Building Teams that Are Different Than You

As an entrepreneur, you’ve been holding a lot on your back as long as you can remember. It can get really frustrating when you must handle everything (and I mean EVERYTHING). So frustrating that sometimes you simply wish you could clone yourself. Have a bunch of you’s: you calling, you emailing, you meeting, you designing, you marketing, you fundraising, you delivering, you you you everywhere! You’s eliminating task after task after task, without worrying if they will get it right. Right?

Wrong. As brilliant as you are, you are not brilliant in everything. Don’t take it personally — there is just no such unicorn in the world. In order to succeed, you need a passionate, reliable team. You need people who are smarter than you — within areas you’re not expert in. A well chosen structure joins forces and together forms the unicorn. It is then you have magic working in your favor.

Surround yourself with experts in the areas you’re not as familiar with. Choose people that stand out by their creativity and share your passion, but have a different perspective. Form a team that covers all points of views, holds all ends tight, and can maintain an objective image of business performance.

Creativity Sparks

You want to work with people who are differently creative than you are. Creativity comes in all shapes and sizes. Working with someone who shares most of your affinities means achieving the point of monotony, sooner or later. Even creativity can become monotonous when it comes down to a single opinion. Don’t be afraid to seize different types of unconventional.

Different Perspective

Some of the candidates will see things from a different perspective than you do. Hear those candidates out. Overcome the differences and allow yourself to understand the logic pattern behind their perspective. These people are valuable team members: they can always help you understand things from another point of view.

They will be the company’s devil advocates, the ones that discover flaws before anybody else does, giving you the opportunity to perfect what you’re doing before releasing it into the public. They will help you understand how users interact with your product, how they see it differently than yourself. You’ll be able to measure success performance and will have valuable insights that lead to constant improvement.

THE team

Instead of hiring a bunch of little you’s, think of equipping your team with every single useful skill there is out there. The key to building a successful team, the one team that can do it all — is chasing after people who are different than you, and different among themselves.

You always need the super organized one to make sure everything is on track, the analytical one that draws miracles out of what others see as bunch of numbers and arrows, the witty ones to build those miracles into a winning strategy, the wordy ones to make it sound irresistible, the neat ones to keep it tidy and typo-free, the communicative ones to get it all out there, the artsy one to put a dash of love-at-first-sight powder over everything you’ve packed so far… Does all of this sound like you? If yes, then congratulations — you’re a living unicorn! If, way more likely, no — then you’ve got it clear by now why you building teams that are different than you is one of the key pillars of success.