You should also know that there are other personality dimensions besides introversion versus extroversion, though we find that one to be the most actionable on a day-to day basis. There is no widespread agreement on the aspects of personality to focus on, but Lewis Goldberg presented one leading theory in “The Structure of Phenotype Personality Traits” that suggests there are five key factors:
Extroversion (outgoing versus reserved)
Openness to experience (curious versus cautious)
Conscientiousness (organized versus easygoing)
Agreeableness (compassionate versus challenging)
Neuroticism (nervous versus confident)
Beyond personality, you’re probably familiar with IQ (intelligent quotient), a measure of general intelligence. A form of intelligence that you might not know about is emotional intelligence, measured by EQ (emotional quotient). People with high EQ are typically more empathetic, correlated with high abilities in these areas:
Perceiving complex emotional states in others
Managing these emotions in themselves and others
Using emotions (including their own) to facilitate conversations
Thus, roles that involve group dynamics, coordination, or empathy (e.g., project management, leadership, sales, marketing) are best suited for people with high EQ. (Note that IQ and EQ are independent traits, meaning the same person could have any combination of high or low IQ and EQ.)
When considering people for roles, you must also consider their individual goals and strengths, which can vary widely. A few mental models can help you make some useful distinctions. For example, some people wish to know a little about a lot (generalists) while others wish to go deeper in one area (specialists).
Specialist vs. Generalist
Think about physicians: primary care physicians are generalists and do a bit of everything, serving as the starting point for the diagnosis of any ailment. But for specific conditions, they will refer their patients to specialist physicians, trained and experienced to treat in one area, such as infectious disease or oncology. Or take retail stores: Sometimes you want to go to a general store like Walmart or Target to get a variety of things. Other times a specialty store like Home Depot (home improvement), Best Buy (electronics), or AutoZone is more appropriate.
In your organization, you will need people who lean toward one side or the other depending on the situation. In very small organizations, for example, specialists are more of a luxury. You will want generalists because so many types of problems need to be solved but you have only a few people to address them. In these cases, problems that require specialists are often not frequent enough to justify full-time positions, and so organizations usually rely on outside resources to solve them. By contrast, larger organizations employ many specialists, who can usually get better outcomes than generalists because of their long-term specialist experience.
A similar model from author Robert X. Cringley in his book Accidental Empires describes three types of people required in different phases of an organization’s life cycle—commandos, infantry, and police.
Whether invading countries or markets, the first wave of troops to see battle are the commandos. . . . A startup’s biggest advantage is speed, and speed is what commandos live for. They work hard, fast, and cheap, though often with a low level of professionalism, which is okay, too, because professionalism is expensive. Their job is to do lots of damage with surprise and teamwork, establishing a beachhead before the enemy is even aware that they exist. . . .
Grouping offshore as the commandos do their work is the second wave of soldiers, the infantry. These are the people who hit the beach en masse and slog out the early victory, building on the start given them by the commandos. . . . Because there are so many more of these soldiers and their duties are so varied, they require an infrastructure of rules and procedures for getting things done—all the stuff that commandos hate. . . .
What happens then is that the commandos and the infantry head off in the direction of Berlin or Baghdad, advancing into new territories, performing their same jobs again and again, though each time in a slightly different way. But there is still a need for a military presence in the territory they leave behind, which they have liberated. These third-wave troops hate change. They aren’t troops at all but police. They want to fuel growth not by planning more invasions and landing on more beaches but by adding people and building economies and empires of scale.
This model applies equally to well to projects. As entrepreneur Jeff Atwood put it in a June 29, 2004, post on his blog, Coding Horror:
You really need all three groups through the life cycle of a project. Having the wrong group (commandos) at the wrong time (maintenance) can hurt you a lot more than it helps. Sometimes being a commando, even though it sounds really exciting, actually hurts the project.
People who like rules and structure are much better suited for police roles, whereas anti-establishment types gravitate toward and excel in commando roles. If you put a commando person in a police role (e.g., project manager, compliance officer, etc.), they will generally rebel and make a mess of everything, whereas if you put a police person in a commando role (e.g., a position involving rapid prototyping, creative deliverables, etc.), they will generally freeze up and stall out.
Another mental model that helps you consider people’s strengths is foxes versus hedgehogs, derived from a lyric by the Greek poet Archilochus, translated as The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Philosopher Isaiah Berlin applied the metaphor to categorize people based on how they approach the world: hedgehogs, who like to frame things simply around grand visions or philosophies; and foxes, who thrive on complexity and nuance. Hedgehogs are big picture; foxes appreciate the details.
