An important part of the role of leaders in organizations or social groups is creating teams around them that can help them define, refine and implement a vision.
This aspect of a leader’s life is often underrated. It can happen that, in an effort to centralize attention on themselves, (not-so-good) leaders neglect to credit what, most probably, had a relevant contribution in elevating them to a position of leadership in the first place: their teams.
This is very short-sighted because leadership only functions on the long term when the people around a leader are happy and motivated to perform good work for her or him.
Hence, the question of how to build a high-performing team becomes of paramount importance for enlightened leaders that care about their results as much as they care about their team members’ and co-workers’ results.
In this post, I’ll outline my philosophy for building incredible teams from the ground up, trying to refer to examples and experiences that I have seen in my professional life.
The most important thing(s)
Often we hear the saying that “A players hire A players, B players hire C players”. This may be true, however there is a non-trivial flaw in this argument: you actually don’t know who you’re hiring.
It doesn’t matter how deep your recruiting methodology goes, or how thoughtful and “field-tested” the questions you ask in your multi-step interview process are, leaders cannot really know the employee they just hired until they work closely with him or her for a reasonable length of time.
I find that a better heuristic is to hire people that you would work for. Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon, is famous for adopting this hiring technique. My experience has repeatedly shown that this system works fairly accurately.
I agree with you, Jeff. Sounds like you know what you’re doing 😅
In truth, what makes a team incredible is the ability of the team as a collective to make decisions that are better than the decisions that each individual team member would make in isolation.
As a consequence, a learning attitude (cultivating the beginner’s mindset) is another key characteristic that members of an incredible team should possess.
Imagine you are tasked with building an high-performing team and decide to trust Jeff Bezos (and me) on this one: you only choose people you would work for. Naturally, in order to shape a team with an edge, you would surround yourself with men and women that are smart, motivated and love to learn.
Intelligent people like to team up in cohorts to do meaningful work. Very rarely, in fact, big and complex problems that are worth getting tackled, can be solved by a single person: those problems, typically, require the efforts of a team of people. Problem solving as a team is inherently fun.
Who should be in your incredible team
So far, we got the idea that good leaders have a high chance of building an incredible team if they hire smart people they would love to work for. These team members should not be just intelligent: they must also be acutely aware each of their own strengths and weaknesses and willing to support each other to compensate and complement for those.
If you’re a left brain person, you better have in your team the creative type: it’s an easier way (and probably a more effective one) of doing good work than forcing yourself to suddenly become imaginative and unstructured in your thinking. Most likely, you are not going to make it happen in this one meeting.
If you’re naturally a big picture type of person, I encourage you to have in your team somebody that is detail-oriented: your solutions will be far more robust.
Of course, if developing the right part of your brain or becoming a more detailed thinker are valid goals for you, by all means go after them. However, know that this process will require time.
It may be tempting to hire people that are similar to you because you naturally “click with them”. This is a sub-optimal strategy because you are not addressing all the aspects which you are weak in. You need complementary skills, you don’t need to clone yourself.
Personally, I’m very comfortable in the knowledge that there are many subjects in my job which I’m not an expert in. These areas are generally more nuanced and sophisticated than what I could possibly see from the outside. I don’t feel the need to be the “smartest person in the room” – if anything, I look to be the one that has the most to learn. Therefore, I choose to hire for those specialties and then resist the temptation to give very detailed guidelines to my experts.
I can still ensure my leadership style and approach trickle down to my team members while also enabling them to make decisions independently and take actions autonomously.
Which brings me to the last element I want to discuss today: Trust.
When you initiate a relationship, you should always start from a point of trust. If you are a Game Theory nerd, you may be familiar with the Prisoner’s Dilemma, designed by American mathematicians Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher in 1950, in order to analyse why two rational individuals may choose to not cooperate with each other even when it is in their interest to do so. As Robert Axelrod demonstrated in 1984, starting with Trust actually works and it’s the most effective way to solve for that problem! Of course, Trust can be abused and lost (and your behavior should then change accordingly), however starting with Trust presents a much bigger upside, especially when we scale up on this concept and Trust becomes the fundamental building block of our teams’ culture.
Conclusive Thoughts
One of the hardest things for a leader in any type of organization is building high performing teams.
This exercise requires a true 360-degree vision and profound self awareness: understand what you don’t know and complement your pitfalls.
In this post, I have shared some of the ideas that worked for me during the years and I have highlighted some of the key characteristics I look for when hiring in my teams.
Looking forward to learning more and more from my future team members!