~2 min read I bristle when I hear about hiring ninjas or rockstars. This imagery gives the impression that individuals matter the most. The team is the fundamental unit, not individuals. Hiring individuals who can perform very well is not the same as hiring people can that work well together. Messaging to people they should be ninjas or rockstars stresses their individuality. That's the wrong focus. Individuals can know a lot, but a team can know more. Individuals can do a lot, but a team can do more. Individuals can learn and grow a lot, but a team can also do that more. Individuals can get sick, go on vacation, or get hit by a bus. It's possible for that to happen to entire teams as well. But a harder. Some might object that there is no team without the individuals. That's true. But that's like arguing there's no body without the cells. True, but missing the point. That said, I understand why people forget that teams are the fundamental unit. You can't really hire a team. Putting a bunch of individuals together in a group suddenly and telling them to work together doesn't tend to start up cleanly. I'm not saying it can never work, but generally there are all sorts of latent hierarchies that we default back to: seniority, gender, age, height, extraversion, etc. Things that do not matter actually, but our cultural norms from our backgrounds scream to us do. So figuring out how to start a team is its own problem, one that has plenty of study for the science and lots of writings about the art. I said you can't hire a team. It's not quite true. Some companies buy other complete companies that are good at executing and getting work done together. It's called an acquihire. And it tends to work well if you let them keep doing what they're doing. The further you pull them from what. They can come up to speed and deliver much faster than hiring bunch of individuals, provided you don't break them up and you continue to give them the same autonomy as before. Again, this is hard and valuable. And gives me additional proof that the team is the fundamental unit. — Robert This message is 100% organic human effort, so it will have typos. No, I didn't send it through an LLM to typo check it. It was made with just my fingers and my eyes. |