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The Ultimate Guide To Hiring Original Thinkers
By First Round Review
Adam Grant, the best-selling author of Originals, shares his secrets to hiring the right people to grow your com...
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Bestselling author and Wharton professor Adam Grant has spent years researching and interviewing originals. In Originals, Grant shows how to identify, foster, and nurture nonconformists—here he expounds on how to recognize and recruit them in a startup setting.
Grant is perennially recognized as Wharton’s top-rated professor and has been named one of the world’s 25 most influential management thinkers. He’s spoken to and consulted with a range of organizations, from Google to Johnson & Johnson and from Pixar to the U.S. Army. A prolific writer, Grant is the author of Give and Take, an active blogger and a contributing op-ed writer for The New York Times.
In this interview, Grant explains why it’s imperative for early-stage companies to hire originals. He shares how he singles them out and delves into recommended questions and exercises that can help startups find and hire them.
THE CASE TO HIRE ORIGINALS AT STARTUPS
The initial act of founding a company is an expression of nonconformity. They must eventually convince others to join them, internalize that vision, and will it into reality. But isn’t it counterintuitive to bring other originals—who may buck their ideas—into the fold?
"If you don't hire originals, you run the risk of people disagreeing but not voicing their dissent. You want people who choose to follow because they genuinely believe in ideas, not because they’re afraid to be punished if they don’t. For startups, there's so much pivoting that’s required that if you have a bunch of sheep, you’re in bad shape."
To seed a resilient culture. By default, companies are built in the image of their founders, which is why it’s vital to proactively introduce diversity of thought. "A resilient culture has a certain amount of resistance embedded in it. Not so much to capsize it, but enough so that it doesn’t atrophy," says Grant. "What happens when startups get successful and grow is that they become more and more vulnerable to the attraction-selection-attrition cycle, where people of the same stripes are increasingly drawn to the organization, chosen by it, and retained at it. The way to combat that homogeneity creep is to proactively infuse the culture with originals who have the will and skill to think differently.
To anticipate market movements. The more you can internally mirror the evolving market you’re aiming to change, the better you will manage it. Grant says, "You need originals to keep bringing fresh ideas that can challenge your current business model, your assumptions, and your principles. That accelerates your ability to adapt to—or better yet, initiate—change, as opposed to getting caught by surprise."
To repurpose dissent. From the company name to a go-to-market plan, the early stages of a startup are rife with big decisions. A diversity of thought on the way forward will mean some ideas will get scrapped. The key is to not let the owners of those ideas get left behind, too.
WHERE TO SEARCH FOR ORIGINALS AND HOW TO SPOT THEM
Here’s how and where Grant surfaced originals—and what tipped him off.
Unsung heroes. For each major innovation or movement, there are catalysts that fade into the background of what they create. The fire is brighter than the match—or it burns up with it. "I took examples of breakthroughs and traced back to pinpoint the unsung heroes.
Insubordinates. It’s important to triage troublemakers, but in doing so, don’t miss an original in your midst. "Another approach that I took was to look for people who had engaged in very visible acts of nonconformity." says Grant. "I had to add a qualifier. I said, ‘I want to know who was insubordinate but ended up actually being a great innovator.’ The person that annoyed middle managers but was valued by higher-ups. That led to a lot of really good names and a few crazy people."
Inward-facing innovators. People notice public, original acts, but nonconformists also turn their original thinking toward their teams, making a private, but equally profound impact.
If you’re a founder building out your team, you may not have a wealth of time or data to suss out originals. It can be difficult to see if there’s substance beneath surface indications of nonconformity.
Organized by three key attributes of originals, here are unconventional questions and exercises to use to help validate an original.
1. CHALLENGES DEFAULTS
How would you improve our interview process? "I find this question powerful for a couple of reasons. One, it's an opportunity to see if they’re willing to speak up. Two, it's a window into their thinking process.
Tell me about the last time that you encountered a rule in an organization that you thought made no sense. What was the rule? What did you do and what was the result? "You’re not excited about candidates who just let it go. But you also don’t want somebody who says, ‘Yeah I saw this rule, marched into my boss’ office, argued, and quit over it," says Grant.
Why shouldn’t I hire you? "In Originals, I talk about founder Rufus Griscom, who pitched his startup Babble to investors by listing three reasons not to invest in his business.
