Leadership
Why hiring people better than you is harder than it sounds
Everyone agrees with this and comparatively few do it. The obstacle is not recognizing the principle.
Published
The obstacle is not ego, exactly
It is closer to control. Someone better than you at something will do it differently, and differently is indistinguishable from wrongly until it has worked.
The discomfort is real and it is not vanity.
The interview problem
People instinctively rate candidates similar to themselves more highly, because similar reasoning is easier to evaluate.
Someone better in a domain you do not understand will be harder to assess, and that difficulty gets misread as a weaker candidate.
In the domain you are worst at, you are also worst at evaluating candidates. Those are the same weakness.
What to do about that
Have someone who does understand the domain in the process, even externally. Ask for concrete examples rather than assessing reasoning you are not equipped to judge.
What it requires afterwards
Letting them do it their way. Hiring an expert and then directing them is expensive theater.
It also means being visibly not the smartest person in the room, which some founders find harder in practice than in principle.
The signal it sends
A team notices immediately whether senior hires are empowered or decorative. It determines who else you can attract.
One over-managed senior hire makes the next one much harder to recruit.
Where it stops
Better at something, not better at everything. You still have to be able to evaluate the outcome and decide when to overrule.
Deference is not the goal. Judgment about when your judgment is not the relevant one is.