Danielle Gualtieri

WE’RE HIRING

I mean, what else would we do?

When someone leaves, a project gets backed up, or the company needs a new capability, the natural reaction is:

We need to hire someone.

However, in his book How to Hire A-Players, Eric Herrenkohl makes a different argument. We aren’t filling a seat, we’re building a team.

He encourages intentional, proactive hiring of talent. Not reactive hiring of yes-(wo)men.

But what happens when the best person for the role is better than you?

Logically, the founder should leap for joy knowing they found an expert with skills beyond their own.

But is that always the case?

What if a manager finds talent…

…but also finds that talent intimidating.

What if they rock the boat? What if they are better than me?

I found myself wondering if the hardest part about hiring A-players isn’t actually hiring them, but making space for them.

Hiring for Possibility

Most businesses hire because they have a problem.

They hire someone to fix the problem.

But Herrenkohl argues smart businesses hire A-players because they aren’t just problem-solvers.

They are possibility generators.

A great hire can change what the company is capable of doing.

They might build a system the company didn’t have before. Find an opportunity the founder hadn’t seen. Build a team of their own. Take over something that was consuming the founder’s time.

Now the hire isn’t just helping the company do what it was already doing.

They’re creating possibilities that weren’t there before. They’re creating change.

And change can be uncomfortable.

So we have to continue our march into discomfort, uncertainty.

We must be flexible, bendable, viscous if we want what the A-players can bring to actually manifest.

We must give them the space to utilize their skills and do the amazing things we hired them to do.

Building the Team

So the approach is not what positions a company needs to fill.

It’s imagining what the company needs to become capable of, and who can excelerate us towards that capability.

Not:

What jobs do we need?

But:

What capabilities do we need?

A company might think it needs a project manager because projects are falling behind.

But a really strong project manager doesn’t just keep projects on schedule.

They might build better systems, improve communication, take work off the director or founder’s plate, and create the capacity to take on more business.

The A-Player Problem

And that brings me back to the question I started with.

What happens when the best person for the role is better than you?

Follow the logic. Jump for joy.

If you actually want the best people on your team, some of them are going to be better than you at something.

They may challenge how you’ve been doing things.

They may need more autonomy.

They may make decisions you wouldn’t have made.

And they may build something that you couldn’t have built yourself.

Excellence may feel threatenting because it shows up as change.

It is not threatening.

Change, enhancements, and discovering better ways of working are not a failure of the founder, director, or manager.

That’s the whole point of building a team: adding people that change what the team is capable of, who create new possibilities, and who offer effective talent that wasn’t there before.