It’s your first few months on the job. What questions would you first ask and to whom? Presidential candidates are often asked what they plan to accomplish in their first 100 days in office, and hiring managers tend to evaluate candidates for leadership positions similarly. Grant says, "Ask candidates what questions they’d want to ask in their first two months on the job, and who their ideal sources would be. Listen for examples of open-ended questions—rather than just yes/no or testing-my-own-thinking styles of inquiry—as well as a willingness to draw from and challenge many sources of information. Originals are constructive contrarians. They're not just pointing out that the emperor has no clothes; they're also tailors."
2. EMBODIES A MULTITUDE
Start at the bottom of the CV. Above the bottom margin of the last page of each resume is typically a line about a candidate’s hobbies, travels, or interests. "Look for people who have multifunctional backgrounds, multicultural experience, and wide interests.
Look for diversity of role models—and distribution of their impact. "Asking a candidate what his role model would do is a way to assess how he thinks outside his own perspective." says Grant.
Uncover their roads not taken. Originals are supremely prolific. Ask candidates, ‘What did you try but ultimately give up on—and why?’ Look for those who demonstrate continuous curiosity, but a willingness to move on when the writing’s on the wall."
Make the candidate a culture detective. "Beyond asking how to improve the interview process: assess how candidates view your company culture," says Grant. "Two weeks before her interview, give a candidate three names of colleagues to reach out to learn more about the culture. Tell her that when she comes in, you want to know what’s working and what needs to be changed.
3. DEMONSTRATES INSISTENCE AND RESILIENCE
Present a problem, but leave out a piece of information. "Focus less on the content of their solution, and more on their attitude and fervor in attacking the challenge," Grant advises.
Evaluate the response to difficult situations. "In Give and Take, I covered the ways you can distinguish a selfish taker from a generous giver.
In which job were you most miserable? Why and how did you deal with it? "This not only gauges attitude, but also reveals the triggers of discontent. If hiring originals, I want people who are frustrated by red tape more than people who are bored," says Grant.
NOTES ON EVALUATING ORIGINALS
Corral references until they’re candid. Says Grant. "The easiest way to do that is to give them forced choices of two undesirable attributes. Try asking: ‘From your vantage point, if this candidate were going to rock the boat too often or not often enough, which is more likely?’ If you phrase the question correctly, it's not clear what the ‘correct’ answer is. But I’d suggest looking carefully at the ones who rock the boat too often as potential diamonds in the rough."
Use a prepared scoring key. "When seeking out specific qualities—such as those of originals—research supports evaluating responses using a scoring key.
Identifying originals is only the initial step, but it’s a supremely significant one. It not only keeps you rigorous when forming your foundational team, but also indicates to candidates that you are an organization that seeks out and values original thinking and action.
Says Grant. "The world is full of ordinary objects and ideas that are made extraordinary by people who have the capacity to repurpose and reapply them, MacGyver-style. It often starts with a slight recalibration in perspective followed by a small, but defiant act. It’s the originals who keep pulling on that thread—they instinctively know that that’s the difference between inspiration and innovation. Don’t you want those people building beside you?"
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Teaching Creativity to Leaders
Tim Brown, CEO and president of IDEO, on breakthrough problem-solving.
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SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR “IdeaCast” from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael. Today, I’m talking with Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO.
BROWN: What we’re interested in is how do people who have leadership roles in organizations, whether they be businesses or other forms of institutions, unlock the creativity of their organizations. And there’s a simple reason for it, which is that in a more volatile, complex, faster-changing world, it’s getting more and more obvious that organizations that don’t evolve quickly through innovation, they will simply be outcompeted by others, whether that’s the latest startup, the latest disruptive technology, the large-scale competitor that is busy acquiring and consolidating in their market, whatever it might be.
And so there is this imperative for organizations to unlock far more innovation than they ever have before and therefore to spend more of their time innovating than they have before. And so for a leader, one of your principle tasks in the future will be to figure out how to unlock as much creativity in your organization as possible. And that’s what we’re focusing on teaching here.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: OK, so I want to dig into this a little bit more deeply. One of the things I think that a lot of leaders seem to jump to when you start talking about helping people in their organizations be more creative is things like office space, or ping pong tables, or certain things about the space or the rituals that happen in the space. How much of this really is about that kind of thing? And if it is, then what are the types of things in those categories of rituals and space that really matter?
