A good idea without a great team is going nowhere.
There is no business without the people in the company.
A great team with an average idea will be more successful than a great idea with a poor team.
Companies are a collection of people who work together to achieve a set of common goals. Products matter...yes; telling a good story matters...yes; getting orders and filling those orders matter...yes. Ultimately the success of the company is heavily dependent on everyone buying into a purpose or vision, pulling in the same direction and executing on the agreed upon plan.
The people on the team are important.
As the company evolves and grows it will add or replace members of the team. The hiring managers or leadership will identify a need and recruit someone to join the team and help achieve the common goals. Lots has been written on good ways to recruit people to the team: define the need; identify the characteristics of a good hire for the position(s); go find them; interview them for fit...on skills, experience and personality.
Depending on the job market, hiring can occur quickly with many good candidates being available, or hiring can take some time and it could take a while to find the right person. In the meantime, the work is piling up and projects or deliverables may be falling behind schedule. Inevitably the hiring manager hits a conundrum; hire a candidate that’s available now but ok...or wait and keep looking for a really good fit who can be with the team for some time.
Passing on an OK candidate to wait for a better fit means pain and pressure for other members of the team as they have to take on extra work, work longer and potentially not be as effective. The quality of work could suffer. Burn out could occur. All risks that could occur and harm the team, if that hire isn’t made soon enough.
Instead, going ahead and hiring that OK candidate means that work can be distributed and started on. Saves pain for the existing team and projects/deliverables are moving forward. Pain avoided...for now. So what’s the risk? The risk is that the work of the OK candidate is just that...ok. It’s not up to the quality standard of the organization, it ends up requiring support from other team members. Or there ends up being a misfit in terms of personality or work ethic and standards. The misfit causes harm to the cohesiveness of the existing team or worse, poisoning the overall work environment.
So, which is worse? The pain from waiting or the pain from a bad hire?
A bad hire not only can disrupt a good team, it could end up making more work for the existing team as they have to go back and re-do substandard work. The bad hire has to be let go after a few months and now the team and their projects/deliverables are in fact further behind.
I was involved with a software company and the VP of Sales had left to pursue another opportunity. The company needed a sales leader and we immediately started our search for a replacement. After a month a few candidates emerged that seemed capable and we went into in-depth discussions with them. More time passed and none seemed like an obvious choice to help the company succeed; but now we had gone quite some time without a sales leader and some nervousness was creeping in amongst members of the company’s leadership. “Ms. Smith seems good and will likely do a decent job”; “Mr. Jones has been a sales leader before explained his methodology really well!”. We hired Ms. Smith. She was well-connected and made some good introductions. She didn’t close any new accounts; we missed quarterly targets for orders. She left the company within 12 months. We didn’t grow the business during Ms. Smith’s tenure. We struggled to maintain the accounts we had. We should have waited. We should have continued to share the load of leading sales, across various team members. We should have kept searching for a candidate that was a better fit.
Seems like the pain of waiting for the right hire is much less than the pain from a bad hire.
Thank you for investing time in reading this post. Questions and comments are always welcome.
Shail Paliwal
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