The Invisible Conductor

Replacing a key employee, upgrading your talent, promoting from within or adding additional people. These decisions have significant consequences. Optimizing your current staff to perform as a team is also critical, much like a conductor getting the musicians in an orchestra to "play as one." However, making personnel adds or changes can leap the whole organization forward if done right, or backward if done wrong. It is the same with any sports team. They make drafts and trades to get more wins as a team. Stealing a line from Moneyball, “your goal shouldn’t be to buy players, your goal should be to buy wins.” Exactly. 

Let’s say the primary goal of any business is to generate customers and profits. To generate customers and profits, you need a team working effectively together toward that purpose. To have a team working effectively together, you need to complement and balance their individual skills, strengths, and personalities. This balance will get the team to perform better as a whole than as a sum of its individuals. When making hiring decisions, however, too many times the goal is to "buy players." The goal should be to buy wins, through optimizing the team as a collective.

There are many ways to complement skills on a team and find balance. One example is using personality or behavioral assessments, which I endorse. However, the core issue I am writing about here centers on understanding, finding and hiring people with broad skillsets. Generalists. There has been considerable progress with talent sourcing, but left behind is this "invisible" pool of leaders. Generalists help a team connect the tactics to the mission, adapt, communicate and perform better as a unit than as individuals. 

Let me use an illustration to help explain.

SEND IN MACGYVER. HE'LL GET IT DONE

One of my favorite television series from years ago was a program called “MacGyver.” This popular show and character of the same name have recently returned to television.

MacGyver was a fictional character that worked for a private foundation, also serving as a secret agent for the U.S. Government. He got thrown into every random, material, national emergency that needed to be solved successfully and quietly…which he did of course. He also made the people around him better, bringing out their talents, and held all of them to an ethical code.

I interpreted his value proposition as being a dynamic generalist, leveraging his broad skillset to solve a specific need at a moment’s notice. He was a master at adapting and “getting it done,” brilliant at the tactics but never losing sight of the overall mission. Everyone on his collective and ever-changing team was also aligned and added value. They fully leveraged their specific skills, and together had plenty of healthy team friction. However, their disagreements led to better solutions, not standoffs, thanks to MacGyver's ability to communicate and bring people together.

I bet most everyone wants a MacGyver type in their organization. However, if MacGyver was looking for employment today, would he hit your search radar? My opinion is no. Well, at least not easily. In the age of “keywords” and “Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS)” used to locate candidates, MacGyver would likely get missed. His skills are too broad. His expertise, achievements and industry experience too general. Other “specialists” with more repetition and placement of strategic “keywords” will be harvested instead.  

WHAT WE VALUE INTERNALLY IS NOT WHAT WE LOOK FOR EXTERNALLY   

Most businesses have "MacGyver types" that get promoted over and over again, taking on different assignments while always “getting the job done.” They may possess deep knowledge in a specific area or two, but their core value is adapting and solving for broad problems and opportunities. These superstars are respected by their company and peers, personifying the desired culture while piling up a long list of experiences and achievements. Management usually identifies them as “high potential” on “9-block” succession exercises. As high potential employees, they are challenged and stretched. In many scenarios, stretched in ways that make them more “general.”

If on the market, these are the type of people businesses should be lining up to hire. However, there is no line forming. This is because there is no simple way to find them and their broad skillsets using a narrow list of strategic keywords. i.e., how most talent searches take place. An astute job seeker who understands the process can figure it out, with a more optimized profile, resume, and good networking. But that alone doesn't help employers find this hidden talent.

To be very clear, I am not blaming recruiters and HR leaders for using ATS software and keyword searches. In today’s world of high-volume online job applications and LinkedIn profile reviews, they need a way to sort through it all. Also, there are many positives with these types of tools and processes.

So, where and with whom does the problem reside?

EACH HIRE IS AN OPPORTUNITY TO IMPROVE THE WHOLE TEAM, NOT JUST FILL A POSITION

The issue lies with business leaders, inadequately outlining the type of skills they need and value. Some very talented generalists can kick-start team performance, but current thinking does not readily enable this connection. It is up to management to be more conscious about what they value, starting with what they promote and celebrate within their own walls. They also need to complement their existing in-house team of people and skills when hiring. Why isn’t this happening effectively today? Here are my thoughts on the issues and some action to take:

• Incorrectly defining the talent you already have, and the positions to be filled – It is difficult to describe "it," i.e., what makes up those MacGyver types. This is needed so you know where to stretch them next, but also to replace them if they are promoted or leave. Alternatively, defining a role. A manager may describe a position as being made up of a few hard skills, i.e., the perceived role. However, there may be many “hidden” soft skills that make the position so much more valuable, i.e., the actual role. Example: A person in this position may have quietly served as a functional boundary spanner, successfully connecting people and ideas across teams. If you do not hire for these same skills, it can lead to a train wreck.

