Leadership Advantage - Issue 23

by Andrea Michalek

The most valuable asset I’ve built in my career?

Not a product. Not IP. Not revenue.

It’s a network of people who still want to work with me again.

Years ago, I posted that I want to create an environment where I’d be proud to have my family come to work for me.

My brother Mike called me after reading it. “Great post,” he said, “but that part about me working for you… as the kids say, is sus.”

We laughed. I told him not to worry. I don’t actually want my family working for me.

I just want to build teams that feel like family.

And honestly? I still believe that’s the kind of place worth building.

When building your team, work from the point of view that you want it to be the best environment possible for those who are on it.

Everything works more smoothly: retention goes up, communication gets easier, and trust builds faster.

When building out my team at Plum Analytics, my co-founder and I sat down and made a list of all of the people we’d love to work with again.

In those early bootstrapping days, we pulled in part-time help from that list, paid in gratitude and an occasional case of beer.

For others, we had to wait for their non-competes to expire.

And others still, we needed to wait until after we were acquired and could pay them a standard wage.

But, looking back, we built the bulk of our team from the people we’d worked with in the past.

It gave us a huge advantage to build a team that already worked well together.

We skipped the storming phase of team formation and got straight to building with fast progress and fewer missteps.

Even new employees, who weren’t a part of our network, stepped into an environment where teammates were more than work acquaintances.

We kept that approach as we grew.

Trust scales fastest when you hire people you already trust.

Instead of simply asking for employee referrals, the question is, “Who would you love to work with again?”

This helped us bring in an ever-widening circle of great people.

Because people don’t refer others lightly, they only suggest folks they trust, and that trust spreads.

An approach like this has amazing downstream effects as well.

Over time, I started to notice something:

People I’d worked with years ago would reach out during key career moments.

They were looking to reconnect, collaborate, or just get a sense of what I was building next.

These weren’t cold calls.

They were calls from people who still trusted me. Who remembered the way we worked together.

I realized this isn’t just a network.

It’s an alumni base.

And it’s become the strongest asset I have.

I’m proud that many of my coaching and consulting clients are people I’ve worked with before, just in a different capacity.

If I ever started another product company, I know exactly who I’d call, and they’d show up to help lay the foundation of a great team once again.

Gut Check for Leaders

How many former team members have asked to work with you again?
When was the last time someone said, “I’d follow you anywhere?”
Have you created the kind of environment people remember years later?

So, if you are reading this thinking, well, that’s great, but I don’t have that yet, how do I get started?

If you want to build talent magnetism, start with these two moves:

Feed your network

• Make a list of the 10 people you’d love to work with again

• If it’s been longer than 2 months since you’ve spoken with them, reach out to them this week.

Keep the ties with your own inner circle of great people.

Improve your environment

• Next, look at your current team environment. What would make this team better, from their point of view?

• Don’t guess. Ask the questions to help inform your perspective.

• Pick one change you can execute to make their environment better. Once that is done, rinse and repeat.

Even tiny tweaks to culture compound over time.

Building talent magnetism is all about the people you lead, and it’s within the reach of every leader.

It doesn’t happen in isolation. The other skills we talk about still matter, like leading with passion and building the kind of streamlined systems high performers thrive in.

But, spending time truly focusing on how can you build the sort of environment your team members remember as one of the best jobs they’ve had, is an investment that continues to pay off for them AND you, for decades to come.

The best environments leave a mark.

And if you build one right, people will come back: to say thanks, to refer others, or to rejoin you years later.