on their performance and development goals, including the CEO. Organizations that share feedback top to bottom with dignity and professionalism are great places to work and perform better.
5. Always have a company handbook that lays out the rules of behavior in the workforce. You can’t do this too early. You set the tone early and it propagates. It is great if you can start with your values, clearly laid out for everyone, and then lay out the rules and what happens if they are not followed.
6. Build a great employee onboarding process. I believe that the companies that take the time to properly onboard new employees are better places to work and perform better. Onboarding should be more than “here’s your laptop, here’s your desk, here’s your boss.” It should be at least a few weeks of getting ingrained in the values, culture, systems, processes, and rules. It should be learning about every part of the organization, the current operating plan, strategic priorities, management team, and more. Doing it right is hard but it pays off bigtime.
7. One CEO that I have worked with for more than fifteen years once told me his HR leader was his most important senior executive. He said she was his “business partner.” That’s a great place to get to if you can get there. What is more important than your team, after all?

I hope those suggestions are helpful. They are based on what I’ve seen work and not work over the years.

In the Uber situation we also saw a failure in the “whistleblower process.” This is a particularly hard process to get right. First of all most teams, whatever kind of team, don’t really want “snitches.” It is human nature to try to come together and support each other. And blowing the whistle is the exact opposite of that. So here are some things you can do to get this right:

• Train your organization about the situations that are particularly tricky; sexual harassment, drug and alcohol issues, fraud, etc. Teach everyone how to recognize them and what to do about them. Make it clear that they are EXPECTED to report these issues to management and that failure to do so is complicit behavior.
• Have some sort of whistleblower hotline. Often times the company General Counsel will manage this hotline. Make sure everyone knows about it.
• Enable anonymous feedback throughout the organization and explain when it is appropriate and when it is not. Obviously anonymous feedback has great potential for abuse. But it is often the only way you are going to get the most important feedback that nobody will share otherwise.
• Talk about this stuff in your all hands, regularly. I am sure this is a big topic this week but it should not get talked about only when something bad happens somewhere. This is something that should be discussed at least a couple times a year. Companies that scale rapidly can double in size in less than a year. So you have to talk about this stuff frequently to make sure everyone understands it. And make sure to clearly cover it in the onboarding process.

If you don’t have this stuff worked out in your company, now is a great time to do that. Your employees are watching you.

 

This is just a niggle but I think we hear that “hiring is the worst part of my job” far too often.

If anyone in your organization feels this way, you might take a look at deeper seeded issues.

Hiring is one of the most important responsibilities that any employee and certainly any leader has.  Only using an aggregator (Zip Recruiter etc) to sort job seekers in buckets is not a best practice. They are not the most qualified or attractive candidates, are actively looking, and there is a reason they are available.

 

Not quite. HR’s role is changing, as a growing number of companies give more power to individual team leaders to evaluate and guide their direct reports.

When Deloitte revealed recently that it was redesigning its approach to performance management—hoping to fix a process that chews up nearly 2 million hours a year but yields crummy results—the professional services giant suggested that people might be surprised by “what we’ll include” in the new system “and what we won’t.”

As notable as the “what,” however, is the “who.”

Deloitte plans to give more tools, along with more of a sense of urgency, to individual team leaders so that they can conduct formal check-ins with all of their direct reports at least once a week.

“These brief conversations … provide clarity regarding what is expected of each team member and why, what great work looks like, and how each can do his or her best work in the upcoming days,” Ashley Goodall, Deloitte’s director of leader development, explained in the current issue of Harvard Business Review, where he laid out the initiative.

Deloitte is at the fore of a trend that is changing how major companies are managed: Team leaders are being offered—and, in some instances, simply seizing—more responsibility and autonomy in evaluating and guiding the people who work for them. As part of this movement, they are taking over functions that have traditionally been the province of corporate HR.

“We now have the opportunity to put power right into the hands of the team leader,” says Marcus Buckingham, who wrote the HBR article with Goodall and whose company, TMBC, has been advising Deloitte. (Full disclosure: Buckingham is a member of the board of advisors of the Drucker Institute, which I run, and he is a friend.)

Under the classic corporate hierarchy to which most businesses still adhere, HR centrally administers a performance evaluation once or twice a year. By the time feedback filters down to front-line managers, it’s often too backward-looking to be useful.

“The most important audience for this information is the person who doesn’t get any of it in a timely way—the team leader,” says Buckingham. “The real work of a company happens in microclimates.”

In the case of Deloitte, as well as other organizations using Buckingham’s methods, team leader check-ins are augmented by an initial online self-assessment taken by every member of the group. The instrument allows employees to explore and understand their strengths and share those insights with their supervisor and other colleagues.

Automated reminders then ensure that the team leader is given a weekly dose of data, making it possible for him or her to answer three questions shown to measure and help spur engagement and productivity: What are the strengths and capabilities of each of my people? What are they doing this week (and, implicitly, how does that match up with their strengths)? And how are they feeling this week?

Performance management isn’t the only activity undertaken directly by a growing number of team leaders. Goal-setting, surveying workers, training, and even hiring are increasingly being handled in much the same manner.

“There’s definitely a shift happening,” says David Hassell, the CEO of 15Five, a company that makes web-based software to improve communication between employees and their managers.

Two factors are fueling this transformation. First, pressure is rising for companies to move much faster than the typical corporate bureaucracy can facilitate.

For instance, athletic-gear maker Under Armour has turned to HireVue, an interactive platform for recruiting, screening, and hiring job candidates, to bring on staff as it opens new retail stores. But it’s the store managers themselves—with HR’s backing—who are making these selections. Through this decentralized arrangement, Under Armour has opened a new store in as little as two days, according to HireVue, and it has cut the time to fill jobs by 35%.

The second factor is a proliferation of technology. Indeed, while “there is no I in team,” there is ever more IT being deployed at the team level—some of it so cheap that managers can buy the stuff themselves without any corporate rigmarole. For example, 15Five costs $49 a month for the first 10 people, and $5 for each additional person.

The goal-setting application BetterWorks goes for only $15 per user per month. Kris Duggan, co-founder of BetterWorks, recalls the CEO of a financial services firm who at first saw little point in rolling out the product. But so many of his managers started using BetterWorks on their own that he eventually had no choice but to input his own objectives to keep them in line with everyone else’s. “It was definitely the lower ranks of the organization that was pulling the CEO in this direction,” Duggan says.

Of course, not every company is ready for their team leaders to assume such an assertive role; a top-down philosophy still prevails inside most large organizations. Nor does every team leader have the skills and mindset to successfully manage this way.

“You have these really fancy, awesome tools,” says Dan Pontefract, a longtime TELUS executive and the author of Flat Army: Creating a Connected and Engaged Organization. “But the culture has to be there first.”

It is also hard to imagine that some HR executives—afraid of losing their authority—won’t resist these changes.

But Buckingham believes that with team-leader-driven companies, HR officials will have the chance to be more valuable than ever. “Tim Cook recently commented that ‘the most important data points are people,’” Buckingham says. With team leaders tuned in as never before, “HR will finally be in position to have real-time and reliable people data,” as opposed to serving up figures that are “stale and untrustworthy.”

They’ll also be able to spot pockets of true excellence throughout the organization and try to replicate those. “Rather than having things centrally launched and cascaded down,” Buckingham says, “you’ll have them locally launched and aggregated up.”

Slowly but inexorably, the world of work is being turned upside down.DoDO

Your Fired ! 

Aver Inc. Names Nick Augustinos, Veteran Healthcare Executive, as New President and CEO