Hiring
is traditionally a piecemeal endeavor, with managers bringing
individuals on board one at a time to fill specific openings. But what
if companies didn’t always hire this way? What if they sometimes hired groups of people instead?
A few intrepid companies are doing precisely that. One Silicon
Valley company I researched experimented with allowing small groups of
people to apply for jobs together. The company either hired the entire
group, or none of its members.
More commonly, a number of
high-profile companies have engaged in “acqui-hiring,” buying startups
with an eye toward acquiring their talented teams. Similarly, new CEOs
sometimes bring along colleagues with whom they’ve worked in the past.
In addition to trusting these people, the new CEOs know they can be
relied on to work well together.
Or consider the practice of outsourcing. Why would a company
ever outsource anything? In part, it may be because teams of talented
operators have already demonstrated excellence in a specialized task or
function, and it’s easier or cheaper to tap those teams than to create
new teams of your own.
Still, such activity raises the question: Is hiring teams instead of individuals really a smart move?
The answer is yes, for a number of reasons.
First,
it allows companies to hire more reliably, avoiding many of the
unconscious biases we all have. A large body of research has shown that
conventional job interviews poorly predict applicants’ future job
performance. We think we understand how successful applicants will be
after bringing them in and barraging them with tough questions. But we
really don’t know much at all. Our biases as hiring managers lead us
astray—we tend to favor people who look like us, think like us, come
from the same cultural background or went to the same schools that we
did. We rely on old rules of thumb or “gut instinct,” forgoing the
benefit of real data.
By contrast, employers who hire preformed teams can feel
confident that the new employees will work well together. After all,
they already have. Managers have hard evidence that the team has the
right mix of personalities and skills to succeed, in the form of the
team’s performance record—revenue increased, deals notched, customers
acquired and so on—and its longevity and stability over time. Such data
is far more valuable than the largely subjective impressions gathered
during job interviews.
In effect, hiring a team allows an
organization to hedge against the risk that individuals won’t be as
strong as advertised, especially in critically important social skills.
Last year, the World Economic Forum circulated a list of the top 10
skills that companies would most seek in 2020. A number of these
skills—people management, coordinating with others, emotional
intelligence, and negotiation—are notoriously difficult to evaluate in
job interviews. But these skills become readily evident as individuals
interact with others in team settings.
Making an impact
Hiring
people in groups also enables new employees to contribute much more
quickly. When individuals join new teams, they typically require a
couple of months, and often longer, to adapt to the team’s culture and
to make it their own. During that time, they usually feel compelled to
embrace team norms, a process that can lead them to sacrifice their own
creativity.
Most managers are painfully aware of the irony: The
very people they bring into an organization to “shake things up” and
offer original thinking wind up conforming. Within months or years, they
sound just like everyone else on the team. By hiring preformed teams,
companies can welcome in several individuals at once who already are
part of a different kind of team culture. Strength in numbers increases
the odds that these newcomers will retain their fresh perspectives.
Hiring
teams further helps organizations by allowing them to navigate a number
of challenges specific to today’s workplaces. Many organizations, for
instance, have tried to diversify their workforces, and they’ve
particularly struggled when it comes to hiring and promoting women.
Evidence suggests that team-based hiring might help make specific
workplaces more attractive to women. In a 2011 study published in the
Economic Journal, Andrew Healy and Jennifer Pate found that women were
significantly more likely to choose to compete when they were part of a
team rather than on an individual basis. The study’s clear implication
is that if you want to attract more women to your organization,
structuring their work so that they become team members—which team-based
hiring automatically does—will be more effective than having them
compete as individuals.
Many companies today also struggle with conflict in the
workplace, a veritable plague that leads to job stress, burnout,
employee turnover, reduced creativity, lower productivity and many other
ills. In a 2010 article published in the journal Organizational
Dynamics, Christine L. Porath and Christine M. Pearson reported on a
large survey of employees and managers, observing that 48% of people
“intentionally decreased work effort” after others were rude or uncivil
to them, and about that many—47%—“intentionally decreased time at work.”
Almost 38%, they found, “decreased work quality.”
By hiring
teams with a record of functioning well, employers might reduce these
damaging effects. After all, team members who have worked together for a
while are more likely to have learned how to handle differences and
resolve conflicts when they arise. They will have built up a certain
amount of trust that will allow them to avoid misunderstandings in the
first place.
Ultimately, hiring teams just seems intuitively
right. When you’re renovating a room in your house, you usually don’t
want to do it haphazardly, fixing only one part of the room and then
making additional alterations as time passes, jury-rigging the room to
meet your evolving needs or desires. It’s far better to think ahead,
anticipate your future needs, and come up with a single, unified design
that will stand the test of time. Yet in companies, managers take the
haphazard approach all the time. They hire individuals for different
reasons and then try to cobble them together into a team afterward. All
too often, it doesn’t work. Why not pick a number of individuals
simultaneously with the express purpose of crafting a group of talents
with complementary skills and outlooks?
Elite operation
Doing
so will confer the additional benefit of creating a “cohort effect”
among the new hires, whereby they feel special as a group and bonded to
one another. As my research has shown, the world’s most effective
leaders know that members of a cohort typically support one another,
while also pushing one another to grow and perform. These leaders
explicitly encourage collegiality among colleagues to take root, while
also fostering healthy competition between teammates. That unusual
combination gives rise to intense team environments, which lead in turn
to extremely high performance, high engagement and rapid development on
the part of team members. By hiring teams, managers can take a page out
of the playbook of these great bosses, initiating a cohort effect in a
single stroke. New hires will join an organization feeling like
insiders, members of a group of high performers so elite that the
organization saw fit to bring them in en masse.
Hiring teams is by no means a panacea for organizations
seeking to compete on talent. Organizations will continue to see value
in hiring exceptionally talented people on an individual basis. And in
hiring teams, they might well have to negotiate tensions between the new
groups they hire and existing political centers of gravity. They’ll
also face the challenge of assimilating new teams into the organization
without losing the very uniqueness that made the team worth hiring to
begin with.
The task, though, is hardly impossible. Leaders
might experiment with keeping the team intact most of the time, but also
having team members collaborate on a project basis with colleagues on
other teams. They might create external touchpoints for individual team
members—mentors, buddies and so forth—that allow them to build bridges
to the wider organization, even as they retain their sense of belonging
to a privileged cohort.
Think about it this way: So much of
human-resources practice involves incremental improvement. Yet winning
in our age of disruption requires that leaders change the game on
competitors, operating in bold, unexpected ways that are simply better.
It requires that they rethink their processes from top to bottom, taking
on sacred cows and best practices. From that perspective, hiring teams
might be exactly what leaders should start working on—not least because their less adventurous competitors aren’t.
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