4 Tips For Recruiting a High-Performance Team

Happy Friday,

The forces working against building a high-performance team are brutally strong. I’ll explain why in a second.

Here are four things we did to build a high-performance organization at ECO:LOGIC. I was pleased this week to hear Naval Ravikant extolling the very same.

1.    Identify and hire the geniuses and soon-to-be geniuses. Brains, character, communication skills, and a can-do attitude. All four.

2.    Build and run your team/organization around the geniuses, not the other way around. Around the highest common denominator, not the lowest.

3.    Move less capable, less willing staff to your competitors, expeditiously. Excellent engineers want to work with other excellent engineers. When they realize they’re not, it adds to their cognitive load, gnawing away at them and making them believe they should probably be somewhere else. Decide who you want to keep.

4.    When recruiting someone new, suggest they speak with anyone they choose for half an hour. Tell them if they don't come away impressed, they shouldn’t take the job. If you then find yourself concerned about who they might talk to, that’s who needs to go.

Sounds straightforward, but here’s why it's so hard.

For more than a decade, the demand for engineers has outstripped the supply, putting leaders under intense pressure to compromise and settle for warm bodies, because 1) projects are serious contractual commitments with legally enforceable performance requirements and deadlines, 2) they're very aware their key staff are overburdened, and 3) leaders have both a mandate (the business plan) and a personal financial incentive (their bonus) to deliver growth every year. Excellence is desirable, but it isn't quantified or measured in the business plan, nor is it incentivized in their bonus. It's important, but not important enough.

Taken together, these are profoundly powerful incentives to lower the bar, not raise it.

So, for most, this GNF is irrelevant, at least for now 😉. Startups, however...

Have a GREAT weekend,

Dave

Feedback and blowback are always welcome: dave@goodnewsfriday.com

All 150+ topics are available at @goodnewsfriday.com