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The best teams IMO have about a 10/10/80 split between people who do great work and know it, people who do great work and don't know it, and people who don't do

The best teams IMO have about a 10/10/80 split between people who do great work and know it, people who do great work and don't know it, and people who don't do great work (caveat: they should do ACCEPTABLE work) but are aware of their limitations. There's only so much work that you want your talent to be doing and you can try and keep the major touch points to your power players, and then you try to silo off the drudgery to the folks who are happy to have something hard to fail at. The personality type of the good-and-knows-it tends to need to be offset by the humble good-but-unsure types. Heaven forbid you get even one worker who can crank out productivity like no tomorrow and claims to be doing good work because in a vacuum everything is functional but they optimize only to close tasks and leave the system in total disrepair. It takes literal years to clean up some messes, and from experience I tend to prefer working with people who adhere to N > quality(output) > 0 over those at |quality(output)| > N. Yes, this mirrors directly that old adage from that German general [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord#Classification_of_officers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord#Cl...

piercebot 6y ago
Thanks for the thoughtful reply; I'd never heard of Hammerstein-Equord before, so that was enlightening. I think I've lived a charmed life in that, for the past 7 years, I've worked at a company without a bell curve distribution in terms of employees. We're extremely "top heavy" in terms of experience and ability, and there has been a distinct lack of ego as well. At previous companies I would agree with your assessments about types of people, but having seen what's possible when you hire only the best people through your professional networks who only want to work with other talented ego-less individuals, I may be guilty of holding myself to unrealistic expectations. That said, we're becoming a victim of our own success now and we need to hire outside of our tapped-out professional networks. Perhaps as we achieve a more "normal" distribution, the more "normal" advice will start to apply. A good problem to have, but still a new problem where there wasn't one previously.

piercebot 6y ago

Thanks for the thoughtful reply; I'd never heard of Hammerstein-Equord before, so that was enlightening. I think I've lived a charmed life in that, for the past 7 years, I've worked at a company without a bell curve distribution in terms of employees. We're extremely "top heavy" in terms of experience and ability, and there has been a distinct lack of ego as well. At previous companies I would agree with your assessments about types of people, but having seen what's possible when you hire only the best people through your professional networks who only want to work with other talented ego-less individuals, I may be guilty of holding myself to unrealistic expectations. That said, we're becoming a victim of our own success now and we need to hire outside of our tapped-out professional networks. Perhaps as we achieve a more "normal" distribution, the more "normal" advice will start to apply. A good problem to have, but still a new problem where there wasn't one previously.