Let’s talk about “team building” for a sec. This is basically a quick jaunt into the world of making successful hires. If you’re looking for a job, you may find some good thoughts here about how workplace chemistry matters on teams.
If you’re hiring for a big role, you may benefit from these thoughts on why you should value chemistry more and skills/experience less (aside from basic competencies and required experience levels required to do the job).
As always, there’s the one paragraph TL;DR at the end if you’re already twitching to scroll somewhere else.
You Know what Team Building Is…. right?
I hear the phrase team building get thrown around a lot, often used as a synonym for hiring people, creating positions, or moving people around inside an organization.
It can also be used to reference the well-intentioned but awkward ritual of getting people who don’t normally work together in a conference room with free breakfast and asking them to build towers out of marshmallows and toothpicks or whatever.
Yay, we’re a…. Team?
The team building I’m talking about is assembling a group of people that is greater than the sum of their parts – by exponential factors. I’ve been fortunate enough to have been hired onto excellent teams, I consider myself part of winning teams when it comes to my clients, and I have built my own teams that I’m proud of over the years.
But how do you get there? It’s not like family – you get to choose these people. Their personalities don’t just have to be tolerated because it came with the resume you hired. I think there is a vital flaw in most conventional hiring that can keep you from finding the right people.
All too often teams with incredible capabilities fail or flounder until they are able to find the right mix of people with the right chemistry to get the job done.
I have made hires in the past based on someone’s incredible skill set and their experience, even though I knew it might not be a right fit with my group, thinking we would all make it work, or that we would perform so much better because of this person on our team that it wouldn’t matter. False. I was dead wrong. Chemistry always matters.
(Let’s be realistic though, chemistry doesn’t matter as much if you’re a brain surgeon, a rocket scientist, or the myriad of other skill-based professions that require an intense, next-level understanding of a specific skill.)
The most obvious reason chemistry matters when hiring is that skills can be learned efficiently, and chemistry is something that comes naturally or takes a very long time to develop. I would say it is far easier for me to pick up a new skill than it is for me to learn to get along with someone who has a different working style than I do, a different communication style than I do, or different values altogether.
This is also incredibly powerful to remember when it comes to choosing clients to work with, or hiring agencies, or freelancers. Across the board, skills are common and readily available. So are clients, jobs, and projects. What is vital for success is finding the right match, pair yourself with people that really make you excited to do the work of the day. People that have good chemistry make each other better at their jobs, and ultimately create better results.
So to go back to my original opener about team building versus hiring, it is vital when team building to consider the chemistry of the group that you’re putting together. Don’t try to make a homogeneous group of individuals that have checked all the boxes. Understand that your team is a cast of characters, with complementary strengths and weaknesses, and that makes the group more effective, engaged, and productive.
When I say skills don’t necessarily matter as much as chemistry, there is a caveat. You have to be able to do the job at hand, but I don’t get too hung up on checking little boxes of who knows what software and the exact type of experience they’ve had in the past, or types of organizations they’ve worked for.
Core skills do matter, but only in the broadest sense. I think that if you’re hiring a day-to-day producer, and it is a very specific task, they probably need to have a clear idea of what kind of tools they’re going to be using coming into the job. You wouldn’t want to hire someone for a programming position that has only ever been an accountant, or vice versa.
I’ve never worked at a corporation in my life before my job at BBVA, but I feel like I’ve been really successful at it, and the people I’ve worked with are some of the coolest people, and I’ll be sad to see this job come to an end for that reason (if you are just tuning in, BBVA is being acquired by PNC this year, which could lead to downsizing).
I was hired because I was going to be part of a team, by an awesome team builder, clearly not because of any corporate experience. It turned out to be the best team I’ve been a part of, aside from the one I built myself at Studio 20.
And believe me, working for a corporation rather than a small or medium-sized company is a skill all its own. It’s a different cadence, communication style, and workflow in almost every way. And now I have that skill, and for that, I’m grateful.
My suggestion for how to approach to hiring:
Disclaimer: This idea might not be new, but I didn’t go searching the internet for this thought before deciding to share it here. Forgive me if I’m parroting some famous Seth Godin team-building book or if Simon Sinek wrote about this last week. Don’t compare yourself to others too much before you decide to contribute or you’ll never create.
My suggestion when it comes to building a team is to choose a new starting point for the vetting process. Rather than going through resumes and finding the most qualified candidates, with the most impressive resumes and working our way down the list to try to find someone that would fit on our team, let’s… not do that.
Start by taking all of the people who are qualified, separate them from the people who are absolutely not qualified. If they don’t have the hard skills necessary to do the job, they’re out. Make a “can do the job” pile and toss everything else.
Then go through this pile and perhaps sort into people you like right away on paper, and people you might not. Don’t compare specific levels of qualification, hard skills, job history, etc. Unless they had six jobs in the last six years, you’re getting into the weeds.
Have a 5-minute phone call with everyone in the “like right away” pile. This should be maybe 10 – 25% of your applicants but probably not more than 20 people.
You can learn a lot about a person in a 5-minute phone call. You can learn a tremendous amount about chemistry as well. Rather than starting with the absolute most qualified candidate and working your way down to find someone that you can work with, you are instead trying to find people that you have great chemistry with first.
Protect Your Existing Team from Bad Hires
Let’s also not forget you already have a team. This is a tribe of individuals who are doing good work, you don’t want to disrupt that by bringing in someone who doesn’t fit. Just because they have the core skills you need, doesn’t mean they will make everyone on the team more motivated to do a great job because they complement everyone else’s skillset and working style. It is your responsibility to protect the team you’ve already built from a bad hire.
This is why I believe the decision-making process for how to hire should be structured differently. In short, if someone is qualified enough to do the job, don’t start comparing their qualifications against someone else’s qualifications. Start having conversations. Find the people that you resonate with, that bring you ideas, that sound like the kind of people you would want to spend weeks and months with, get into healthy arguments with, and make tough decisions with.
At the end of the day, and you already know this – your team is made of people, not resumes.
Looking for a new job or new clients yourself?
For those of you looking for work, looking for a team to join, or deciding whether or not to pick up a new client: always gravitate toward the people that you have the best chemistry with, not necessarily the most high-profile job, or the biggest opportunity, or highest paying client you can find.
Following real connections with real people, and building meaningful professional relationships has taken me much further than the pursuit of high profile opportunities. Your best life will find a way. You will get where you want to go when you value working with people you trust and respect above all external factors. Taking the best gig you can find with people you don’t work well with will likely result in you not being able to “win” at your new role or with your new client.
The Big TL;DR – Having a lot of small conversations with a variety of candidates will help you find a better chemistry match for your team. A chemistry match for your team is one of the most important factors for a new hire, aside from their core required skills. Skills can be learned quickly, chemistry either exists or must be nurtured over time. If you surround yourself with people that make everyone’s performance better, you’ve done it right and you get a gold star for team building.
