How to Stand Out By Speaking Up

Tech companies can't succeed based solely on a handful of individuals in the C-suite. Ask any founder or CEO and they'll tell you a company's success hinges on the grit and determination of its rising stars. Whether you're in software development, IT infrastructure or sales, your contributions matter. In this episode on our special series on tech talent, CampusLogic CEO Gregg Scoresby shares insights on how to keep your stars rising. How you define top tech talent? Top tech talent needs to be smart, have a desire to learn new things and be committed to solve the problem or mission you're working on. What makes an employee stand out from the pack? They need to be collaborative and naturally curious to learn new things. We don't have people working in isolation at CampusLogic. If you were in one of our standup meetings, it's hard to tell who is senior and who is junior. No one is above working on a something else than another. One of our values is, "We're nice and take care of each other." Being able to work with other people and being nice, smart, collaborative and curious. Those are things that make someone successful at CampusLogic. How do you recognize your best employees? We have a company meeting every two weeks where we have lunch together and go over things we're working on. As part of all of that, we're recognizing individuals on teams. We also do real-time recognition of people via Slack where people are recognizing the good performance of other people they see within the company. That said, it's not my job as CEO to make sure everyone gets recognized. Everybody needs to make sure the good work of others is getting recognized as well. What's one of the roles you have the toughest time filling? Software engineering talent is certainly in high demand. The discipline of project management is also hard to find. We have a couple great people in that area, but scaling that is hard. If you were mentoring a group of emerging tech talent, what's one thing you'd want them to know? There's a contract that exists between an employer and an employee. We give you a salary and you give us your best work, including your opinions. I want people to be vocal. They need to bring their best ideas and be motivated to solve a problem. So my advice to younger tech talent is be curious, be vocal, be thoughtful and be collaborative. Is there a book you'd pass along to them? There's a book called "Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter" by Liz Wiseman. It's not directed at tech talent but more toward leaders of developing talent in general. It's a good book to think about whether you're killing genius or cultivating genius. As leaders of tech talent, we need to be doing all we can to multiply the genius within the organization.