RallyDev.com
Tue 26 Jan 2010
Some Silly Advice
I’ve noticed a piece of advice repeated in many Agile blogs, articles, and books.
Seeing it makes me roll my eyes until it hurts. (Why I would hurt myself on purpose will be the subject of another post, on a blog reserved for psychotherapists.)
Even my very most favorite Agile book, “Scaling Lean & Agile Development” by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde, has a section in there with this advice.
I saw it in Jim Highsmith’s new book, too, although by the time he’s done discussing it he does make a couple of good points. It’s an old piece of advice that pre-dates Agile.
What is this old chestnut? Here it is:
Hire the best.
I mean, come on. Is this supposed to be a big lightbulb moment? Where do they find stuff like this, in the “Journal of the Totally Obvious?” Am I supposed to leap out of my chair, smack my forehead and exclaim “Eureka! All I have to do is hire the best! Why didn’t I think of that?”
Is this really good advice? Is it actually possible, or necessary in an Agile world? Is this sensible, if trite, piece of advice useful at all? Talk amongst yourselves while I blather on for a bit.
The problem with “Hire the Best” as an operational principle is that:
a) it immediately excludes most of us, and
b) it’s extremely difficult to do.
What’s the best? The top 5%? 10%? Certainly no more than 20%.
So what about the rest of us? What are we supposed to do? Are things hopeless for us? Should 80% of companies worldwide just give up and shut down because the top 20% of people are taken? What about big companies and the Law of Large Numbers? Can you really hire only the best when you’re hiring 10,000 or 20,000 people?
Something that makes much more sense to me, and which has much more power, is this idea:
Hire well, and develop people.
Check it out! Everybody can do this. “Develop People” is one of the two pillars of Lean, while “Hire the Best” is not. So far, those Lean folks have been right about pretty much everything, so why not this, too? Why would I need to develop people if I only hired the best? Why not save the money so I can pour it into my “Hire the Best” employment initiative?
The Agile Principles say something like […find motivated people and trust them…], and I believe in Agile. So I cannot find in the bedrock of either of my professional beacons, Lean and Agile, any indication that I should “Hire the Best”.
My common sense and experience tell me that it is incredibly hard to actually hire the best, and I like that it might not be absolutely necessary for success. How cool would it be to hire the ‘pretty good’ and then kick the butt of some company that thought it was hiring the best? Is that possible? Yes.
“Hire the Best” is really hard to do.
I’ve worked as a full time hiring manager at more than a dozen companies, all of which thought they hired the best and only one of which actually did. That company really worked hard at hiring the best. At that company, one rule of the hiring thumb was that you only hired people onto your team who would immediately place in the upper 50th percentile.
In other words, when you were on an interviewing team in that company, you were expected to vote to hire somebody who was better than half the people on your team. You think that’s easy? You think that isn’t scary? Try it sometime.
What I’m really really really interested in is something that can take my average team (and let’s face it, Ms. Wishful Hiring Manager, it is overwhelmingly likely that our team is average, for some value of average) and make it better or improve its ability to deliver value to my customers. That’s worth some effort to achieve because it is worth money to my business. If I believe in “The Art of the Possible” then I like this better, because it’s a lot more possible than simply hiring the best.
Anybody can embark on a long, expensive and likely unachievable quest to only hire the best, but if Agile were really valuable, it would help me to take my team of competent professionals and make them significantly more effective than they were. It might even make them more effective than a gaggle of “the best” somewhere else.
The Agile Principles talk about motivated people, but they don’t actually mention “the best”. I view this as a good thing because I strongly believe that the best teams are not built from a homogeneous mix of the smartest, fastest, bestest people.
Teams work best when they are diverse and when the power of the team can be unleashed by empowerment and self-organization. I also know from bitter experience how hard, and frankly scary, it can be to really hire the best. (Sorry if I harp on that, but I have scars…)
What I want is what I think both Lean and Agile offer to me as a businessperson. They offer me a way to take solid professionals and then ignite their passion and professionalism within a framework of continuous learning in a way that allows them each to contribute to the fullest extent possible.
That’s something that make Lean and Agile worthwhile to me, and not some lazy idea about hiring the very best (somehow) and then automatically winning.
About the Author: Alan Atlas is a Soul Musician, Certified Scrum Trainer, and Agile Coach at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.
Bravo – the very notion of “best” riles me no end!
Nice article!
A more reasonable advice is: Hire the right people.
