Rule #9 : Hire People Smarter Than You

I have been compiling rules that I live by as a CEO. Many of these I picked up through the years and learned some through difficult real world lessons. From time to time I'm going to outline one of them to give you all a deeper insight to how I run a business.

Today's rule is number nine, Hire people who are smarter than you.

9.Hire people smarter than yourself:
A confident leader realizes that hiring people who are smarter than they are or better at certain tasks will bring even more success to the project and the leader gets just as much credit for bringing the talented personnel on in the first place. They may be smarter than you when it comes to the task at hand, but would they have been creative enough and brave enough to hire themselves if they were in your shoes?

I found myself CEO of a public company at age 25. My COO was a 52 years old lawyer and my CTO was a 35 year old [brilliant] engineer. I remember feeling threatened as all hell and really wishing they weren't around to point out my deficiencies. Out of the gate I am embarrassed to say I was looking for a reason to can them both. But, as the project went on, I was thanking my lucky stars to have them. lesson learned. Many leaders steer clear of anyone they think has skills in areas they are deficient. Some leaders are afraid to face the fact that they have flaws at all. That's when projects fall apart.

The few leaders that are not afraid to hire someone who's knowledge or creativity may match or exceed their own, are the leaders who succeed. I always give my people proper credit and always go to bat for them so they don't feel they have to try to outshine me to investors or superiors. This allows me to get the job done in the best way, and take credit for it too. After all I was the one that hired (or supported) them wasn't I? I also recognize leaders within my organization who are bold enough to give credit to their subordinates when credit is due. This behavior is rewarded and it should be.

Never be afraid to hire and give support to those who may be better than you at certain skills, as their leader you get as much credit for choosing them as they get for a job well done.

Thank You
Raymond Barton

Customer Service Failure

I have to say that I am very surprised with godaddy.com! having been a customer for years, I have always experienced great customer service. Well that has changed.

Today our websites went down. The message gave the impression that it was a problem with our account but after logging in to the account, there was no problem evident. My assumption was that the bank denied the charge as they sometimes do with hosting companies lately, but it all appeared fine. In fact, our most recent bill went through this morning at 10:30am!

We were told by customer service to wait two hours to "see if it goes back up." Now, I don't know about you, but I think it is absolutely incredible to ask a business to wait two hours to "see" if their site goes back up. Needless to say after four hours and five tech support guys, one of them finally knew enough to flip some switch and bring it back online. The CYA factor was running high too as he stuttered and struggled to come up with an answer that made it our fault, or at least made it not a result of incompetence.

What's worse is that I've seen this more and more lately with a lot of companies sending customer service overseas to India and Pakistan. it's absolutely painful to call Dell or Verizon anymore. Even a call to Kinkos this morning had me on voice-mail for over 20 minutes! Incredible!

I know as much as anyone that mistakes happen, and that's OK. But, when your customer service people take the easy out and guess, then lie about it, you have failed as a company.

Godaddy, Shame on you!

Raymond Barton