Hi, everyone, I want to spend a minute talking about managing rock stars or super elite talent. You often hear stories that super talented people don’t want to work with others, or they want to take up all the space in the room. I actually don’t think that talent and an inability to work with other people are correlated at all, if anything, they may be inversely correlated. I find the most talented, the most extraordinary people generally do want to work well in teams, because they recognize teams together, can come up with better solutions and make everyone, including themselves, more effective.

I remember a time at Red Hat when we had a platform as a service Kubernetes offering. All the key people on the team needed to rotate pager duty in case that managed service went down. We even had some of the top contributors to the Kubernetes project doing pager duty. There was a discussion about how they would feel about that. It turned out to be a non-issue because those talented individuals, the largest contributors, wanted to be part of the team. They wanted to see how those technologies were getting used. I often think that we create a culture where someone might decide to say, I don’t need to do this because I’m a star. If we start off with the context that we get the best solutions by working together, then the best people are going to want to work together on those solutions. I think we often artificially construct this issue about working with our best talent that really doesn’t exist. I would encourage you to think about building a set of values that talk about how teams working together always create better outcomes, so your best people are most likely to want to be part of those teams. Thanks. Talk to you again soon.

[To hear more of Jim’s views on culture and open leadership follow him on LinkedIn to see his video series, “An Open Conversation with Jim.”]

Zehra Karakılıç, Longitude fellow, Tilburg University:

Thank you, Jim, for sharing these amazing insights from your career path.

I think that working as a team is an excellent way of incorporating different talents and skills while having different perspectives, as well as having the opportunity to work with people from various fields and backgrounds. Not only is working together contributing to creative solutions, but it also encourages team members to be more motivated and create an atmosphere that inspires them to be persistent and ambitious. Especially when coming up with a fairly new idea, it is always important to have the insight of other people. There might be details one is missing when working alone, or is not being able to see the bigger picture of a problem. So, starting off as a team might not be a bad idea, hence it could even be the better option compared to working alone. Having different views on a project helps to think outside of the box, and find the missing piece to the solution. Besides, as Jim mentioned, the values gained from teamwork are definitely great experience especially for young people that want to broaden their perspective and make themselves more effective.