TIM BROWN: Some of it is to do with those kinds of things. But it’s probably easiest if we put that into context in terms of understanding how things like that play a role. The important idea that we’re trying to get across in this course is that traditional forms of leadership that have been communicated through us from the youngest age through media tend to get reinforced and emphasized when we’re going through our educational experiences is that leadership is all about leading from the front. It’s all about being the person with the smartest ideas, being the person who makes all the decisions, being a top of some kind of pyramidal-shaped hierarchy.
And the most important point we’re trying to make here is that unlocking creativity in an organization requires a more sophisticated idea of what leadership is. And what we’re focusing on here we think of as three stances that are necessary for effective leadership when it comes to this idea of unlocking creativity.
One of those is leading from the front. And there are moments when we use the metaphor of the explorer, being the person who points to the horizon and says, let’s go explore that way. So that’s tremendously important, but it’s only one of the stances.
Another one refers to things like space and culture. And the metaphor we use for that is part of the gardener, this idea that we have to nurture culture, and nurture environment, and nurture circumstances. In other words, we somehow have to lay out the stage for people to be creative on. And that is important. And that takes a level of proactivity. That’s something that you have to think about in advance. It’s too late when you’ve asked the team to go off and be creative, if you suddenly think, oh, boy, the problem is our culture attacks creativity.
And then there’s a third stance and that’s the start– we think of the right metaphor there as the player coach, the person who is able to step in and advise and help a team as it’s performing, as it’s been created, to learn as much as it can from the experiences that its had, to ask questions about are we really reaching far enough? Are we taking all of the appropriate constraints into account? Are we stepping back from the problem and understanding it in its completeness?
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So this is interesting, because I know part of what you have talked about is this importance of a process of experimentation. Does that process shift depending on whether you see yourself as an explorer, a gardener, or a player-coach? Or is it basically there is a process and anyone can do it?
TIM BROWN: No, I think experimentation is a process for exploring new ideas, right? And I think you can think of yourself as a leader playing different roles within those experiments.
Often, I think it’s in helping them understand what they’ve learned from an experiment, particularly if that experiment seems to have failed, if it hadn’t had the outcomes that they were expecting. That’s often where teams struggle. And a good leader and a good player-coach who’s had some experience knows how to help the team extract the maximum amount of learning from the experiment, because in the end, that is the purpose of the experiment is that they push learning forward?
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, it’s interesting too as you talk about these roles a little bit more, it sounds like they don’t need to be mutually exclusive. You could take a little from column A and a little from column B, as it seems appropriate to you.
TIM BROWN: I think that’s probably true. The way I think about it more is a bit like a dance. You can choreograph your performance, as it were, as a leader by moving backwards and forwards between these different leadership stances or leadership roles. So the best creative leaders are able to play all of these roles.
And they may come from a beginning of being one– quite often, we find in our own environment here at IDEO for instance is that some people, who are perhaps a little more introverted, or who have spent more time studying the craft of innovation and design, tend to start off as great player-coaches. And they learn how to step out in front and point to the horizon.
And they learn to think about the constraints of culture and how they might affect those and how they might design for those. So most of those start from one or other of those three places, but I think what we should aspire to as strong leaders is to be able to be competent of all three and then know when to play each of those roles.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: One question I have for you about this is related to the lumpiness of creativity in an organization. It’s not like everyone is equally creative. Some teams may be very playful and creative. Others may be less so. And I’m just wondering if you are a very senior leader in an organization, how do you manage across that a team that may have a very different creative culture than another? How do you bring them all along?
TIM BROWN: Well, I suspect this is true of almost any set of skills in an organization. Obviously, any organization ought to be striving for mastery of those skills so that they can perform at the highest level. And like any organization that’s focused on any set of skills, you need for think about development.
One of the values of thinking about creativity as a collaborative act, rather than one where you isolate people or teams, is that they can learn from each other. That’s certainly what happens at IDEO all the time.
In some cases, it’s important to measure things. For instance, we believe that one of the indicators of a strongly creative culture is how rapidly teams can go from asking a question to getting something in front of users, in other words, getting prototypes built. And it’s useful, in some cases, to measure that, particularly if you’re trying to encourage an organization to do it faster. And there are some things as a leader one might want to measure. There are also some things that as a leader one can do to increase the skill base of your team by bringing in new people from the outside.
