Do not recruit someone like you!

Make sure you leverage collective intelligence when you recruit someone for your team. You, as successful business leader have had a successful career; you have the right set of competencies that allowed you to go that far and that high.

One day, the moment comes that you have to make an important choice: Hire someone for a critical position in your team or choose a partner for a new venture you want to create.

I remember one of my clients who had this superior creative, inquisitive and innovative mind-set. A few years ago, willing to leverage one of his great business ideas, he suggested his good friend who appeared to be equally creative and innovation oriented to partner with him on this project. They then agreed to join forces and to create a company in order to produce and deliver this product to the largest number of people. Together in a room, those two imaginative, open and curious minds were constantly mutually nourishing ideas to each other; and imagining great plans to make their business grow. However, none of them was strong at translating those strategies into detailed execution plans. This venture turned up to fail after several years of trying to make it fly – hence losing a lot of money in the adventure.
What really went wrong here?

The great idea was there though! What could explain the issue is that this “partnership was not synergistic”.

As a business leader, while heading a team or forming one, you need to ensure that people in the team have the right team profiles and that they are truly complementing each other within this particular team. You should aim for maximal collective intelligence.

Our personality and past experiences create a kind of filter we see the world through. Because of this unconscious bias that we all have in each of us, it is really difficult for anyone to assess others in a neutral and objective way.
You may therefore want to use the services of people who are trained in assessing the competencies and skills required not only for a certain position but also within a specific team.

As a business leader, when your recruit people to strengthen your team, you want to ensure the profile of the new hire will create a synergy which is definitely not guaranteed if you recruit another you!