Selecting Your Project Team
The members of your Project Team are, of course, important stakeholders in any project. They have a high influence on the outcome of the project, and their careers, bonus payments, and status can depend upon a successful outcome of the project.
So how do you identify and choose the ‘best’ people for your team? I’ll bet you were thinking that you would always go for the highly competent person over a likable person of lesser skills? Well, think again. In a study published in July of 2005 in the Harvard Business Review entitled, “Fool vs. Jerk: Whom Would You Hire”, the article describes four different types of colleagues:
1) The Competent Jerk - Who knows a lot but is unpleasant to deal with;
2) The Loveable Fool - Doesn’t know much but is likable and a delight to be around;
3) The Loveable Star - The best combination of likability and competence; and
4) The Incompetent Jerk -The unpleasant and useless combination.
Unsurprisingly, the research showed, everybody wanted to work with the lovable star, and nobody wanted to work with the incompetent jerk. Things got a lot more interesting, though, when people faced the choice between competent jerks and lovable fools:
“We found that if someone is strongly disliked, it’s almost irrelevant whether or not she is competent; people won’t want to work with her anyway. By contrast, if someone is liked, his colleagues will seek out every little bit of competence he has to offer. And this tendency didn’t exist only in extreme cases; it was true across the board. Generally speaking, a little extra likability goes a longer way than a little extra competence in making someone desirable to work with. […]”
So there you have it. Likable but less competent people are preferred team members over ‘jerks’, who generally have a repulsive personality and would presumably drag your entire team down with them.
This effect was also studied recently during the 2007 annual Oxford vs Cambridge Boat Race in England, as reported in The Economist. Team work is essential to winning a boat-race, and the Cambridge crew (who won) were being observed by Mr. Mark de Rond, a management theorist from Cambridge’s Judge Business School, to see how each member of the team interacted with their peers.
The lesson: Teams that like each other also seem to work better together.