Don’t hire all-stars for every position.
A friend and serially successful entrepreneur told me a story to illustrate a point. In one of his most successful companies, he hired six of the most talented developers he could find—and one guy who was just a solid performer. His all-star six were constantly coming up with new ideas, and they were constantly arguing over the best way to do things or taking off on tangents to try new ideas. The other guy just wanted to write code—and to be told what the code needed to do.
After less than a year of this, my friend fired the six and kept the reliable workhorse. He later brought on new people and built the team back up, but not everyone on this version of the team had to be a magical unicorn. He had learned that the best team isn’t necessarily made of the most talented individuals.
Not everyone on a team has to be an all-star.
We have created a myth—as a species, as business builders, as entrepreneurs—that in order to have the best team, we have to have the best and brightest individuals. That’s just not true. The best and brightest are likely to require more maintenance, more stimulation, and more money. If they have egos—and the highest performers frequently do—those egos will require some stroking and some protection from other high performers. The most individually talented people often struggle to work as a team, which requires a lot of back and forth and compromise, something the highly talented don’t often have to do.
It’s possible to put five incredibly intelligent and talented people together and have a team that performs at a mediocre level—perhaps even worse. A team takes on a personality and an intellect of its own, and just as a person with internal conflict may have bad results at work or in social interactions, a team that develops a lot of conflict and division is likely to produce some bad outcomes no matter how intelligent and talented its members are.
This goes to the heart of one of the most misunderstood principles of life in a company: a team is different from the individuals who make up the team.
A team is a very specific type of group that comes together to achieve common goals. Those goals usually supersede the individual aims and desires of the individuals on the team. The team is based upon an agreement that the common good is more immediately important than individual gain, and that that common good can only become real through cooperation and coordination. If there were a way to achieve those goals as an individual, there are many times in which it wouldn’t be worth the sacrifice and headache of being in a team. Members in a team make a conscious choice that the needs of the many take priority over the individual needs of the few. Or the one, Trekkies.
Teams are different from the individuals in them. They take on qualities that are more than the sum of the talent and personalities on them. Top talent is great when that talent can work with others and not need the limelight. When that top talent needs to be distinct from the team—especially when that need is about getting attention—the effects negate the talent and hurt the team.
Placed in this context, the notion of hiring for brilliance rather than, say, unwavering commitment to a cause makes far less sense. One of the fundamental requirements for a team is cooperation. If “talent” were the only factor in selecting the best people for your team, your focus on the individual would come at a steep cost: unity. There’s a big difference between being individually brilliant and collectively brilliant. Yet, we frequently mistake the former for being indicative of the latter.
“Top talent” might very well kill your team—and your company. “Modest talent” might save it.
Huge caveat here: I’m not suggesting that you hire highly inclusive idiots. Without a good deal of talent and a track record of working successfully to build and grow companies, you’ll end up with a team that is perfectly prepared to host a bake sale. You won’t necessarily find performance there, and everyone around the company will smoke that out.
I am suggesting that you take “doesn’t play well with others” seriously. When you talk to a candidate, listen for the ratio of “I” to “we”. Note whether their stories of accomplishments past are about a shared effort to reach new heights or an individual victory in which the candidate was the lone hero. Even if—perhaps especially if—the candidate is unicorn-level talent, dig into how they worked with others to achieve things that no individual can achieve alone. We all get starry-eyed when we find great talent, but our myths and superstitions about what that talent might be like in our company has to be balanced by the understanding that the work is in “our” company. Not mine, not theirs.
There’s the truth about what makes teams work: hiring solely for talent and brilliance looks like the right thing to do, but it’s actually a stupid and toxic decision. Conversely, hiring for cooperation alone is a recipe for feel-good underperformance. If we’re building a great team, we have to balance these things. Your all-star developer will bring the dev team to its knees if the skill isn’t tempered by wisdom and at least a tiny bit of humility and curiosity.
Turns out the guy who just wanted to know what the software needed to do was the all-star.
