Hiring Someone Better Than Me at My Job

The first time someone folds a fitted sheet better than you, something small happens in your chest before your brain catches up. It passes fast enough that most people never examine it.

I hired someone into operations a few years back who was better at the job than I was inside the first week. Not close either. She saw the bottleneck in our onboarding process on day two that I'd been half-aware of for a year and never fixed. She fixed it by day four.

What I felt on that first day was not pride. It was something smaller and worse — a flicker of being replaceable, maybe a little exposed, like the thing I'd been quietly good at for years had a ceiling I hadn't noticed until someone walked straight through it. I didn't say anything. I didn't do anything dramatic either, no test, no pulling rank to remind anyone who was in charge. I just gave her the work and watched. That's the part I'm least sure about — whether I actually got past the feeling or just got busy enough that it stopped coming up. Those aren't the same thing and I don't fully know which one happened.

I'd been trying to hire people smarter than me for years before I knew there was a name for it — I just thought of it as not wanting to be the ceiling on my own team. Then I read Ogilvy's line about hiring people bigger than yourself and felt that specific annoyance you get when someone says out loud the thing you'd been circling without ever saying. It didn't teach me anything new. It just confirmed I wasn't wrong to want it, and didn't do much for the part where wanting it and feeling it are two different experiences.

I think the discomfort is supposed to happen. I think if it doesn't happen at all, you probably didn't hire someone actually better than you, you hired someone better than you're willing to admit. But I've never fully trusted my own read on that, because the ego doing the assessing is the same ego with something to lose.

If you've hired someone clearly better than you at your own job, did the feeling actually go away, or did you just stop checking for it?