Changes in market dynamics are
influencing the way we look at the pool
of potential candidates; here’s what it
takes to build a rockstar team today.
I completely understand that this is an extremely subjective matter and to
quote Paul Simon: “one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor”. What’s a rockstar
anyway? Building a high performance team dedicated to doing genome
sequence research is most likely quite different than putting together eleven
soccer players to win the World Cup or a hiring few hundred technology spe-
cialists to help power your company to achieve its business objectives, right?
I don’t think so. Yes, of course there are nuances of each of those specific areas.
Of course the skills and expectations will vary between all of the above but
they all have ONE thing in common. THE MISSION. You can not build a rock-
star team without the mission, the end goal, the Big Hairy Audacious Goal, the
light at the end of the tunnel, whatever else you want to call it. Every team of
rockstars need to strive towards something, and that something is not to
punch the clock but rather to achieve the mission. The missions can vary from
putting a man on the moon, to developing a new drug to cure cancer, to build-
ing a new service on AWS. The mission is also not a task or a body of work but
rather the objective and the relentless focus on getting there in the best way
possible.
The mission is just a start and a few more ingredients are required to put
together a rockstar team. Here is my list of top 5 items that are absolutely nec-
essary for this recipe of success:
1. The mission
2. The right talent
3. Roles and responsibilities
4. Motivation
5. Keeping the score
Let’s discuss each one of these ingredients in more detail.
SPRING 2018 | THE DOPPLER | 11