#0084: The “5Cs”
Braingasm
There’s a trope from the diamond trade known as the “5Cs”. This is a way to think about the “quality” of a diamond in terms of 5 characteristics of the stone: cut, colour, carat, clarity, and confidence. I like this framework because it allows someone who might not know too much about diamonds to get a reasonable sense of the quality by reference to these factors, and at least come up with a relative ranking.
Jumping back to my day job, I spend a lot of my time building lean/agile engineering teams for ventures, and in that process, interviewing candidates for roles from the CTO right down to associate engineers. As anyone who does this kind of thing knows, it’s tricky enough to get a sense of someone’s technical competencies in one or two hour-long interviews, but it can be even more difficult to get a sense of their non-technical competencies.
A few years back I came up with a heuristic that is loosely based on the 5Cs, but with reference to the kinds of things that I am looking for when hiring and working with engineers. They are:
- Curiosity: perhaps the most important virtue in an engineer. If someone is curious then they can overcome most challenges by self-framing them as personal opportunities for intellectual growth.
- Creativity: an obvious one, but sometimes undervalued. Engineering is as creative a discipline as there is when executed to excellence.
- Competence: not easy to measure without working directly with someone, but you can get a good sense of how someone will perform by listening to the questions they ask.
- Camaraderie: there are almost no projects that a single wizard can do better than a well constructed, high-performing team. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
- Constitution: a person’s ability to self-reflect, give and take feedback, and admit an error and move on are crucial when the currency is ideas.
For each of the 5Cs, I have a couple of simple questions that I ask, or signals that I look for when talking to candidates. These questions are not just useful for hiring, they’re also very useful for ongoing development and growth of people, and the broader team:
Curiosity
- Always ask why and how?
- What’s under that rock?
Creativity
- Can you draw me a picture?
- Can you tell me a story?
Competence
- Is this the best we can do?
- Will this leave things better than we found them?
Camaraderie
- Can you help someone else make their point?
- Are you playing to your strengths?
Constitution
- Are you listening with your ears, not your mouth?
- Do you have strong opinions, weakly held?
Some of the above questions will be familiar to people who have managed engineers, and I certainly don’t claim provenance. But as a simple framework, the 5Cs have served me well in the past, and continue to serve me well to this day.
Let me know if you have your own framework for understanding people. I’m always keen to hear of new ways to help people grow!
Regards,
M@
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