Former DocuSign CEO Dan Springer graduated from Harvard Business School, but he says holding an Ivy League degree won’t help his employees score a promotion during their annual reviews.
“I’ll tell you what matters. It matters to me that people did something great,” Springer said in an interview with Business Insider.
Springer was the CEO of DocuSign, the electronic signature company, from 2017 to 2022. In April, he left DocuSign’s board and joined Ironclad, a contract management software company, as CEO.
Springer graduated with an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1991. He then joined McKinsey and worked at the consulting firm for over six years.
He told Business Insider that while he loved his time at Harvard, he’s not that interested in hearing about people’s degrees.
“I’d be more interested about: ‘What did you do after you got that degree? How did you apply it and how are you growing your stuff?'” he said.
The three variables that lead to promotion
Springer said that when it comes to vetting people for promotions, he looks at three variables: an employee’s skills, their ego, and how hard they work.
Those come together for him as a formula.
“Skills, having the skills that you work with, divided by your ego,” Springer said. “You don’t want to have a big ego. You want to maintain the ego and focus on the company and our customers, and then you raise that to the power of how hard they work.”
“It’s a lot of work to build a growing software company, and so people have to have that intensity to say, ‘I’m going to put in the work.’ Once you have the skills and values, in the end, it really comes to, ‘Are you working smart and are you working hard?'” he added.
Springer isn’t the only business leader who has stressed the importance of dedication.
Ken Griffin, the billionaire founder and CEO of the hedge fund Citadel, told his summer interns in 2022 that people needed to aggressively pitch themselves for bigger roles and responsibilities.
“Don’t be shy in asking for bigger problems to take on. Don’t be shy about asking for a promotion. What’s the worst they’re going to say — that you’re too ambitious?” Griffin said.
Luis von Ahn, the cofounder and CEO of Duolingo, wrote in a LinkedIn post on September 22 that new hires who wanted to succeed at his company should be proactive at solving problems.
In his post, von Ahn said Duolingo didn’t have a company blog, until an engineer took the initiative to start one. Von Ahn said that the engineer “did way better at Duolingo” than his colleague, who only complained about the problem instead of doing something about it.
“If something bothers you, you generally have the freedom here to fix it. We’re still figuring lots of things out, and if you see a problem, you can actually do something about it here,” von Ahn added.
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