Building Your Team: Don't Clone Yourself

Do you wish that you could clone yourself?

Imagine the possibilities. Your one man band could be a one man BAND. Your team could be filled with people who meet your expectations exactly. Wouldn't that be great?

No. That would not be great. And yet so often we are tempted to try to do that, even though it is (currently!) impossible. How? By hiring people like us. By hiring people and staffing our teams with people who remind us of us. By doing our best to create the team of our dreams filled with the perfect people: copies of ourself.

Except, you wouldn't really like a whole team of you. Your problems would be magnified. Your weaknesses would be multiplied. And your sense of judgement, unregulated by any kind of diversity, would pull you right over a cliff.

Building your team does not mean cloning yourself.

Instead, building your team means finding diverse talent, people who are creative, people who are strong enough to disagree with you, and people who surprise you with both their powerful strengths AND their occasional challenges.

Build your team with pieces that fit because they're both different and flexible. Build your team with people who are so different from you that they push and challenge you. Build your team for the mission, not for the look. Because as attractive and wonderful as you are, one of you is enough.

-- Doug Smith

Our training program "Supervising for Success" includes valuable and instantly usable ideas on how to build your team. Contact me today about bringing this two-day training program to your location.

doug@dougsmithtraining.com

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