Business Perspective : Business savvy: Why it is important to hire smarter people than you

A good manager is the one who always hires smarter people than he is. When recruiting new staff it is advised that managers hire people who are smarter than they are, with more energy and better ideas. Surprisingly quite a number of managers at every level surround themselves with people that are less technically competent than themselves. But to develop as a leader, you first have to let go of being a subject matter expert. You must hire people or develop existing staff to take that role. If you insist on being the smartest guy in the room, you will never learn how to grow as a people manager. You will be so busy trying to hold onto your technical expertise that you will stifle the very people who you need to develop so you can be a better leader. This will lead to great frustration within your organization because you will be so busy wearing an old hat that you don’t focus on setting the strategic direction of your department. And by stifling the people on your team, you will lose talented people who don’t see career growth and that causes you to take more control of the technical situation which then leads to greater and greater attrition. This is the true definition of a vicious cycle. Hiring people who have a high level of talent is the mark of strong leadership, forward thinking, and a commitment to quality work, smarter employees will make sure that the following components are always in place; Trust If you trust your employees can do something better than you can, you are more likely to trust them to do this independently. By allowing your employees the freedom to do what they do best, you create a better product overall. This means that you will worry less about the work that is being done at any given time and they will in return have enough confidence to perform their duties at their very best. Quality when a business changes hands, the difference in quality is sometimes extreme. This quality drop leads to a drop in your customers’ opinions over time. Top-notch employees mean that the quality is kept high whether or not you are there, and you will always be assured of your clients being satisfied and return again for your services. Fresh Perspectives When new talent comes in to your company, they bring in experiences, skills and ideas that are different than your own. If you have hired good people, this new wave of ideas can increase the value of your product. It means that you will always have new products or designs for your clients, thereby increasing your profit margin. Efficiency Hiring people better than you means that you spend more time working and less time explaining anything to your employees. Work will be easier and few corrections will be needed Cost Savings Having employees that do quality work means that you spend less money on redesigns or re-dos—and that money goes to your profits instead. One thing i found that holds people back is; most of the managers are not ready to hire people who are smarter than them and invariably I have found these people stuck in their current job doing it repeatedly year after year The human resource department must always imbibe and then build this with in the culture of the organization to ensure that individual managers do not tend to overlook the fact and get too focused on their current role and day to day activities. The managers must not forget the fact that if they need to grow, somebody should be able to get into their shoes! Any manager, I believe, must focus on building people capabilities taking into account individual aspiration to the mutual advantage of both the company as well as individual. Most of the managers, I have found, tend to focus solely on organization objectives and take their eyes off individual goals and objectives which results in avoidable conflict and high churn. Whether we accept it or not, the fact is majority of the people leave their managers and not their organization when they turn in their resignation letters. In a nutshell, let us eliminate our inhibitions and start hiring people who are smarter than us as they help us keep on the edge and also help us develop and reinvent ourselves constantly. Smarter people create a smarter company and smarter company performs well specifically in tough business scenario as we are in today. In my days when I was in employment, one of my senior managers told me that half of your work as a leader is over if you hire people who are smarter than yourself, just put the right structure in place and align right people to the right job. I have found it true ; so to keep your top talent, think of creative ways for them to learn and grow with your company, or incentives that make you an attractive employer, as they will not be learning their craft from you, but you from them. Ends