Which is Best: Hiring One Superstar or Several “Good” Employees?
Posted June 21st, 2011
In evaluating job performance, the titans of Silicon Valley seem to have a decided preference for hiring just a few star performers over many very good performers. The Silicon Valley executives see a yawning chasm between good and great and are willing to pay for great.
Mark Zuckerberg has said exceptional workers can be 100 times better than very good employees. And Marc Andreesen believes that five top notch programmers can outperform 1,000 mediocre ones.
While acknowledging the credentials of these two Silicon Valley titans and their well-regarded opinions, business writer and consultant Bill Taylor nonetheless questions the logic of their statements on performance.
Would you really prefer five stellar workers over 1,000 good workers in your company, he asks? He questions the reasonableness of showering money on one standout performer, rather than taking the time to assemble a team that, while lacking a superstar, has been formed to work together, and where performance is the result of collective action, of teamwork, rather than individual brilliance.
He makes a comparison to sports teams and looks at the results there. The Boston Bruins defeated the Vancouver Canucks for the 2011 Stanley Cup. It was the Canucks who had the superstars, but it was the teamwork and determination of the Bruins that took them to victory. The best team in the international professional soccer league is FC Barcelona. It has no superstars, but it is the teamwork displayed by Barcelona that has carried them to victory. He also cites studies that have been done of star investment analysts on Wall Street. The studies have shown that star analysts who move to another firm actually perform worse after the move because they have lost the resources and networks they have built up at their previous firm. Their performance never returns to the level it was at.
Taylor believes the pendulum has swung too far away from teamwork to the cult of the superstar. While no one should accept mediocrity, performance over the long run involves more than just performance by the superstars. Long-term performance involves things such as character and what engages and excites a worker as much as it is about what an employee knows. While few choices in business come down to picking one great performer or 100 good ones, Taylor suggests that the Silicon Valley crowd think twice before hiring the superstar, especially if it means cutting out 100 employees who work together really well as a team.
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