Like other dichotomous pairs, foxes and hedgehogs excel in different situations. For example, in his book Good to Great, Jim Collins noted that most of the “great” companies profiled were run by hedgehogs who built up massive companies in dogged pursuit of one simple vision:
Those who built the good-to-great companies were, to one degree or another, hedgehogs. They used their hedgehog nature to drive toward what we came to call a Hedgehog Concept for their companies. Those who led the comparison companies tended to be foxes, never gaining the clarifying advantage of a Hedgehog Concept, being instead scattered, diffused, and inconsistent.
However, many of those “great” companies no longer exist. They were great only for a short period of time, often because times had changed while they held on to the same Hedgehog Concept. By comparison, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nicholas Kristof, writing in The New York Times on March 26, 2009, described research detailing why foxes often make better predictors:
Hedgehogs tend to have a focused worldview, an ideological leaning, strong convictions; foxes are more cautious, more centrist, more likely to adjust their views, more pragmatic, more prone to self-doubt, more inclined to see complexity and nuance. And it turns out that while foxes don’t give great sound-bites, they are far more likely to get things right.
Again, each type of person should be placed in roles that suit them. For example, a hedgehog will be better at marketing roles, communicating a vision clearly and succinctly. A fox will be better at strategic roles, wading through the nuances of uncertainty and complexity. And you will need both types of people on your teams.
Because 10x teams perform at such a high level, leaders should be actively thinking of ways to create and maintain them. Members of 10x teams tend to have different skills and backgrounds because this gives the team variety in perspectives (see divergent thinking in Chapter 6) and the ability to assign team roles and responsibilities to people well suited for them. This means that at the organizational level, you benefit from diversity because you can create multiple 10x teams by arranging people the right way, drawing on their wide array of skills and other individual traits that diversity provides.
For leaders, when constructing these teams, the starti
ng point is knowing and appreciating the unique characteristics of your team members. Then you can craft team roles and responsibilities based on what will work best for the specific people available. As needed, you can recruit additional people with complementary skills who can further strengthen the team.
You also need to keep individual characteristics in mind when you manage the people on these teams, and adjust your management accordingly. We call this managing to the person, as opposed to managing to the role or managing everyone the same. In other words, good people management is not one-size-fits-all.
As with many challenges, Maslow’s hammer (see Chapter 6) can convince you that you should take the technique that worked for one person and apply it to all the other members of the team. But this is not effective; managing two different people will involve two different sets of behaviors, each individually calibrated to their unique characteristics and situations.
This model can be extended to other settings: teaching to the student, parenting to the child, etc. Our two children are very different, and parenting techniques that work well with one child seldom work as well with the other. Approaching each relationship as unique will help you better appreciate its individual attributes and use that knowledge to ultimately create more effective relationships and teams.
WHO GOES WHERE
The strongest teams have the right people in the right roles, allowing them to amplify their individual strengths and skill sets. Conversely, when people are in the wrong roles, you can get dysfunctional teams. At the very least, you don’t want people in obviously wrong roles. That sounds easy to achieve, but in practice it is not.
Educator Laurence Peter introduced the concept of the Peter principle in his 2009 book of the same name, which has become known by the phrase managers rise to the level of their incompetence. What he’s saying is that people get promoted to a new role based on how they performed in their previous role; however, the abilities required of their new role may be completely different, and possibly ill-suited for them. Eventually, they will be promoted into a role that will not suit them (“the level of their incompetence”), where they will struggle.
Peter Principle
When people are excelling, it’s natural to reward them with promotions for their excellent performance. However, you need to keep the Peter principle in mind when doling out those promotions, so that you don’t put people in roles where they are unlikely to succeed. This can be more problematic the longer a person succeeds in your organization. Often higher roles involve different skills, such as more people management and less individual contribution, which may cut against someone’s strengths or career goals. To counteract the Peter principle, organizations can develop multiple career tracks, such as a technical leadership track that doesn’t require people management.
In addition, higher roles tend to involve more strategy than tactics. Generally, strategy is the big picture; tactics are the details. Strategy is the long term, defining what ultimate success looks like. Tactics are short term, defining what we’re going to do next to get there. The Peter principle factors in because promoting someone who is great tactically into a strategic role can be problematic if that person is not strong strategically.
A related difficulty arises when a person wants a role that they are ill-suited for. In that case, you must determine whether they could grow into the new role over time. If you think they can, you can promote them and give them the support they need to grow. On the other hand, if you think the new role will be forever ill-fitting (perhaps because of personality or other factors that are hard to change), you should help them attain satisfaction in their current role or craft a wholly different role that both fulfills them and works for the organization.
