I hired the wrong person.
There may be no decision more detrimental to a team. I did it. I’m not proud of it. Here’s what I learned from it.
When I hired this (very nice) person I was aiming for balance on the team. They had values and behaviors that I thought would give an additional dimension to our group. Nope. It just brought confusion.
In this instance, I hired someone who I thought would make us more efficient.
But, efficiency isn’t who we were. Miss Efficiency was quickly annoyed, and was exhausting everybody else.
I should have been looking for someone who validated what we already were.
Every hire is a statement to your team about what matters. You can hire skills that round out the team. You can hire diversity that provides different backgrounds and voices. But. If you hire different values and behaviors you do more than water down your values, you set a new trajectory.
Hire for values. Train for competency.
Note: This was a while ago. And I schedule these things pretty far in advance. So if you’re reading this and I just hired you, no, this isn’t about you:)