An inquisitive novice team member is sometimes better than hiring a new expert

We as leaders sometimes look at our existing team members as if they can’t scale to the level we expect them to become and as a general practice, we tend to move towards the market to hire a new domain expert and onboard him/her.

This could be because of many reasons-

a) Few past interactions with them led us to believe that it’s not their cup of tea.

b) He/She doesn’t have that level of depth to succeed in the role.

c) Who will handle the existing running business if we move him/her to another role.

In utter simple words, we as leaders are responsible for the above three, as we always have a delivery to be released into production and sometimes we don’t allow them to get into that depth.

Also, it's impractical to keep allowing every team member to work on that role and see if he/she fits in. In this way, we will hamper the business.

So, how do we solve it??

From my experience, I see 4 different types of people -

a) Resisting change and stuck to same work but diligent in it

They are pretty much in their comfort zone and would continue to remain in that zone itself. Learning new things is what they hate the most.

b) Lethargic

Hard Work is alien to them and all that matters is a peaceful life and unwillingness to work

c) Marketing Experts

They work, but sell more and believe in making connections and ideating in the meetings, but possess no skill in-depth and are far away from ground reality.

d) Inquisitive

They are working towards their assigned tasks, but have a hidden thirst to learn new things/experiment.

In my experience, I would like to first place my bet on the Inquisitive ones.

The inquisitive, in parallel, work on few other topics that interest him/her and handle the business tasks as well. They will connect with you sometimes to showcase their work or asking for a role change or bringing new ideas of implementation. They might be connecting with people in other teams and try to get some knowledge from them. We really need to identify them and give them the platform to rise.

An inquisitive team member will switch to another company in his quest to learn. So, it’s better to retain him.

Hiring a new expert from the market may/may not solve your problem as he may not like the environment/existing infra. He may/may not be aligned to you aswell, but an existing team member will always be more thankful to you for the opportunity you gave him.

In his interest to learn, he will go deeper into the domain and get expertise on it and since you gave him/her that opportunity, he will make sure to be more aligned with you.

So, far my success rates in accommodating role change for my team members have yielded good results.