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Mariam Naficy, founder and CEO of Minted, believes that cultivating leaders from within is often one of the most effective strategies for long-term company success. “If you can look for people’s unique talents and grow them from within, those people will often become some of the strongest leaders you have,” she explains.
Naficy acknowledges that while this process takes years, it pays off, particularly in areas where a company’s unique value lies. “We take disciplines where we are not experts, such as finance and HR, where people do things better than we do and hire those people from outside. But for the things that we do that are differentiated and where our secret sauce lies—for example, crowdsourcing instead of traditional merchandising—we grow people from the inside. It’s a lot harder to take a merchant from let’s say GAP and say ‘we want you to unlearn everything you’ve learned over the past 25 years’ than it is to take a very smart person and build them up into a leader from within the company.”
She also notes that building talent internally is more difficult when resources are tight, since you have less leeway to let employees learn through their mistakes. With more capital, however, it’s possible to bring in external advisors to support internal growth and leadership development. This combination, according to Naficy, leads to a stronger company culture and a resilient leadership pipeline.
