The Diary of a CPO - Chapter 5

I don't suffer fools gladly.

Have you ever heard this saying before? 

I’m in HR and I think that’s why I don’t suffer fools gladly even more than the average person.

The first time I heard this was around 2016 when I took on my first leadership position at a fast-growth SaaS startup company. At that time, we had to do everything fast - fast hiring, fast development and fast execution. Even failures had to occur quickly, swiftly followed by the lessons learned. My first executive job was stressful and exhilarating at the same time, and it was during that time that I started to learn so much about people in general.

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I’m not sure if it was because I was finally at a level where I had to interact with so many different people at different levels that you learned to gauge people and their behaviours very quickly. Was it because I was involved in so many more recruitment interviews, hiring for fast growth companies that I learned to quickly assess when someone wasn’t completely genuine in an interview or when that person felt “off” in terms of their character? Was it because I was working with so many executive leaders who were managing their verticals and you had to spend so much time fixing problems, performance managing teams and doing all the hard things about hard things?

What I learned very quickly was that hard technical skills and book smarts will not result in your ideal hire. I’ve reviewed thousands of resumes from shiny candidates with every accreditation and ivy league school graduation letters on their resumes but the majority of them ended up being the worst hires I had ever made. What I learned was that they spoke very well, showed up to the interview extremely confident but they were obviously trained to show confidence, bred to believe they are the best of the best. The only problem was that they couldn’t execute on all that confidence after they were hired for the job. In fact, the majority of them had imposter syndrome quite a lot and they made a lot of excuses to blame others for why they failed to succeed in their role and the majority of them were cons (they had connections to gain flashy jobs but they didn’t earn the true right to be there). This is obviously disappointing for any hiring manager, but worse if you believed that their credentials and their resumes should have resulted in your amazing, high performing hire.

Let’s go back to that saying, “I don’t suffer fools gladly.”

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, it simply means “to have very little patience with people who you think are stupid or have stupid ideas.”

Pretty blunt, right?

I agree, it sounds harsh. So mean. Just so dismissive about people. And shouldn’t HR be the ones to uplift people all the time? Isn’t that our job?

Not for me. Why does HR have to be in the job where they must be unconditionally “for the people” versus “for the mission?” For one, not everyone is here for the mission and some people are just plain unhappy being here. I’m probably one of the few HR leaders out there that truly believes in the mission first before just rah-rahing for the people. I’m not the happy cheerleader that blindly sees the positive in every situation because we all know that we need to look at facts or the truth. No matter how much we want to believe in others, we need to be objective and ensure that we are not viewing the world with rose tinted glasses in some blind and rainbow way. There is such a thing called reality and I’m a firm believer that everyone has an opportunity to achieve their reality if they put in hard work and they’re disciplined in their approach.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very much a people first HR leader but that doesn’t mean that all people are right all the time. I think meritocracy is an important part of creating an environment where everyone feels they have the opportunity to achieve great things…as long as they put in the work to do so. That also includes myself and I’ve been the first to tell my CEOs, when that day comes when I am no longer servicing the company the best I can, I’ll be the first to step down - you won’t need to tap my shoulder, I will know first. And I mean it.

This has nothing to do with DEI or giving concessions to others because we should. I grew up as an immigrant from South Korea and I landed in Canada when I was 2 years old. At the time, my family had very little to show for themselves as we quickly had to learn the language and navigate a new country that was so different from where we came from. We didn’t have friends or family and my parents had to work hard to integrate into this new society while trying to find work to feed me and my older sister. It was hard and there was rampant racism at the time where you had people who just came up to you on the street to make fun of you for no reason - making gestures and saying cruel things because they thought it was funny and in their right. I remember my mother never cowering away when strangers taunted us. She stood up to them and hurled curse words back at them which startled them even more (I guess they thought she would be more submissive based on the Asian stereotype but she was anything but). I look back at those early years and I don’t blame my mother for how she reacted. At night, when she was putting me to bed, she would say, “Don’t let fools like them make you lose your confidence. Work hard, find your success and never let them take away your pride. Be successful and you show them.” Even as a little girl, scared and unsure of myself, I still remember what my mother told me. And as I grew up, I started to realize something…there are a lot of fools that speak confidently and swagger around like they own the world but more often than not, they are fools. They literally lack all self-awareness and they have no idea how ignorant they look most of the time. They were certainly not what I thought success should look like. 

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I wish people respected hard work and discipline more than they do today. That’s the one thing that I think we all are capable of but few of us actually put work into. I feel like so many people complain about what they don’t have versus appreciating what they do, and knowing that they can control many parts of their destiny to get to where they want to go. I hear employees complaining that they want their company to be fully remote so they can work from Portugal but they don’t choose to leave for a remote-first company. I hear people complaining they want to be a leader, but they are the first people to log off at 5pm and they don’t want to be disturbed when there is a company emergency. I hear people saying they want to be a manager of people but then they get upset when they need to share difficult company news and instead blame the executive team as if they had nothing to do with any company decisions. Maybe I grew up in a different time or maybe I grew up with very little, but I really believe that every single one of us has an opportunity to make our dreams come true if we put our minds to it but it takes hard work and it seems like that’s something no one wants to do these days. I’ll share 3 short stories about my childhood that might show a snippet of how I became who I am today.

