We’ve done a lot of hiring at Highland over the past year, and it’s been a reminder of a very simple truth: interviewing is hard!
Trying to gauge in one hour whether you want to spend the next 1,000+ hours working with someone is incredibly difficult. It’s been a process for the Highland team to figure out what it is that we look for in the people that we want working with us. We’ve developed an atmosphere of vulnerability and acceptance, and are intentionally becoming more diverse. How do we keep that culture while we continue to build on our values in ways we can’t currently predict? How do we hire someone who encapsulates our future as much as our present?
There is one quality that I believe makes all the difference between a hire that will be a long-term asset and one who will be a long-term problem. Communication, competency and culture are all important, but they are meaningless without optimism.
Optimism isn’t what you think it is.
When I express the importance of optimism I often find that people have bad associations with the word. This puzzled me, until I realized that often our understandings of the word “optimism” differ. So let’s figure out exactly what the word means.
definitely worth watching), has done research that shows that an optimistic outlook (he uses the word “positive”) trumps every other talent when it comes to business results. He says that, “Your brain at positive performs significantly better than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed…[and] every single business outcome improves.” And he has the stats to back that up.
The impact of an optimistic person gets even more powerful in a team environment. If the nature of optimism is harmony with the universe, it is natural that harmony within a team will follow. Project Aristotle, an initiative at Google that made an exhaustive study of what made effective teams, determined that “psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work.”
