When you’re hiring, seek out people who are managers of one.
What’s that mean? A manager of one is someone who comes up with their own goals and executes them. They don’t need heavy direction. They don’t need daily check-ins. They do what a manager would do — set the tone, assign items, determine what needs to get done, etc. — but they do it by themselves and for themselves.
These people free you from oversight. They set their own direction. When you leave them alone, they surprise you with how much they’ve gotten done. They don’t need a lot of handholding or supervision.
How can you spot these people? Look at their history. Have they been self-sufficient at previous jobs? Have they defined their own role before? Have they started their own site/company before? Or done their own thing in some other way? Find someone with initiative and a budding entrepreneurial spirit. And then nurture it.
You want someone who’s capable of building something from scratch and seeing it through. When you find these people, it frees up the rest of your team to work more and manage less.
Marc Hedlund
on 26 Nov 08Agree completely. My take on this is, hire people who are inspired by what you do, and you won’t have to manage them.
Landon
on 26 Nov 08Execellent, short post.
Geoff
on 26 Nov 08I would add that you also want someone who shares your values and buys into your vision.
A manager without the attributes you describe above is not much of a manager.
A manager that has your attributes but is not interested in your goals for the business needs to go start their own company.
Geof Harries
on 26 Nov 08I couldn’t agree more. Speaking from personal experience, hiring people at the opposite extreme only leads to a LOT more work for you, which obviously isn’t the point of hiring someone in the first place.
Anton
on 26 Nov 08Something to watch out for however, is how much you trust this person. Who do you suspect that they are most dedicated to?
Self-sufficiency is great, but it seems* like this type of personality would have a slightly higher chance of having a personal agenda that overrides honest responsibility to the company they work for.
I’ve seen production designers that, even though have needed higher levels of supervision, have had a much higher level of dedication to the right people. And, given the right tasks can be a real machine at getting similar levels of work done.
*disclaimer: This is a personal opinion formed from people I’ve met in the industry, and not derived from any type of known data.
Matt Brown
on 26 Nov 08Of course this is sound advice—people that work hard, and don’t stand around waiting for someone to tell them what to do are an obvious plus to any team. However, I feel this glosses over the potential downsides of this worker type.
Many ‘self-starters’ are difficult to work with in teams, stubborn to change their opinions, and generally isolationist in their workflow. I should know—I’ve fit this type too closely in the past, and it’s not great in a team environment. Any self-starter should be willing to listen, adapt, and fit their work ethic into a team setting. Having a fun and healthy process is just as important as the end result of the work.
I still think the best hiring advice is to weight personality more than skill. Whomever you hire on your team should be someone you trust, and someone who’s personally flexible, and willing to both compromise AND stand up, when either is really needed.
GeeIWonder
on 27 Nov 08They set their own direction.
Hopefully not. The logical conclusion of this statement is you end up with a team without unified direction, or a bunch of yes-men, both of which are disasters waiting to happen, both of which are most likely to show up on the most important/interesting projects.
They may their own decisions, they may even find their own path, but hopefully the team as a whole sets the direction.
Matt
on 27 Nov 08I would suggest that self-learning is what you should look for when hiring. You want to be able to give someone direction and have them follow your vision, but you don’t want to be explaining/teaching them every detail or have them wander off on their own tangent.
With a self-learner, you only need to give them general direction and goals and they will fill in the details (i.e. manage themselves). That way, they will both be team players while freeing you from worrying about the details of their job.
Matt
on 27 Nov 08I guess I didn’t self-learn how to put a hyperlink in properly the first time.
Neil
on 27 Nov 08I believe a small team of passionate self-starters is ideal. It’s difficult, but if you can somehow align the direction of your team’s passions with what you are attempting to build it’s a win/win situation.
The idea that most managers can make this easier is actually quite the opposite from my experience, the mess just becomes hidden beneath a pile of duties no one wants to take ownership of. Coupled with the chance that your product managers have a vision they couldn’t explain in detail if they wanted to makes a group of self-starters even more valuable.
That said, I echo some of the other concerns added; passionate, self-directed people can have their own agenda, which is not always helpful in a team environment.
The line is very thin, but I’d opt for a small team of passionate genius’ that like to butt heads over the “technical” manager any day of the week.
Till
on 27 Nov 08I think you need to create the right atmosphere at work for that kind of people. If you just hire innovative, self-sufficient people but putting them into a moderated/controlled work environment easily just makes both sides sad.
One point that I think is important about hiring people is: hire somebody who fits the job with his talents! It is great, if the job challenges and trains his real skills, it’s a mess if he needs to do things that are not his nature
If you hire someone to do PR, who is great at making connections with people, dont waste his abilities on writing copytext. If you hire a developer, who is No.1 in optimizing code, dont force him to become also your server admin. Instead you should seek for the talents of the people and think about how to use these.
From my point of view it is nonsense to force people into a job. It is way better to build a job around the someone’s talents even if that means that you need to restructure your process. If you don’t have a job for some special talent perhaps you are just the wrong company for that guy.
Tom G
on 27 Nov 08I agree 100% with this assertion for a company like 37 signals, but this is a bit of an over simplification.
As we move away from the industrial revolution and fully into the information age this may seem like the best idea. For certain types of work, self management is irrelavant and maybe even counter productive.
An assembly line would be a frustrating place for a person who wants do go their own way at their own pace.
Tom G
on 27 Nov 08Assuming we want to hire self motivated problem solvers, we have to address a lot of very tough issues.
How do you attract these kind of people? They are self managed, why would they want to work for someone else?
How do you identify these people? Eberyone claims these traits in an interview.
How do you retain these people? Managing a group of superstars is like herding cats. The cats will want to run away if they feel like they are being herded.
alshur
on 28 Nov 08But you should still somehow direct those people, so that they don’t get carried away.
Richard
on 28 Nov 08This of course only works if you put those people into an environment where they can thrive.
CJ Curtis
on 29 Nov 08This goes beyond finding the “right person,” which is hard enough. It’s finding the right person at the right time. You want someone that is challenged by what you do, however, not someone that cannot compete with what you do. Sometimes all the passion in the world doesn’t make up for experience.
If at all possible, find someone BETTER than you. Let them grow your core services, and you can finally move on to growing your business.
CJ Curtis
on 29 Nov 08@ Tom G:
Interviewees will always give the same BS answers to the same expected BS questions. I used to sit in on interviews with my supervisor and ask a few questions. I never asked any typical “interview” questions. As a designer, I wanted to know what work was out there that impressed them and why, and if money were no object, why and how they thought they could produce the same level of work. If this spurred some excitement and good conversation, I knew this was someone I could probably work with. If they stumbled around trying to say something “witty,” the interview was over as far as I was concerned.
Once you find such a person, you retain them by respecting their opinion, trusting them, and paying them well.
gvb
on 01 Dec 08This sounds a lot like Steve Yegge’s Done, and Gets Things Smart (only a little more terse ;-).
CJ Curtis
on 01 Dec 08“Done, and Get Things Smart” provides a lot of great insight, but I don’t know that I buy the whole story.
The ability to recognize someone as “smarter than you” isn’t necessarily a sign of “brilliance.” Nor is it always blind luck.
A former manager of mine had this mindset…”all we can do is hire them and see what happens. It’s a 50/50 chance every time.” The problem was he was wrong 90% of the time. He was niether a good judge of character nor talent, because he wasn’t really looking for either. He was looking for someone to do his bidding.
If you truly understand the importance of hiring people that are “smarter” than you, picking them out isn’t what I consider the hard part. The hard part is getting them to ask you for a job.
This discussion is closed.