To Build a Team of Geniuses

A select few organizations genuinely need the very best and very brightest. Having had the privilege of working in some of those groups, I’ve seen those hiring choices go well and go badly.

When you need the very best, how can you choose the right ones?

Having been asked, here are my topmost observations.

A brilliant mind is not enough. Those who are mentally miles ahead of ordinary people breeze through their studies and exams. They can get through even the most advanced university degree without having to learn to work as hard as someone of more ordinary intelligence. In many fields they don’t need help from anyone else to achieve those goals, either. They are actually at a disadvantage in terms of learning persistence, self-discipline and teamwork.

For people gifted with a magnificent brain, it is perilously easy to become like Sheldon Cooper in the television series Big Bang Theory.

Doing something truly big in the real world requires a team. Can you build a winning team full of Sheldon clones? No. They wouldn’t know how to work with other people and they lack the type of self-discipline you need. Remember the episode where Sheldon rushed an earthshaking finding into publication and ended up shamed by the discovery that it contained a foolish error? Either more self-discipline or willingness to let someone else check his work could have saved him from that disgrace.

There are some brilliant people who do learn teamwork and self-discipline. Build a team of them and they can change the world. But how can you recognize them?

They are intense about everything, not just about their work. In the best such team I’ve worked with, their hobbies were phenomenal. The one who liked audio systems bought a $10,000 system (worth about $40,000 or so now) and before he even hooked it up, he rebuilt the electronics in the speakers because they weren’t good enough. Two of the women had tropical fish–in huge salt water reef tanks. Digital movie making was in its infancy, and one engineer was writing some of the first software to do it. He had nine gigabytes of disk on his computer when most people bragged if they had half a gig. The dabbler in pottery made all her own dishes, which looked and felt like expensive designer pieces. The quilting hobbyist’s work was featured in a major book on the subject.

Hand them an impossible task at work, and they were similarly creative and diligent about not just coming up with a solution (the fun part) but seeing it through until it was implemented (also fun but with some drudgery) and highly refined (the boring chore of finding and correcting flaws).

None of them thought they could do it all alone, so they saw working well with other people as simply another skill necessary to achieve their goals. Role-playing games after work were popular, as were other pursuits such as sailing that involved other people.

Last but not least, on the job they were focused on their mission. Meetings were about the work, about doing it right. Mistakes were simply mistakes to be corrected. Criticisms were about the accuracy of the work, not political, not status-seeking.

Look for brilliant people like them, and you’ve found the ones you need.