The importance of creativity in technology

In addition to hiring, developing people’s abilities, and managing their careers in a structured way, for a technology company, it is essential to enable the engineering team to function as a high-performance team. Having the right, bright people assigned to projects that motivate them and align with their skills creates tremendous value for the organization. The challenge is that building and maintaining a team of exceptional people is a hard task, and it requires a savvy leader.

The presence of inspiring professionals in a team has quite an impact on other professionals and hiring them is always a good investment. First, there is always the possibility that such a person will design and implement a brilliant and innovative idea that revolutionizes the business, bringing huge savings and even giving rise to a new service or type of activity. These events might not happen often, but they do happen, and organizations need to make room for opportunities like these. 

Aside from having this potential for positive disruption, inspiring people act as aspirational role models who help establish the company’s culture.  As mentors, they work on developing new leaders within their teams and serve as magnets, attracting other talented employees, either because they are followed wherever they go or because they have good criteria for selecting future hires.

Talent requires freedom

Candido Portinari is considered one of the most important Brazilian painters of the 20th century and a leading figure in the neo-realism style of painting. When, in 1952, he was commissioned by the Brazilian government to paint the “War” and “Peace” panels that were to be gifted to the United Nations (UN) for the General Assembly headquarters in New York, no one said to him: “Paint red over there and black over here, make figures in such and such a way in this or that quadrant.” He was the artist, and whoever commissioned the work trusted his talent. 

Engineering professionals are similar to artists in many ways and are able to flourish when given the freedom and conditions to do so. It’s not enough to hire good people if they don’t have a certain level of independence and an environment that allows them to perform at their best. Everything flows more naturally when professionals are motivated and in tune with the company’s mission. 

It’s the technology leader’s role to make this cycle of talent and execution happen. The problem is that fostering the ideal work environment takes effort and, more than anything, money. It’s worth, however, investing as much as the company can in its top talent. 

10X professional

In engineering, there is the idea of the “10X professional”—a person who is so efficient that he or she can accomplish the work equivalent to that of ten average employees. When this happens, even an employee who is a costly resource can represent overall savings. And the effect keeps replicating itself because super-efficient employees attract other super-efficient employees, while mediocre employees tend to bring in mediocre employees. 

Many startups already have in their origins a handful of exceptional talents on their team. It’s more complicated, however, to be able to develop such talent within the company. That is why the fight for talent in Silicon Valley is so enormous. Everyone is always looking for outstanding people, the ones with high achievements on their resumes, since they are tried and tested professionals who will continue to produce a huge impact on the companies that are lucky enough to hire them.

Multipliers and diminishers

According to Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown’s concept, described in the book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter (Harper Business, 2010), multipliers in a company are those professionals who:

• Provide the conditions for their team to do their best work
• Let their employees learn from their mistakes
• Maintain just enough involvement to prevent disasters, instead of intervening at every stage

Multipliers see things from the company’s perspective and usually have a collaborative mindset, without acting in an exclusionary way: they involve other areas of the company, create efficient and sustainable processes, and bring in new talent. They end up getting the best out of the employees under their influence. 

They are the opposite of the so-called diminishers, characterized by their micro-management and focus on control and self-promotion. The technology market is filled with individualistic people who, having been treated as the smartest students in the room during their upbringing, often evolve into centralizing and controlling professionals. 

Depending on the situation and career stage, anyone can act as either a diminisher or a multiplier. Understanding when we are behaving in one way or the other, the reasons for our behavior, and what we can do to change course and be more effective is a daily exercise.

The technology market is filled with individualistic people who, having been treated as the smartest students, often evolve into centralizing and controlling professionals.