I’ve strived to create an environment of happy, productive people who are excited to show up to work in the morning (or afternoon, as appropriate!). I’ve found that this environment, while being extremely positive in its own right, also gives us a competitive advantage in recruiting. The following points are the most important takeaways that I’ve learned while heading up recruiting.

1. Only hire people who make others want to be around them.

We apply what we call the “Sunday test” to every candidate. If this person was alone in the office on a Sunday, would that make you more likely to come in just to hang out with him? We only make a hire if the answer is a strong yes. Not only should working with your coworkers be tolerable, it should be something you actively enjoy.

This principle is easy enough to espouse, but it took me a long time to become comfortable with sticking to it in practice. We have often needed to make a hiring decision on an otherwise great engineer who failed this test. And I sometimes have to remind myself that no matter how talented an engineer might be, if I know in my gut that our team would be less happy with this person on board, then it’s not worth it. Bringing someone on board who isn’t a good fit will only make it harder to hire other talented engineers in the future.

2. Each new hire should increase the team’s quality.

Every additional hire has the ability to slightly increase or decrease your team’s quality. By always pushing forward the quality, you can make a good team great. (See the Lake Wobegon strategy for a detailed discussion of this technique.)

Early in Stripe’s history, we ensured that each new hire had a skill set that was missing from our existing team. I brought my experience designing and running large-scale systems to the team; one of our subsequent employees had negotiated deals with all the major record labels. Now that we have about twenty people on staff and have covered most of our needed skill sets, the standard has shifted towards making sure the candidate can do some task better than anyone currently at Stripe.

3. Never make a hire simply for an immediate need.

As a fast-growing company, we often find ourselves with pain points that feel increasingly urgent. For example, after Stripe came out of beta, the company had to deal with skyrocketing support requests from users. I knew we had to hire fulltime support engineers, and it was extremely tempting to lower the bar. But if I had, our culture, happiness and team quality would have suffered. Ultimately, making short-term optimizations at the expense of long-term goals does more harm than good.

4. Take time to integrate new team members.

For a long time, I didn’t think we needed to do anything special to integrate new employees. But as we grew, I noticed that new hires were spending an increasing amount of time trying to figure out how our internal processes and structures worked. And even worse, I would often talk to a new hire and find that she had accumulated a slew of questions, and she wasn’t sure whom she should ask.

Now, when a new hire starts at Stripe, we put a lot of work into helping her acclimatize and become as happy, productive and effective as possible. From day one, she is assigned an experienced employee to serve as a mentor. We ensure that lots of team members spend time with her, even if they don’t work directly with her. We aid her in exploring the space of possible projects she could work on, as well as spinning her up on the skills and tools needed to do the job.

5. Be willing to let people go, but hate it when you do.

Occasionally, a hire doesn’t work out. Sometimes, the issue isn’t with the hire directly — it’s just a problem of fit with the rest of the company. In these cases, I’ve found that you need to summon the will to part ways. When we’ve done this, we’ve always felt much better about the long-term prospects of the company afterwards.

At the same time, a firing should never be regarded as a positive outcome. They are painful for everyone involved, and indicate a miscalculation made somewhere along the way. So whenever you let someone go, you should go back and determine how you could have avoided the situation in the first place.

6. Everyone gets a veto.

As the number of participants in the Stripe hiring process has grown, it’s become increasingly difficult to achieve unanimity on hiring decisions. However, we’ve been careful to preserve the principle that a single person’s strong objections are sufficient to result in not hiring a candidate. This forces us to make sure we’ve addressed all of the issues on the table, rather than simply sweeping one person’s criticisms under the rug. Additionally, we ensure that we don’t sacrifice the happiness of an existing team member for the sake of a potential new one.

We’ve worked hard to build the kind of team we’ve always wanted to work with, and I’ve been extremely happy with the results to date. We’re still learning and adjusting our principles with every additional hiring decision. But I’m convinced that building an amazing team takes discipline and strategy far beyond the ability to hire talent.

The good news about building a great team is that it’s really easy to determine if you’ve been successful. If you love working with the team you’ve built, then chances are other people will feel the same way.

Greg Brockman works on recruiting and infrastructure at Stripe, a San Francisco-based startup focused on online payments.

Image courtesy of Flicker user aka Kath.