I worked at a company whose name will not be disclosed here) who followed this “Hire the Best” mentality. Remarkably, they hired me :-) Here is what happened. You had a lot of highly driven, very competitive, very self-focused, smart individuals. When I got into collaboration and learned more about teams, I came upon some work by William Marston about personality types that, well, make good teams. A mix of these four personality types were actually a good thing. AND, some of these people may not, in a lot of hiring manuals, look like “the best”. This assessment of personalities is the DISC assessment. You can find our more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DISC_assessment
So, while not wanting to disagree outright, I might live better with “Hire the Best” if we don’t use it myopically and have very clear team-focused guidelines on what “best” means. Using DISC might be one way to help assess that. Getting teams involved in hiring helps the team figure out what “best” is for that team. That is another way to change our mental model of “best”.
Thanks for bringing this up Alan. The irksome nature of the glib “Hire the best”, despite some of my additional thoughts, remains :-)
Hear hear!! Examples: I have a very smart, experienced analyst on my team who would be considered one of the Best. This person is mightily struggling at requirements, agile or not. I have a very smart java developer who would also be “Best”, who is struggling with focus and commitment. Two people I have who would be challenged to present themselves as the “Best” are the two most successful, reliable team members I have.
While I generally agree with you, most of the groups do not “hire the best” In this economy there are a lot of superstars looking for work, but they are having trouble getting a job. Why? because they are “overqualified”.
Managers are afraid that better people will leave when they get a better job. They are afraid that the new person is better than they are, and might replace them. Sometimes they are reluctant to hire someone older or in any way different from the rest of the group, for fear that it will wreck the culture.
So my advice is, You don’t have to do anything difficult to find the best people, just post the job. But when good people find you, don’t reject them!
Tomo – I agree it’s a good time to be hiring talented people. But I’m seeing an opposite trend as well. Skilled team players are leaving companies that seem stuck in place. Here’s more or less the story I’ve heard from two development managers in recent hiring interviews:
“My current company made across-the-board layoffs in the past year by asking every department to “cut 15% of your budget.” They did their best to cut from the bottom. I still have my job, but nothing else has changed. We’re hunkered down. There is zero investment in Lean & Agile. The company feels like it’s just circling the drain. I want out.”
To me this says that talent is mobile – one of your points – and there is a real flight to quality (companies). The hiring managers you describe are in for a rough ride as they’ll both be losing talent as well as resist making the changes needed to develop their staff.
Thanks Alan and Jean! I believe in constant improvement and I don’t think that having the “best” individuals necessarily make up the best teams.
I am struggling with implementing the right processes to develop good people and teams into using better/the best development and test methods and processes. I work on the software development side of a manufacturing company and while they tout using best practices, LEAN processes, and Spiral development processes, it looks like, smells like and feels like Waterfall.
So I’m struggling with the questions – How do I develop my team to work in an Agile/LEAN environment? How do I manage up to develop my managers in the same direction?
Any insights or suggestions are welcome.
In fact I would add a reminder from “The Wisdom of Crowds” diversity is more important than the best. A crowd of experts will often drive off a cliff as they’re often focused on the wrong thing. In addition I’ve seen situations where a stars have turned into real prima donna’s. I would rather hire good, open minded people.
Cheers
Mark Levison
Agile Pain Relief Consulting
Some observations from my experience:
(1) The most productive developers can be 100%+ more productive other developers but are usually only paid a small fraction more. In theory they could all be lured to your company by offering higher salary.
(2) I usually build a diverse team. The last technical lead I picked wasn’t the most productive on offer but was the most thorough.
(3) For some roles it is hard to assess who is “the best”. Unique project tasks make the comparison difficult. Some highly rate people seem to make their job sound hard and are good at producing convincing excuses.
(4) Some of the most productive developers in a waterfall environment enhance their productivity by secretly using Agile techniques. When they move to an Agile environment they loose that advantage.
Regards,
Simon
Alan, thanks for calling out this persistent nonsense! To riff on a couple of your points, I’d echo that:
1) “Best” is a meaningless and unquantifiable term, given the complexity of work and the dynamics of team interactions. (Unless you’re trying to hire the best chess master, tennis player, Rubik’s cubist…)
2) Over-focusing on individual “best” runs contrary to what 50 years of quality research has consistently shown us: process & culture trumps individual heroics. As noted above, you can hire a bunch of brilliant Type As and accomplish almost nothing, if they’re all competing rather than collaborating.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Kelly Waters, Daryl Kulak. Daryl Kulak said: RT @allaboutagile: some silly advice – hire the best – http://tinyurl.com/yemgguu [...]
