How to Find the Most Capable People in your Organization! 🤯
Who are the most capable people in your larger team or organization? How can you effectively find them? I have one answer!
Hi everybody - here is a question for you: Do you know who the most capable people on your team are? The answer to this question is one of the most important things for you to figure out in order to be effective at your job. This is especially true if you join a new team or your team changes as part of a reorg. If you are a manager, all of this is doubly so.
The following video explains this further:
You can interact with this video directly on YouTube, Tiktok, Twitter / X, or LinkedIn. Now if you prefer reading, I have summarized the video in the following sections.
A Foolproof Approach
In answering this question on how to find the most capable person in your organization, the biggest mistake many people make is this. They automatically assume that the individuals with the right titles, the ones who are the loudest, or the ones who self-nominate themselves as the defacto experts are the people to turn to.
Modifying a visual from the earlier Career Growth Secrets article, this mistake can be visualized as follows:
In some cases, this may actually be true. I wouldn’t automatically dismiss an obvious answer. Also, most capable has many dimensions. Someone may be very capable at product strategy or execution or politics, but if your measure for most capable is something different, you may miss the right people for the wrong reasons.
Putting such cases aside, most of the time, you will have to do some digging on your own to find the most capable people in an organization. An approach that I use that has worked well is the following.
What particular skill or skills are you trying to find the most capable person for? Let’s say that, for this example, you want to find the person who has the best insights about the product and how to improve it.
Who does your team actually build things for? Who are your customers?
Who in your team spends the most time interacting with your customers? This is going to vary by team, company, and product. For some of you, it might be the sales team. It could be support engineers. It could be developer relations. It could be the PM org.
Let’s say that it is the sales team that spends the most time interacting with your customers. Go to them and ask them who you should talk to learn more about the product and how to improve it
The answers you’ll get will usually result in you seeing a pattern where one or two names will keep coming up:
The names they give are very likely the individuals you are looking for or just one degree separated from there
Once you identify this individual or individuals, you can be fairly confident that these people will be an invaluable resource in helping you better understand what your team builds and how that can be improved. There is also a bonus angle here.
If you are in a position where you need to build out a team to deliver something, if you can recruit these individuals to join your effort, then you’ve significantly increased your chances of success.
Till Next Time
I hope you found this quick tidbit on how to be more successful in your career helpful.
As always, I like to hear from you on what you like, don’t like, and/or want from Santa. To discuss this further or to contact me, feel free to continue the conversation on my Twitter / X post on this or on the forums.
Cheers,
Kirupa 😀