Build a team when you hire — why cloning Jaromír Jágr won’t pay off

I once attended a motivational talk about building a successful company. The main message, at least as I remember it now, was to focus on hiring so-called A-players. Americans sometimes call them rock stars. Nobody can dispute that a successful company needs smart, capable people. But that tells you nothing about whether you need A-players exclusively. In an ideal world you really could build a great company by hiring only the best. The slight problem is that we don't live in an ideal world, and worse, hiring A-players can pave the road to hell. I'll use a few examples from sports to explain why.

The team matters more than the individual

From the short history of sports, I can think of only one successful team made up of A-players: the American basketball Dream Team at the Barcelona Olympics. I can think of plenty of failed attempts to build a successful team with A-players alone, such as Real Madrid in the Galácticos era. Although it might not be obvious at first, the previous sentence contains the most important word: team. To stay with the sports analogy a little longer, the team matters more than the individual in a team sport. That's why successful teams are rarely, if ever, made up entirely of A-players, the best individuals. Success goes to the teams and sports organizations that make the best use of each player's qualities for the team's benefit. If you accept that a company is a team and software development is a team sport, there are plenty of parallels.

Culture matters more than the individual

Most successful sports organizations have a clear philosophy that guides both the business and the sporting side. That creates what we'd call a company culture. Culture sets up the internal environment so the company can live by its philosophy and achieve its goals. If you have a great player who doesn't fit your culture, there are only two options. Change the culture, or accept that the great player isn't the right one for you.

Jágr’s little finger and the team’s bus factor

During the 2005 ice hockey world championship in Vienna, Jaromír Jágr, the Czech team's offensive star, was injured in a group-stage game. Afterwards people debated the team's chances of a good result. Their prospects turned on the state of Jágr's broken little finger. Everything worked out in the end and the Czech team, led by Jágr, took gold. We'll never know how the team would have done without the great man from Kladno in the lineup, but we can still learn from it. Good or bad luck plays a role in everything people do. It can be fatal when it becomes the centerpiece or the weakest point of your strategy. Any team that relies on one player is literally playing Russian roulette. In any team, an individual should be replaceable, no matter how brilliant. In Team Geek, the authors called this the team's bus factor: How many people on your team have to be hit by a bus for the project to go to pieces? A team bus factor of 1 means it only takes one person, and so on. Try asking yourself what your team's bus factor is…

Team hierarchy

Being able to replace individuals doesn't mean you build a team on the assumption that everyone is equal. Only someone who knows nothing about sports could think a player from Zetor Brno's fourth line could replace Jaromír Jágr. In every team sport you need players who make a difference (A-players?). They lead and shoulder the main responsibility. But even they need the support of the team. Imagine what a team consisting only of players like Jaromír Jágr would look like. Its defense would certainly be shaky, and its offense would almost certainly be miserable. Even the divine Jaromír needs someone to pass him the puck so he can score. Besides the practical reasons, the team would sooner or later fall out among themselves because there wouldn't be room on the bus for all those egos.

Every team needs a clear hierarchy, and every player must know exactly what their role is. It's perhaps clearest in the NHL, where a player's place in the hierarchy is reflected both in pay and in ice time. It comes down to a simple equation. Play well consistently and you get a good contract. Get a good contract and you get the ice time to show what you can do. But even in the NHL, past achievements don't get you on the ice forever. The people in the hierarchy can change. Work teams, including software teams, should have a clear hierarchy too. Everyone should know their place in it and have a chance to move up. They should also realize that without teamwork, neither the individual nor the team will get anywhere.

Develop your own players

In football, developing and selling players is the business model for many clubs. Buying the best players, the A-players, is very expensive. Even the biggest and best-known football businesses, like Barcelona or Manchester United (don't confuse them with their city rival, City), have worked out that it pays to develop A-players themselves. Besides the financial benefit, homegrown players have another advantage. They've been at the club a long time and know its philosophy and culture. It works both ways. A club often develops players from school age and knows their strengths and weaknesses inside out. Buying players, like bringing in anyone from outside, always brings some uncertainty about whether they'll fit in and genuinely strengthen the team. In sports, and especially in football, there's no probation period. If you sign someone to a five-year deal for a lot of money, you're paying them for five years. Hence the simple rule: a player you buy has to be substantially better than one you've developed.

There's no reason the same rules shouldn't apply when growing a company team. The similarity is obvious. Developing someone in-house is much cheaper than hiring from outside and taking on the risk that they won't fit the company culture or the team hierarchy.

An individual A-player undeniably plays an important role in any team, whether in software or in sports. The team itself, its culture and its hierarchy, matters more than the individual. So focus on hiring people who fit the team you have instead of trying to fit the team around them. In other words, build a team when you hire.