Tagged: Steve Jobs

January 2, 2013

Steve Jobs on Hiring And Managing Talented People

Whether you are an Apple fan or not, it’s hard to deny that Steve Jobs was a brilliant and visionary business leader. (Full disclosure – I am not an Apple fan and only Android devices are allowed in our home!) In reading Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, I am constantly amazed at Jobs’ ability to get people to do what he wanted them to do. While his tactics in people management make me wince – he either berated people and said they were the dumbest (insert profanity here) or said their idea was the most brilliant ever – he definitely had an eye for talent.

He was able to get the best and brightest to come to work for Apple even when the company was 30 days from bankruptcy. That is impressive. But what impressed me even more was that he knew what to look for in terms of talented people, what they wanted, and how that would further his goals.

Here is what Jobs told the author as quoted from Isaacson’s book, Steve Jobs, about hiring talented people…

“For most things in life, the range between best and average is 30% or so. The best airplane flight, the best meal, they may be 30% better than your average one… The Mac team was an attempt to build a whole team like that, A-players. People said they wouldn’t get along, they’d hate working with each other.

But I realized that A-players like to work with A-players, they just didn’t like working with C-players. At Pixar, it was a whole company of A-players. When I got back to Apple, that’s what I decided to try to do. You need to have a collaborative hiring process. When we hire someone, even if they’re going to be in marketing, I will have them talk to the design folks and the engineers. My role model was J. Robert Oppenheimer. I read about the type of people he sought for the atom bomb project. I wasn’t nearly as good as he was, but that’s what I aspired to do.”

a-player Red and grey Ok, granted we are building sales teams not atom bombs. But think about what he says as it applies to a sales team. If he’s right that the difference between the best and average is about 30%, what could your sales team accomplish if it was 30% better?

Even more important is what Steve Jobs said about A-players wanting to work with A-players. He nailed this one. EVERY top sales performer I have ever interviewed has expressed this sentiment in some way or another. So many sales managers think that their team by necessity will be made up of A, B, and C-players. But top sales teams are made up of ALL A-players, meaning that all of the salespeople have A player talent and the potential to be top performers. Not all will be performing the same because some of those with A player talent might be rookies or salespeople new to your industry. If you have C-players – meaning those with just average talent who do just enough to get by (euphemistically called “role players” by managers) but will never be top performers – you will never maximize your team’s performance.

By keeping those C-players you are also impacting your A-players. Not only do they typically not want to be surrounded by those of lesser talent, they also find it de-motivating. It’s like a pro tennis player playing a match against a junior. Not only isn’t it fun, it can degrade your skills because people tend to “play down” to the level they are playing against. A-players are motivated by other A-players and push themselves because they want to stay in the top group and be respected by those top people.