Hiring is hard. It’s inconvenient and takes time away from growing your business. And the risks are high. If you make the wrong choice, you will have to go through the whole process again, after limping along with a sub-par performer for a few months.
As I grew my staff from half a person to eight employees, I made a lot of, let’s say, decisions that left lots of room for learning. Finally, though, I learned that two attributes were the most important in my applicants: alignment of values and curiosity.
Basically, it was great if they were smarter than I was. Learning from my staff was icing on the cake and kept engagement high for all of us.
But let’s go back to values and curiosity.
Values
Values are hard to assess. No one will come right out and say, “Jeffrey Epstein is my hero.” But you can ask questions that will get to the “values thing.”
Ken Wilcox has a terrific section on this process in his book, “Leading through Culture.” Wilcox, the CEO of Silicon Valley Bank until 2011, built a culture remarkable for its creativity and self-direction. He did it by hiring people who shared his values and then gradually releasing his grip on the reins, allowing his staff to fundamentally replicate his basic approach across a multi-billion-dollar bank.
Curiosity
Curiosity is underrated. Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo da Vinci describes how da Vinci taught himself various branches of mathematics, approaches to painting and details of anatomy because he was ferociously curious. While his description of a woodpecker’s tongue didn’t necessarily inform his painting of the Mona Lisa, knowing how things worked in a variety of disciplines reinforced and improved any given project.
Being a polymath is discouraged these days. My background in German, economics and poetry marks me as lacking discipline. But as chief operating officer of my consulting firm, I drew on all these disciplines and more. Writing concisely about financial matters drew on this background, as did managing a growing business and interfacing with international clients.
Two of my best hires were poster children for curiosity. One had a background in physics and had worked at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. The other had a degree in philosophy and had started a homeless shelter in Philadelphia.
What would either of these individuals have brought to a small consulting firm that worked on projects ranging from financing the International Space Station to recommending operational improvements for a European private equity firm? Both were curious. You could ask them to study anything and they’d throw themselves into the topic and its details. They could work with a range of different people. They were accustomed to asking questions and learning, rather than thinking they had all the answers.
One of my less successful hires was someone with an advanced degree. We wanted to reduce the burden on our senior partner. But this person, I learned, just wasn’t widely curious. Earning a doctorate degree seemed to have crushed their curiosity. They were fine when it came to updating a project we’d done before. But they weren’t interested in stepping outside the bounds of the original study. Perhaps it was too risky.
As I tried to determine why the first two people had done so well and the third had not, I understood the impact of curiosity. My superstars all had wide-ranging interests. One person loved Harry Potter so much that they’d reread all the prior books whenever a new one was published. Another belonged to a fringe political group.
All these folks thought widely, clearly and well. Those who thought they had the answers … well, with them, it just didn’t work. That saddened me. You never want to let someone go.
Opening doors
Each of these people was more intelligent than I am. Most of them eventually left us for graduate studies or specialized projects.
But I learned more from them than I ever would have from less vibrant people. Don’t ever be afraid of hiring really smart, really curious people. They will open doors you didn’t think existed.
