Chad Silverstein learned from a colleague named Chet to hire people opposite to him, candidates who challenge his views and bring different thinking. He emphasizes embracing diverse beliefs and thought styles to build healthy culture while knowing when to defend core direction.
Chapters
I think when you are a strong leader and you've gotten to a position where you have the power of authority, or you're in a place where you can make decisions that will guide the direction of your team or your product or your service, that there is real responsibility in that. And if you're really good at what you do, then you don't need more of the you. So one of the disciplines that early on, Chet would drive into me and would help me with when we would interview people for new positions, especially team leaders or any type of leadership role, was to make sure they were like, the opposite of me. Say, you know, he liked the challenge. He liked the. Maybe the, you know, the awkward things that I picked up on in the interview, but he liked it because he believed in the person. They were believable, and they were different than me, and he wanted people to come in and challenge me, and he was afraid that people would be too scared to do that. And so he liked anyone that would challenge me. He liked anyone that had a different thought that could help be creative in a different way. And he knew that that's what I needed. And I think that was a powerful nuance that I learned early on, was you're always looking for great people to join your team. You want them to fill the responsibilities, their roles, and basically whatever the expectations are for the job. But there's something to be said about the synergy and the integration of teammates and thinking about it from that perspective as a leader, to build a healthy culture and to embrace diversity in the way that people believe and think. And I think that is a nuance, and it's a powerful one. You have to embrace the differences, let them in, and then you also have to be able to know when to fight for your highway.
