Leverage Weekly #59 - Hiring the right people
tl;dr - There are many different traps in hiring.
An organization, I have proposed, is a machine made of people. The structure and culture, the latter of which has both explicit and implicit elements, constitute the wiring. That wiring connects the people who are members of the organization together. When set up properly, organizations act as force multipliers—people can do much more together than they can independently. When set up incorrectly, organizations flounder and may be much less than the sum of their parts.
The fact that organizations can be so much more effective than individuals does not mean that personnel choices are unimportant. On the contrary, hiring decisions are some of the most important decisions an organization can make. In many cases, hiring the wrong person can seriously damage or slow down an organization, while hiring the right people can lead the organization to become capable of things the original team never anticipated.
In well-designed organizations, the organization is fit to the people and the people are fit to the organization. Every position matters. Ideally, every position is filled and there are no extra positions. Every person is well-suited to their position or will become such within the relevant timeframe. But also, every person matters and the organization is customized to accommodate each and take advantage of that person’s particular skills and abilities.
Since hiring is so important, it makes sense for organizations to devote substantial resources to identifying candidates, assessing them, and being in a position to make compelling offers. What constitutes “best” differs from company to company, and so the process of finding the best talent for a given role also involves a degree of organizational self-knowledge. There are many traps that people fall into when hiring that cause them to focus on the wrong things and end up hiring the wrong people.
The first major trap is only hiring people one likes. Liking a candidate is sometimes correlated with the candidate’s fitness for the job, since in many cases a person likes the candidate precisely because of their perceived skills or excellence. However, people also like candidates for mundane personal reasons, like similar sense of humor. Relying too heavily on what one personally likes can introduce bias. To counter this bias, one can imagine candidates that would be excellent hires that one would not personally like or candidates that one personally likes but would not be competent hires.
A second trap is only hiring people who will get along with each other. If people don’t get along enough, they won’t be able to work together. That can be a dealbreaker. But if people get along too well, it becomes easier to lose focus on the organization’s mission or the tasks at hand. Rather than maximizing cohesion, the goal typically should be to get the degree of cohesion just right. It is often best to aim for people with some affinity for each other, buy also some differences, so that ultimately, it is the mission of the organization that holds the group together.
A third trap is hiring people who are too likeminded. If people’s ideas are too different from one another, it can be too hard to reach agreement. On the other hand, people often take likemindedness as an indication of excellence: “They’ve had the same ideas I’ve had! They must be on the right track.” It can be helpful to identify the sorts of disagreement that one expects to be fruitful and to hire people capable of that type and degree of disagreement. It can also be very helpful to understand the circumstances under which one should change one’s own mind and aim to make sure those conditions can obtain.
As with many things, the challenge is to strike the right balance. Find people one likes enough, who get along well enough with one another, and who are likeminded enough—but not too much so. Then, filter for competence, alignment on mission, fit with the relevant roles, and it’s possible to put together a great team. Alternatively, one can start with talent and role fit first and put together a culture after the fact. Different approaches will yield different organizations with different challenges and, depending on one’s sector or field, filtering in a different order may be called for.
There are many different traps in hiring.
Geoff and Oliver spent most of last week in LA at the Quantum Biology Institute lab. There were four candidates for the position of Head of Biology and the QBI team spent one day with each. Each day had the same schedule: a biology discussion, a physics discussion, and a scientific planning discussion. All told, Geoff and Oliver participated in about forty-four hours of science discussion, while the team and each candidate struggled to achieve genuine cross-disciplinary conversation.
This extensive work in the trenches of science has led to Geoff and Oliver, both natural learners, to learn a lot of science themselves. Geoff has been focusing physics, and can now talk at length about spin, a fundamental property like mass and charge, that determines how particles interact with magnetic fields. Oliver has been learning about biology, using the specific example of insulin production to trace the evolution of biological understanding from the 1960s through to today.
In and around these extensive discussions, the Leverage team grabbed time to do the rest of its work. Melinda continued work on editing YouTube videos. Geoff did some business development, meeting with a potential Leverage client. The team worked together to (mostly) finish the update for the Q1 2024 board meeting. It was a fairly brutal week, though satisfying because we did actually get a lot done.
The Q1 board meeting, which was held on March 28, in advance of the Leverage Q2 team retreat, was an excellent one. The board discussed the Leverage business model which, to some parties’ surprise, may actually be working. There was also spirited discussion of whether Leverage should launch an “interest token,” an electronic collectible that would serve as a gauge of external interest in Leverage. The team has been leaning in favor, though received valuable words of caution from Nevin, who has had a lot of experience with variations on such tokens over the last several years.
Editor’s note: This was written to cover the week of March 24-28 though was published late.