Build an Innovative and Creative Team by Hiring People Smarter than You
“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last, you create what you will” — George Bernard Shaw
I have recently started working in a very early stage startup company and one really important thing I have been thinking about is how to build the best team and what it is that should be taken into account when hiring people.
I believe that the ability to adapt and to learn new things are more important characteristics than the current skillset one already has. Additionally, fitting the company’s culture is equally important. I also think that a very good team should be made up with people who complement each other. This way we can get different points of view that allow us to look at a problem in multiple perspectives.
Recently I have read this great book Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios, where he writes about creativity in business and why it was very important for Pixar to always foster creativity. He shows how to build a creative culture and how to lead your team to accomplish greater things.
Creativity becomes really important in our workplace if we want to truly build things differently and if we want to differentiate from others. Although, it is often difficult to express new and different ideas because we are afraid they may not be good enough.
To be a truly creative company, we must start things that can fail. If failure is positively accepted it can lead to innovative work. On the other side, in a failure-averse culture, people will avoid risks and seek to repeat something safe that have worked in the past.
If you hire people that are smarter than you are, you will be able to work with exceptional people that can innovate, excel and create great new things. Most importantly, by giving freedom to highly self-motivated people will enable you to make significant improvements in your products or services in a short time.
Ideas come from people. Therefore, people are more important than ideas!
Thanks for reading!
Originally published at www.vitorpedro.com.
