Hire Employees Who Complement You, Not Who Resemble You

Michel Theriault
Mon, 14 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

As an entrepreneur, you have some very specific skills and attributes that drive you and make you successful: an eagerness to try new things, a passion for success, and a willingness to take risks and break the rules when necessary.

However, as your company grows, those same attributes and skills are not always suited to building a solid, stable company. For that, you need to hire employees with complementary skills, not just more of the same.

For some roles you hire, those entrepreneurial skills will be valuable to your company’s development, particularly in the technical or creative areas. But as you fill positions to run key corporate activities in your growing company, you’ll run into trouble if you hire other entrepreneurs just like yourself.

It's human nature to surround ourselves with likeminded people. We generally do this in our social circles, and the same thing tends to apply when hiring others. We often look for characteristics and traits we're comfortable with and that mirror our own.

But as you grow and develop your company, you need staff with very specific skills, mindsets, and experience to fill the key functions, which might even include a new president or CEO.

The entrepreneurial skills and knowledge you have aren’t likely to translate well into some of those other roles. And if you try to do them yourself without bringing in someone else, you’ll be distracted from doing the things you need to do as an entrepreneur to develop and grow your business.

That's one of the reasons for hiring others to handle things like logistics, sales, human resources, IT, marketing, finance, production, and design. These employees can build on your entrepreneurial approach and ideas that got your company off the ground in the first place and help you build a company, not just an idea.

As an entrepreneur, you’re probably not even interested in some of those fairly mundane roles within the company. This why startups can stumble as they grow, since the entrepreneur isn’t focusing on the activities required to strengthen, develop, and grow his or her company.

Hiring skilled and experienced personnel for some of the corporate roles mentioned above can also be part of the checks and balances required as your company grows. They can help you to put the right spin on an idea to ensure it is successful, or act as the devil's advocate for some of your ideas and approaches that may seem like great ideas to you, but that could become financial or risk liabilities.

Your employees’ specialized experience is what you’re looking for. As long as they share your excitement and are open to challenging the status quo and developing new approaches, they can help you be even more successful. They don’t have to be entrepreneurs -- and probably aren’t since they are willing to be employees -- but they do have to be someone who fits in your organization.

Seeking out people who are simply different from you is not the right approach either. Instead, take the time to find and hire people who will complement you and round out your organization’s skills and capabilities.