One of those leading from the front-like activities that we talk a little bit about in the course is that it’s hiring people themselves, bringing people into teams, being willing to experiment, being willing to hire edgy kinds of people, who might bring different creative capacities and different creative outlooks into the team. What tends to happen is that cultures tend to homogenize.
So they tend to hire people like themselves. And it often takes strong leadership to hire people or bring people into the team who are not like those people who are already there. So that’s one of those examples of a time when a leader needs to play that explorer type role in order to bring more edgy talent into the teams.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: OK, so just to quickly recap, you’ve mentioned learning from failure, experimentation, the importance of fast prototyping, bringing in fresh viewpoints. One of the things I don’t think we’ve covered yet is constraints. And that is a word that gets thrown around a lot when you hear people talking about creativity.
And I’m just wondering, where are you on this whole constraints discussion of are they useful?
TIM BROWN: In my opinion, constraints are a matter of fact. I would say the opportunity for creativity is in understanding at what level those constraints exist and which ones are important, perhaps which ones you’re prepared to ignore at certain moments in the process in order to explore ideas which might be outside the possibilities of reality because of constraints but which you can bring back inside once you’ve had them.
Another thing that’s important, is the opposite of that actually, is that sometimes teams are working on solutions. And they’re looking at the problem in too local a way. And they might not understand what some of the system-level constraints might be. So a good example of that is, again in the kind of products and services world, is they might well be working on a new solution, but have failed to think about what channels to market they are going to use to get that product out there.
And because they haven’t thought about that and their solution is actually less relevant and less good. So it might be your job as a leader to point out that they haven’t thought about, how are we going to market this thing? Or who is going to sell it for us? Or how are we going to distribute it?
So sometimes that moment when you might be playing you’re in that player-coach role right where you’re reminding the team that they may not have thought about things that were important. So I say to recap, constraints are a matter of fact. The cleverness and the leadership opportunity is how creative you are with those constraints.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Mmm, excellent. OK, I think I maybe have time for just one more question. Is there a mistake that you see people making over and over again as they try to help their teams or organizations get more creative or maybe a series of mistakes?
TIM BROWN: Well, the mistake I always used to make is that you made the mistake of thinking that your job as the leader is to have all the good ideas or that somehow your ideas need to be bigger and better than everybody else’s.
And that’s a huge mistake to make. It may be that you have the biggest and best idea. It may be you have the most perspective. And therefore your ideas have a certain value, because you have more perspective. But it’s a tremendous error to think that others in your team and your organization haven’t also got really important ideas.
And it’s very easy when you fail to understand that, not only to not give value to those ideas, but sometimes even when they’ve got good ideas, your stance is I’m the smartest person in the room causes them to give up on those ideas too quickly, because oh, he’s got a big idea. He’s the one who’s going to think of the solution. I don’t have to be creative.
So that’s the mistake that I see many leaders making. Essentially, it’s assuming they have to lead from the front. And so I really encourage all leaders to have that little question constantly going on in their head is, am I doing too much leading from the front here? Am I having too many ideas? Am I speaking too much of the time? Should I be stepping back and listening? Should I be stepping back and coaching and asking questions rather than coming up with all the answers?
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And there’s something so rewarding when you see people on your team having fantastic ideas that you would never have thought of.
TIM BROWN: It’s a very rewarding feeling.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That was Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO. For more, including articles from Tim, go to hbr.org.
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Build a change platform, not a change program
It’s not you, it’s your company. Management Innovation eXchange founders Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini believe t...
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Specifically, effective change platforms:
- encourage individuals to tackle significant organizational challenges; that is, those that are typically considered beyond an employee’s “pay grade” or sphere of influence
- foster honest and forthright discussion of root causes and, in the process, develop a shared view of the thorniest barriers
- elicit dozens (if not hundreds) of potential solutions rather than seeking to coalesce prematurely around a single approach; the goal is first to diverge, then to converge
- focus on generating a portfolio of experiments that can be conducted locally to help prove or disprove the components of a more general solution, as opposed to developing a single grand design
- encourage individuals to take personal responsibility for initiating the change they want to see and give them the resources and tools necessary to spur their thinking and imaginations
Guiding a process of socially constructed change is neither quick nor easy—but it is possible and effective.
