Leadership Thought #351 – Surround Yourself with Good People
People will make or break your business. The best leaders intuitively understand this reality and surround themselves with the best talent possible. You can only ever accomplish so much alone. Achieving anything significant usually requires leveraging others’ skills, talents, and relationships. You need to be less worried about being the smartest person in the room and more focused on your organization’s collective intelligence. Over time, your IQ ends up being the average IQ of the ten people you spend the most time with.
However, having smart, capable people working for you is not enough. They must also have solid personal values and put the company’s interests ahead of their own. Organizational culture begins at the top, reflecting the behavior and treatment of individuals in critical leadership/management positions. You set the standard, and everyone else follows your lead. When in doubt, you should always opt for cultural fit over individual talent.
High-performing organizations certainly respect and value the contributions of the individual, but also strive equally hard to create an overall sense of teamwork and interdependence. Good people working toward a common goal as a team will always trump the exploits of any one individual. Surround yourself with the right people, and the bar will be raised higher than you could have imagined or accomplished on your own.
Related articles
- Increase Revenue by Improving Organizational Culture and Behavior. Will it Work? In New Book, Fundamentally Different, Author Suggests It’s a Strategy for Success (prweb.com)
- The Most Important Reason People Fail in New Jobs (forbes.com)
- 7 Steps to Finding & Hiring the Best Employees for Your Company (grasshopper.com)
- 5 Ways to Make the Right Hiring Choices (ccblogtheme1.imarc.net)
- Organizational Culture: Are You Taking It to the Next Level? (hroutsider.com)