However, just because someone doesn’t fit a role initially doesn’t mean that they will be forever ill-suited for it. Given time and practice, they might even excel at it. And there are several strong reasons why you might want to help people learn and grow into new roles rather than always hire outside the organization.
First, it often takes a significant amount of time for new employees to ramp up and become truly effective contributors within your organization. This time length is obviously dependent on the job and organization, but as roles get more complex and involve learning a wide variety of new information and internal processes, it can easily be six to eighteen months. You could instead use this amount of time to help an existing team member rise to the same set of responsibilities.
Second, if an organization doesn’t provide career paths to existing team members, many will leave for other organizations where they think they can get better opportunities. When they leave, they take with them some of the organization’s institutional knowledge, the collective knowledge shared by the entire institution.
Your best people know how to be effective within your organization. They know the organizational history, who to go to for different pieces of knowledge, and ultimately how to get things done. When these people leave, their institutional knowledge walks out the door with them, and the whole organization becomes less effective. For example, Lauren continued to get questions about her projects at GlaxoSmithKline long after she left her position, even after one of the drugs she worked on had been purchased by another corporation. She answered them, but there is no guarantee that your former employees will be as accommodating.
A third reason to try to grow people into new, expanded roles instead of hiring externally is that organizations often craft unrealistic job postings. Such a position can be filled only by a unicorn candidate, a term that was coined to signify that finding such a candidate might be as rare as finding a unicorn (essentially impossible). It’s like people who have unrealistic or too specific requirements for a significant other or political candidate.
If you try to fill a role for a long time and you aren’t seeing any qualified candidates, then you might be looking for a unicorn candidate (assuming there isn’t some other issue, such as the compensation offered mismatches the role, or your company has a negative reputation). Unrealistic hiring expectations are a form of grass-is-greener mentality, covered in Chapter 6: “If only our organization could hire the perfect person for this role, things would be great.” In these situations, the organization may need to split the role and hire multiple people, focus on growing people from within, or do some combination of the two.
Another critical endeavor for your organization is making the boundaries around roles and responsibilities crystal clear. Apple is known for popularizing a mental model called directly responsible individual, or DRI for short. After every meeting, it is made clear that there is one DRI who is responsible and accountable for the success of each action item. DuckDuckGo similarly assigns a DRI to every company activity—from the smallest task to the largest company objective.
The DRI concept helps avoid diffusion of responsibility, also known as the bystander effect, where people fail to take responsibility for something when they are in a group, because they think someone else will take on that responsibility. In effect, they act like bystanders, and the responsibility diffuses across all the members of the group instead of being concentrated in one person who is held accountable.
You can see the bystander effect in many situations, including when people need help in an emergency. In a famous 1968 study, “Bystander Intervention in Emergencies: Diffusion of Responsibility,” John Darley and Bibb Latané had a group of subjects participate in a group discussion about their lives, communicating with one another electronically from separate rooms. Unbeknownst to them, all the other “participants” were prerecorded, and the size of the group varied from two (with one prerecorded voice) to six (with five prerecorded voices). Each “participant” took turns speaking, and one of the prerecorded voices on their first turn revealed they were prone to life-threatening seizures. On the second turn, that same “participant” had a fake seizure, with their prerecorded voice saying, “I’m . . . I’m having a fit . . . I . . . I think I’m .
. . help me . . . I . . . I can’t . . . Oh my God . . . er . . . if someone can just help me out here . . . I . . . I . . . can’t breathe p-p-properly . . . I’m feeling . . . I’m going to d-d-die if . . .”
Darley and Latané found that people were much less likely to try to help someone if they perceived that at least one other person was also hearing them struggle. In the one-on-one configuration, 85 percent of the subjects sought help before the recording ended, but only 31 percent did so when they thought there were four or more other participants.
Studies like this one have since been replicated in many other configurations and situations. An everyday example just mentioned is the set of next steps that emerges from a work meeting—everyone attending might assume someone else will do them, and so they don’t get done in a timely manner. The DRI concept is a simple and powerful way to cut through this natural inclination by clearing up who is responsible for what.
In other scenarios, sometimes people step up right away, especially when they are particularly motivated by the task at hand or want to showcase their abilities. An organization can take advantage of this self-selection for roles and responsibilities by using a controlled power vacuum. This mental model is an analogy to the natural concept of a vacuum, a space devoid of all substance, including air. If you make a vacuum, say by pumping air out of an empty container, and then you open that container, air will quickly rush into it, filling the vacuum, normalizing the air pressure.
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