Best Versus Right
Today’s talent market can feel chaotic and overwhelming, and hiring has become extremely challenging. The best candidates are in hot demand, and leaders face a very real impulse to act quickly and snap them up. Instead of hiring the “best” person, a wiser manager should be taking the time to hire the “right” person – to lean into a diversity of perspectives and balance their own strengths and weaknesses. But who, exactly, are the right people? How can we identify them, and what does it mean to hire for your weaknesses? You must be willing to take a look at what you’re lacking if you want to build a team that shores up your weak spots and performs for greater overall success.
Identify the Missing Piece
The first step any leader should take when beginning the process of hiring a new team member is to take time to reflect. Consider the knowledge, skills, and attributes of each person currently on your team — including yourself. This isn’t a simple list of the skills you’ll include in your job listing; this is a deeper, thorough self-reflection. The knowledge and skills that qualify an applicant for the position are always key but don’t underestimate the attributes that will allow them to work well with the other team members or within your culture.
Crucially, don’t give yourself a pass. What do you bring to the table? What are your strengths? Your weaknesses? Be honest with yourself about what you have, and especially, what you’re missing. It takes a great deal of strength to truly probe your weaknesses and tremendous confidence to build a team that you hope will surpass your best solo efforts. Next, do the same at the team level: where are they strong and where are they weak? Consider how different skills and attributes work together to create synergy. By utilizing the strength of each job role and individuals’ attributes, complementarity among leaders and teams encourages high performance.
What Are You Growing Toward?
A good leader is, and should, be judged by their team. Not just running a great team, but putting one together. When you think in terms of your team, you have to not only consider the now, you also have to try to predict who might be capable of moving up to management — even potentially replacing you. Consider how well your team would hold together without you. If there’s no one you can imagine promoting, that’s a weakness. It’s important to find a way to evaluate your team’s composition in terms of strengths, weaknesses, and styles of work and collaboration.
For example, according to the DISC assessment, which analyzes styles of work and communication, a person might be excellent at interpersonal communication while demonstrating limited attention to detail. You want to hire for a cohesive blend and then delegate and assign according to competence. Too many results-driven team members can hamper cross-collaboration, just as too few can drag a team into passivity. The best teams are formed from a combination of skills and attributes.
It’s also important to recognize that not everyone will be aiming for promotion; in some cases, you find people who make individual contributions based on a specific skill, like subject matter experts. To drive success on your team, you need some people seeking to rise to leadership on the current team and others who are good at what they do and may prefer to stay where they are.
Strong Teams, Strong Leaders
Many people find these ideas sound in theory and have trouble implementing them. As managers, it’s easy to fall for the idea that you’re a leader because you’re the best and to be reluctant to hire someone better than you because you fear being replaced.
In truth, leadership skills are often different from the depth of knowledge best suited for less managerial positions. It may seem counterintuitive, but building a team of people who are stronger than you are is almost always the right move. The model of leadership has evolved, and these days it’s generally accepted that the biggest indicator of a leader’s success is the strength and quality of the team they’ve built beneath them.
The way to assemble the best team is to hire people who are already beyond you — already better than you are in their area of expertise. As a personal example, both of my direct reports bring a depth of experience that can sometimes exceed my own. Finding the right people required some self-reflection on my part to identify the areas I needed help in. This required humility on my part and yielded a well-rounded and more effective team that I am honored to lead.
Don’t Lose Sight of Your Vision
Your team’s success often hinges on how well that team collaborates and balances each others’ strengths and weaknesses. Building a great team that functions well is both art and science, and in the frenzy of hiring these days, it will take some planning. Many managers know what they’re looking for when it’s time to hire a new team member, but somehow, when an exciting resume comes in, they forget and start reaching for that ‘best’ person. The fancy college name, the big company they just left, even something as simple as a hefty dose of charisma. After all that work, don’t trip at the finish line. Hold out for the person who is right for your team. That might mean passing on that perfect resume. But it’s those hard decisions that show true leadership and build the best teams.
