What’s going on here, with this human?
The philosopher Kwame Appiah writes that “in life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you’re playing.”
When I try to figure out what game I’m playing, I see that for the last 25 years I have been playing a game of strategy applied to people, a game where over and over I try to answer the question “what’s going on here, with this human?” In this essay, I make recommendations about candidate selection based on thousands of assessments I have made and my somewhat obsessive interest in the topic.
My goal in this essay is to help others make better decisions on a potential hire, business partner, or even life partner as quickly and as accurately as possible. It’s made up of suggested action steps and some of the ruminations that underlie them. At the end I include my own assessment of different personality assessments and some of my go-to interview and reference questions.
Jerry Seinfeld once said, when asked how he felt about aging, “I think if you’re a little lucky in life you should enjoy getting older…when you’re young you can’t see what’s going on so well. You get older, you walk into a room and you see who people are faster.”
Toward the end of his life, Steve Jobs told Walter Isaacson, “If I had a spiritual partner at Apple, it’s Jony Ive. Jony and I think up most of the products together and then pull others in…he gets the big picture as well as the most infinitesimal details about each product.” Let’s say that the way Jobs and Ive knew each other—quirks, strengths, weaknesses—after 14 years of daily conversation was a 10.
How close to that 10 can you get when you’re first getting to know someone and deciding whether they are a fit for your team?
When I started making those sorts of judgments about people, I’d guess my average was a 3. I’ve since done thousands of interviews, spent just as many hours talking to references, and helped hire hundreds of people—as consultants for a research firm that I helped run right after college, and since then as analysts and investors in my role investing large pools of capital. Now, when I’m in the zone and the conditions are right, I think I can sometimes get to a 7.
A lot of people, in my industry and others, see all of this as a drag, a distraction from the central mission of their team. But I’ve come to consider it the most important skill for anyone building teams—and to believe that, to the extent I have any unique skill, this is it. In the work context, managing the complexity around people is the most important skill for anyone building a business. As the gaming company Valve puts it: “Hiring well is the most important thing in the universe.”
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Πηγή: grahamduncan.blog
