Build a team
Once you know where you stand as a leader and what your role
is, then you can focus on the people surrounding you. Bettinger
says it’s vital to establish a strong team, and one of the keys to
doing that is balancing your strengths and weaknesses with those
around you. He suggests using an outside organization to help you
with that, as well. He used a large, global organization that
worked with hundreds of Fortune 500 CEOs to make sure he had
someone with experience helping him.
“It can help you identify areas of strength and areas that you
need to build out your team with certain personalities and skill
sets and capabilities so you have the most effective functioning
team possible,” he says.
Another key to assembling a good team is to take people with
different experiences.
“To the extent that you can, build a team and be surrounded by
a team of people that have different experiences in life and different environments they were in, whether it’s different businesses
or different geographies — just different life experiences,” he
says.
When people have different experiences, they will bring different views to their decision-making process. He says you also need
to have people who share the same core beliefs as you.
“If you have fundamental agreement on the core beliefs, there’s
lots of room for debate and differing views,” Bettinger says.
For example, at Schwab, everything centers around the fact that
team members want to be the advocate for their client. The belief
is that if you do right by the clients, they will choose to do more
business with you. If people don’t agree with this, they won’t be a
good fit. If they do, then he can sleep easy knowing he won’t
waste time simply trying to get people to buy in to a decision that
aligns with the organizational values.
“Talk about the philosophies that you have of leadership,”
Bettinger says. “Ask the other person about their philosophy of
leadership.”
He often asks people to talk about what they have viewed as
their greatest failures and successes in life. Doing so allows him
to learn more about their psyche.
When he’s interviewing for a senior team member, he also likes
to gain more insight into that person’s character. One way to do
that is by taking the person to lunch or dinner.
“It’s less of because of what they’re going to say to me, but I like
to see how they treat the waiter or waitress,” he says. “I know
how they’re going to react around me — they’re trying to get me
to hire them for a job. What I want to see is how they treat those
who maybe they view can do very little for them or they’ll never
interact with again. That gives me a glimpse into the character of
that person.”