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From The Go Game App’s site: “The Go Game App is a location-based game that’s part scavenger hunt, part mobile party and full-on fun. We’ve run over 5,000 street-level games since 2002 and now we’re bringing the party to the iPhone.”

Successful team building isn’t the result of just any game. We know from management research that the best team building helps the team members learn who knows what, who needs what information, and how to coordinate their efforts as a result of that knowledge. The closer the activity is to the team’s task, the better it is at building valuable team capabilities. Given the control you have with The Go Game App, you can create a game that supports your team building in an sensible, and fun, way.

For the intern example: Getting them out on the streets will let them learn who has the best background on the streets of San Francisco (valuable for location scouting). Learning to coordinate on the various missions helps with virtual work skills. Competition across teams can be a motivator.

Cities covered by The Go Game App:

• Chicago (Magnificent Mile and Millennium Park)
• NYC (West Village and Times Square)
• LA (Santa Monica and Hollywood)
• SF (Embarcadero, Fisherman’s Wharf, Mission and North Beach)
• San Jose (Downtown)
• Boston (Quincy Market area)
• DC (Chinatown)
• Denver (LoDo)
• Orlando (Lake Eola)
• Seattle (Pike Place)
• Atlanta (Midtown)
• Orlando (International Drive)
• Portland (Pearl District)
• Austin TX (6th Street)

This is an interesting example of the gamification of work. Give it a go and tell us how your teams did!

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Truth be told, not everyone is a leader. It’s just not meant for everyone. And that’s OK.

But more people are leaders than they realize. Leadership takes on many different faces; it’s just a question of understanding how you lead and why.

Then Ben offers 10 key skills you’ll need to succeed as a leader. We share them here, abridged:

1. Lead By Example. … One of the best ways to lead is by example – pitching in where needed, lending a helping hand, and making sure that the work you do is clearly understood by your team.
2. Passion. [This] doesn’t mean you have to be constantly cheery, it means you’ve got to believe in what you’re doing and what your company is doing.
3. Be Organized. … If you’re frazzled and messy, your team will be too. When you’re organized you’ll be much more productive and so will everyone else.
4. Delegate. A great leader needs to be able to delegate effectively. The key [in the words of 2 great minds]
   • “Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.” – George S. Patton.
   • “Delegating work works, provided the one delegating works, too.” – Robert Half
5. Take Ownership and Responsibility. Although you’ve just delegated work and truly given your team ownership, you also have to take ownership and responsibility at all times.
6. Communicate Effectively. Communicate to employees how their work matters in the bigger picture [and] communicate success … people need affirmation. Be precise. Insecure leaders will often ramble. Whether you’re giving praise, providing constructive criticism, or defining goals … figure out how much to say and in what order. Get to the point.
7. Be Brave and Honest. The project your team has worked on for 6 months just got shelved. Now what? You have to talk to someone about their lack of effort recently… Tell it like it is. Don’t sugarcoat, don’t obfuscate. Don’t be a jerk either. You have to learn how to present things to your team in an honest but balanced manner.
8. Great Listener. If all you want to do is talk, you’re not a leader…When you listen more, you can respond more effectively and get to the heart of things much faster.
9. Know Your People. You do have to know what makes them tick…Keep track of simple things: birthdays, marriages, children, etc. The more you know your people the more common ground you’re likely to find, the more you’ll be able to connect.
10. Be a Follower. Benjamin Disraeli said, “I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?”… Being a leader-follower means finding value in your team, getting inspired by your team, encouraging your team to communicate, brainstorm and be open.

You’ll definitely want to read Ben’s entire post. There much more great advice in it.

But remember, as Ben points out in his conclusion,

“Very few people are great leaders overnight. It takes time and practice. As long as you’re open about learning along the way and working with your team on leadership versus dictating to them, most people will be happy to go on the journey with you.”

Print out our summary and paste it to your wall. Or put it in your wallet. Or commit it to memory. (I have done just this.) Re-reading it periodically will help you keep tabs on your progress as a leader, as well as help you measure the quality of the “buy-in” you have from your staff at different stages. That “buy-in” is equally important; whether your team is “on the journey with you” will be a huge determinant of the ultimate success of your business — not merely your success as a leader.

In other words, if you find, through Ben’s test, that you’re not a good leader, that’s OK. But then find someone who is a good leader to head-up your company.

If you can do that, you’ll stand an equally good chance of being successful with your business. You don’t have to be the leader to be successful as a founder. You do need to know what good leadership is.

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