Story #1: When I was really young, Disney World opened up in Orlando (this was in the 70’s) and it was all the rage. Every kid in my school ended up going to Disney World for vacation at least once and I was so envious! I used to watch Mickey Mouse cartoons on TV and loved all the Disney princess movies back then. I also had parents who worked 7 days a week and never had time for vacations so I knew I would never go as a child. Instead, I had to work part time at my parent’s grocery store and while I didn’t love it, I really learned the power of earning money at a young age. My parents paid me $5 per hour and I tried to work as much as I could over the summer holidays to see how much I could make. I often worked 12 hour days on weekends to see if I could do it (I was 13 years old). I did and I really enjoyed it (making money felt empowering as a kid who had nothing). I ended up visiting Disney World in my 20’s when I met my husband - he grew up in a single parent home raised by his mother after his father died of brain cancer when he was only 10, but his mother decided her 2 sons should experience Disney World and so she saved up enough money to take them. What an amazing mom! I LOVED Disney World when I went for the first time at 27 and I have gone back with my kids at least 10 times since (I still love it but I think more so because I never had a chance to go as a kid). I took my kids many times, not because they wanted to go, but because I felt like I could do something for them that I never had a chance to do myself. It’s something that I’ll probably always carry with me.

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Story #2: I had a tough upbringing as a child (one day, I’ll share those stories with you) but I still had a lot of optimism. I remember sitting in my guidance office waiting to speak to my counselor about one of my courses. While I was waiting, there were a few students who were getting ready to graduate that year and they were all waiting to get their acceptance letters from schools like Harvard, Yale and Stanford. I was not one of them, but I also didn’t dream that big. I was more realistic and all I wanted was to graduate from university. Definitely local and definitely not ivy league. I remember years later, lots of students were really angry about having to pay back their student loans. I secretly felt grateful that student loans existed to help kids like me who needed support with tuition fees. It took me many years to pay back my student loans but I did, every single penny and I never complained - I was given a student loan and I knew I had to pay it back. I was grateful I even had a chance to go to university.

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Story #3: I remember in my early years working in HR, I understood that if you wanted to climb the career ladder, you had to put in years of hard work and dedication to get to where you wanted to go. You get your entry-level job and then you prove yourself, and you move to that next level, etc. One day, in my HRBP role, I was talking to a colleague and she told me to look at someone’s profile on LinkedIn. This person she pointed to was someone who worked at our head office (we rolled into a large, publicly traded company) and she had recently graduated from her ivy league university. She did not start off in an entry level position. She was automatically put into a managing director position straight out of undergrad. I was perplexed. I asked her why this person was in such a high level position when she had no working experience and she looked at me like I was an idiot. “Don’t you know, some people are just privileged like this, she probably had connections or her dad made a call to the CEO. That’s the way the world works,” she said to me. I was shocked…not so much because I thought things like this just don’t happen, but shocked because I couldn’t believe that you could do things like this and expect people around you to just “accept” it. Why is nepotism tossed around so nonchalantly? Worse yet, what IF this person couldn’t do their job successfully, what would happen then? Would the company just have to accept her mediocrity because that’s the way it works? To me, this was even worse, accepting someone who might be really bad at their job but that shouldn’t matter to anyone else because that’s just the way it is. How sad (I hope she was good).

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So when I think about how I don’t suffer fools gladly, I have to admit that I don’t. I think that each of us has the capability to do great things but we all have the opportunity to rise to a level of greatness. The level that we rise to will depend partly on our intelligence, partly on our will and partly on luck. Some of us will rise to extremely high standards and some of us will only rise to a moderate level. I think the part that I find intolerable is when someone is given an opportunity to rise to the occasion and they flop because they relied too much on luck (luck without will only gets you so far), or they didn’t put in the effort required to succeed (you thought that you could succeed without working really hard) or you just couldn’t do the job no matter how hard you tried (you were willing but not able, which is the hardest thing to overcome). 

Where I don’t suffer fools is all the foolishness I see sometimes at work that I find incredibly off putting. People who have a sense of entitlement because they were in their job for a long time. People who chase titles and salaries but they’re hardly worth the titles they chase. People who find every excuse in the book to extol why they didn’t hit their targets but none of their excuses hold themselves accountable. People who claim they should be promoted and how fabulous they would be while they are barely succeeding at the level they’re currently at (I guess a promotion would cure that). I don’t suffer fools gladly. There is a sense of entitlement and expectation that people feel now more than in previous generations and no one witnesses this more than HR. Sometimes, I think that common sense has been lost, replaced by very confident people who are unabashedly asking for the sun, the moon and the stars just because they have no shame.

When you genuinely think of the 80/20 rule, you will understand that most companies are run by the top 20% (I think it’s more like the top 10%) but you will often get the 80% asking for the rewards because sometimes, they think all you need to do is ask and you shall receive. If only it were that easy.

A true meritocracy is what everyone dreams of, but not everyone will put in the hard work and effort to reap the rewards they dream of. Don’t be a fool and ask for something you don’t deserve because the world is extremely competitive and we must all earn our place. Earn your place rightfully and you will also earn the respect of others. I’m in HR and maybe I’ve seen too much but I’ve never suffered fools gladly.