"If we pick all the captains of international cricket team and make a new team – will that be the best team?" Well the odds are - it may end up being one of the lowest performing teams comprising of high performers! 

But why? After all, captains are ‘best’ in their own respective teams. So, bringing together the best should bring out the super best team– simple math. Right? 

Having worked in the field of Predictive Human Analytics for last few years, now I understand that  this simple looking logic does not work in real life. 

Though all the players will possess the required skills but the synergy of a team at behavioural level will be missing. They will form a ‘group of best, most talented individuals’ but not the ‘team’. The coherence, team bonding, team spirit and the feeling of working as one unit may never set in because everyone will be very similar in their behavioural profile. Everyone being a captain will have natural tendency to drive the team their own way because that is what their strength is. They will have definite views on what the team strategy should be and may not be comfortable in jut following the plan of others. “Too many cooks spoil the broth” – can be the end result of forming such a team.  

Interestingly, it is not just cricket, but we can pick any field and try to put all the captains or leaders together – you will see things may never work out. 

Organizations and companies are no different. If we form a top management team of all the CEOs – will that be the highest performing team? It will be nothing short of disaster!

To complete any team and make it a winning combination we need people who are different and yet complementing. We need planned diversity in the team not only at skill level but also at personality and work style level. We need members of team bringing competencies on the table that will enable each one to leverage the strengths of the other. We need a team where all are not CEOs but are competent and fit for their own unique roles and responsibilities. Their natural work style should match the requirements of their job. There need to be some who are comfortable in leading and other who are happy to be led. Everyone should be working in complete harmony and synergy so as to win as a team and not as an individual.    

So the questions that line managers and HRs need to ask themselves are – 

1. What is that you are looking for, is it just leaders or a person that best fits the job? 
2. How will you define fitment? Have you evaluated the fitment from cognitive and behaviour perspective or only from skills, experience & education perspective? 

When HR will think over these questions, they will realize that they can actually stop wasting a lot of effort and time by not hiring wrong set of people. But for this HRs and line mangers need to work together on the missing component of the hiring puzzle. In addition to the normal process of defining JD in terms of skills, education, experience etc. they need to add two more important dimensions of cognitive and behavioural requirements for a particular job. That is where the mismatch happens and our current recruitment process fails over and over again. Behavioural and Cognitive fitment are the blind-spots for the hiring managers in India.   

Effort should be directed at defining each job role individually and scientifically in terms of behavioural and cognitive requirements. For doing this organizations should not rely on opinions or gut feels but should leverage immense power of human analytics system such as Predictive Index (PI) and Job PRO. This will allow them to objectively and accurately determine the personality traits and learning ability required for doing a job. Using the advancement of analytics science they can now have the system automatically evaluate fitments of various candidates with the requirements of the job. This will allow them to not only hire and pay for ‘best’ but select the guys who are ‘best fits’ for a job in the organization. 

So to make a great cricket team hiring only captains is not a shortcut to success but it is a shortcut to disaster. To avoid repeating this mistake, determine precisely the personality traits required, in addition to skills, for each of the key roles and then choose players who will best do their job along with rest of the team. Doing this will also consume lot less time, energy and resources as compared to just hiring captains!