Thoughts on hiring

Yesterday was Navarre’s last day at Google and the team put together an amazingly touching send off party including heart wrenching goodbye speeches. It was special in so many ways I needed to reflect.

During the party he looked around at the team and asked me how I hired such a great team. I somewhat blew it off and said “luck”. I say somewhat because there really is luck involved in getting great people on your team at Google so this reply had some truth to it. Today I was drawn to contemplate how it happened and thinking about it via Navarre seems apropos.

Navarre is one special human being for thousands of reasons but in the context of him being such an integral part of the team I want to highlight these four:

• He’s an extremely talented multi-faceted designer.
• He leads by being genuinely interested in helping people solve problems.
• He is humble and always learning.
• He is self aware, critical, and as accurate as one can be in their self awareness.

This…these four characteristics are what I optimize for when I hire for my team.

I think the quote is “specialization is for insects”. I want to hire people who seek alternate perspectives. I REALLY like people with varied backgrounds, interests, and talents.

Leadership isn’t about telling people what to do. If that’s your take on it, I don’t want to work with you, let alone have you on my team. Leaders that empathize with others and provide them whatever guidance they need to resolve a problem on their own are what I look for.

Humility. This is so core I find it hard to justify. Without it, you won’t seek alternate perspectives which will make you a terrible designer as well as teammate. With humility comes a hunger for learning, adapting, and growing.

Self awareness is the lynchpin of the whole system. There are varying degrees of this and we all have blindspots. That said, I do feel like either you have it or you don’t. If you’ve never taken a hard look in the mirror and changed something fundamental about yourself and/or fully accepted a character flaw (we all have them) then your potential is capped. Teams need to evolve and to do so members need to be self aware, critical, and accurate in their self perception.

Thanks for being an inspiration, Navarre.