Action: The difficulty is not with defining “it,”it is putting yourself in a position to see it. The same for defining a role and its’ actual duties. Get out there with your employees and do roundtables, skip levels, observe, listen to different functions, etc. As an executive leader do not just rely on your direct reports, as every manager is correctly taught to summarize and “manage up.” A few layers can distort things. A high-performance CEO once told me, “for every layer of management, you get half the information at twice the volume.” You need info from your direct reports, but to also see it through your lens.

• The skills of internal and external candidates are valued differently – When matching an open position to the internal people already known, the tendency is to factor in their hard job skills and general intangibles. These can be things like problem-solving, communication, teamwork, ethics, cultural fit, ability to learn and adapt, etc. When management is looking outside for talent, the tendency is to focus much more on their hard job skills. This is because, by definition, intangibles are difficult to value. Think about your history and high potential generalists that were successfully stretched into significant roles. If they were coming from the outside, would they have even landed an interview? Probably not.

Action: Be disciplined. Know the actual job requirements, the existing team makeup, and take a balanced approach to both inside and outside hires. To value outside candidates more effectively, this may mean a longer interviewing and hiring process. Creating social setting interactions (dinner with the team), conducting personality tests and more reliance on referrals and references are needed to see these people more thoroughly.

• Recruiting for a few hard job skills is "safer" to the hiring manager – “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.”, A famous quote from the 1970’s. The point of the saying…stick with the known and don’t rock the boat. If you get it wrong, no one will blame you. The same applies to hiring. If looking for a sales leader, the hiring manager sees less risk if they only target hard sales skills. However, the job may be better served by someone that has sales skills complemented by broader competencies and experiences.

Action: Find the balance between risk and reward. Some roles need very narrow and deep skills to avoid disaster, while others should include more broad and soft skills. That said, we now live in an age where content is so easy to access. Motivated generalists can become more specialized in a matter of days or weeks, reducing the risk of hiring them.

I am not saying that generalists are the answer every time. I think we have all probably seen an internal stretch promotion of a person fail due to a lack of hard skills. What I am suggesting is to find what truly matters for that position and the overall team, then start the search. The most common problem I see with accomplishing this is passing over the generalist skillset. This oversight sub-optimizes the specialists and overall team.

Are there especially good environments for generalists? Small businesses and new ventures are fertile areas. I have also seen them thrive in customer-focused organizations and where there is functional gridlock. Let me explain.

A customer flows through a business horizontally, across and through functions. Businesses organize their functions vertically, people working up and down in silos. This combination does not always end well for the customer. It is also frustrating for the employees, as the “functional vertical” and “business horizontal” can compete and create the wrong kind of friction. Companies that handle this conflict well do so by effectively balancing their functional specialists and broad generalists. This dynamic better enables for the "vertical" and "horizontal" to find alignment.

ADAPT OR DIE – HIRE FOR INNOVATION, SPEED AND TO OPTIMIZE THE WHOLE TEAM

Those businesses that hire and manage to optimize the team as a whole will be ahead of the curve. Moreover, they will be set up to quickly and continuously adapt in an age of constant change and disruption. It is probably not a stretch to say that an organization’s key strength in the future will need to be the ability to adapt. Specialties used to be valuable for decades; soon they may only be relevant for months. Things are moving fast, teams need to be nimble.

The generalist and specialist balance is vital here. Think of what Steve Jobs said in response to Steve Wozniak’s question…” what do you do?” Jobs replied, “I play the orchestra. And you’re a good musician.” Jobs was passionate about the customer and changing the world. Wozniak was passionate about the technology. Jobs was more generalist, i.e., the orchestra conductor. Wozniak was more specialist, i.e., the talented musician. Individually they probably would have been good, but together they changed the world. You need a push and a pull. A subject matter expert and a boundary spanner. Someone saying no and someone saying yes. Different personalities and perspectives. You need the right kind of friction to create a diamond.

If the balance is right, the team will complement and challenge each other in a productive way. But this is easier said than done. Specialists are more straightforward to spot and recruit, identifying and finding a MacGyver type is hard. Knowing your current team makeup and what kind of hire will "fit" is laborious. Yes, it is all difficult and uncomfortable. Remember, however, that comfort is the enemy of progress.

And who knows. Get this right and maybe someone will make a television series about you.

Image by Radek Grzybowski