Great post as well as a great stream of comments! Best is such a relative term… in the eye of the beholder so to speak. It often (and incorrectly) implies coming from ‘the best’ schools, highest test scores/IQ’s etc. From my startup agile/lean experience ‘the best’ is someone who is passionate and driven with never-ending desire work their ass off at learning and improve with a diverse set of minds. This isn’t just a personal trait – it a merger of the right people with the right company.
I laughed over “hire the best” advice when I was working for small company struggling with different problems, lack of money being the most painful one, and I actually hired the best I could get, which was usually average.
The best I could do was avoiding bad choices and enable people to develop themselves. After all we were able to deal with most problems, including financial ones, and gather a bunch of pretty good engineers. I even hired few of them when I changed jobs.
I worked for a while (thankfully as a contractor) at a large company that prided itself on “only hiring the best”. At the same time they had this ‘grade on a curve’ review mentality that demanded managers rank 20% of employees as ‘underperforming’.. Said folks were put on a PIP (Performance Improvement Plan) and if they didn’t do better were let go and replaced.
So I often saw a lot of really talented people who spent excessive amounts of time collecting fodder to pad their accomplishments at review time, or refused to do things that needed doing if it wasn’t part of their review goals.
Not only that, but it always made me wonder, if you really HAD hired the best, then what makes you think there’s someone out there you can find to replace this ‘best’ person who’s ‘underperforming’ who would actually do a better job.. (cause like, if you’ve taken the best, then what’s left is ‘not best’ right? Or is this just admitting that their hiring process was borked and try as they might, at least 20% of the folks they did hire, were after all it turns out not ‘the best’ after all.
And don’t get me started on what stack-ranking of employees (and effectivly pitting team members against each other ) does in terms of team UN-building.
[...] a bunch of people working toward common success. If you don’t hire great candidates only, and let’s face it: you don’t, there are some people on board who just work there and don’t really care for anything beyond [...]
We only hire people from Lake Wobegone, Alan. That way we are assured that all our people are the best…or at least above average.
Tom
Develop the best. Totally agree! Great article Alan!
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by business901 and ericlandes, blubberplinth. blubberplinth said: RT @ericlandes: I have really been into team interactions etc. This post on hiring the best, rocks http://bit.ly/bQLKyV #agile #lean [...]
I agree totally with this article. Management structures are so convoluted with personality cults and ulterior motives that it is impossible to determine who ‘the best’ is or even give any meaning to that phrase. The best practices that I’ve seen have involved actual practitioners in the hiring process. Who better to know what the best is (or even merely excellent) than those using the skills being sought from day to day?
Fantastic article! Engaging teams in the decision making cycle of development has proven valuable in raising quality and improving results.
The same can be true in hiring. Involve the team early in the decision process! This builds morale, the team generally knows what skills the group needs, and it creates a culture where the existing team is willing to invest in the new members into great contributors.
David
The phrase “hire the best” makes me frown. Is there a simple scalar way to rank all the people in a profession so that it is simple to identify the top x%? Consider the work on “multiple intelligences” by thought leaders like Goldman and Garner. I also believe that so much of what makes agile work or not work is very dependent on cultural or environmental factors. So for me it is not obvious or useful advice to “hire the best”. But maybe good advice is to hire the best fit for a position. Some of the best and most productive teams I have been on were comprised of a set of people with very complementary skills and abilities. They were not all the best but they worked well together and complemented one another. If someone were to come up with a model for the geometry of an organization’s culture or a person’s talents and skills so that we could measure “fit” that would be a good discussion.
I recently saw a job descriptin that used this term and then asked for a “new perfect” individual. It doesn’t happen.
Find me an enthusiast, open to learn and apply oriented communicator and I’ll hire that person.
Great post.
Hi Alan,
I really enjoyed the article, the biggest danger I noticed with hiring the best is the fact that you create a completely arrogant culture. In fact you are already on your way to group think almost immediately.
The problem becomes bigger when the group then has not got the ability to resonate with people who are “not the best” which also significantly impacts productivity.
If such a group is allow to mature, the issues magnify as the fire is now pulling in the fuel to grow bigger. I will only hire people who agree with “the best”..
A great article.
Regards,
martin.