The Advantage of Unskilled Teammates
Skill can be taught. Weak character can kill.
I spent a couple days last week in an Avalanche Safety Training course, preparing for an upcoming backcountry ski trip with some friends. Avalanches are supremely dangerous—50% of those caught in one die—so it’s important to know what you’re getting into.
Equally important is travelling with selfless people. The instructor told us he’d in fact pick this personal quality over expertise if he had to choose. Why?
Because expertise can’t save you if it’s not around to help you when you get in trouble. He gave the example of an highly skilled skier he once spent a day with who would ski ahead and never pause to see if his companion was in sight and doing okay. (First rule of the backcountry: don’t go alone, and stay within sight of your teammate(s) at all time.) What’s the good of a knowledgeable ski partner who won’t even know that you’ve been caught in an avalanche or fallen head down into a snow-filled tree well and risk dying of hypothermia or asphyxiation?
Skill is easy to find, easy to acquire. Concern for others’ good is harder to find, harder to acquire. And yet it’s far more valuable on a team.
So when you’re recruiting and hiring, look and test for this in a candidate’s character. I don’t mean feelings-based sentimentality. I mean the virtue—the stable interior disposition, the moral habit—of thinking of others’ good and serving it. In other words, the classic definition of charity, or self-giving love.
To illustrate this, let’s talk about a team characterized by selfishness, then one that is selfless.
The selfish team:
wastes time because people try to solve their problems without seeking help when they need it. Or worse, members undermine each other.
insn’t enjoyable. When’s the last time you enjoyed a meeting or conversation with someone who didn’t care about you? Who only thought and talked about themselves? I once had a get-to-know-you dinner with someone who just talked about himself and answered our questions about him, and who not once asked me and my companions about ourselves. It was so odd. Afterwards I wished him well and won’t have dinner with him again.
tends towards mediocrity: how fast does a rowboat go when the rowers aren’t sacrificially unified in their cadence? Not very.
loses good people. They’ll find better places to invest their time and energy.
The selfless team inversely:
multiplies time. Once I needed to move a couch downstairs, which involved narrow doorways and an even narrower bannistered stairwell. Doing it alone would have given me a hernia and taken hours. Thankfully I thought to invite a few friendly neighbours and within 10 minutes, 2 doors were off their hinges, stairwell and doorways negotiated, and the couch was moved. It was dazzling. (For data people: 4 guys x 10 minutes = 40 minutes vs. 1 guy x 120 minutes + hernia = oof).
is enjoyable: the couch team joshed and laughed the entire time. It bonded relative strangers very quickly.
tends towards excellence: “the good of the other” implies not just collective outcomes but the growth of the people. I certainly learned some things about moving furniture!
retains and attracts good people. Selfless teams and organizations (and families) are attractive, truly beautiful in fact. How valuable is to be sought out by good people?
So the next time you’re hiring, moving a couch, looking to get married, or planning a backcountry ski trip, consider “unskilled” selfless teammates rather than skilled selfish ones. You’ll have a more enjoyable and productive time. It might just prevent a train wreck hire, a hernia, or a divorce. It might just save your life.