Healthcare: Are There Too Many Rebels On Your Team?

Staffing your healthcare startup team can be a challenge.

You need people who can work in an environment of creative chaos while at the same time building the foundation of inevitable control as the company grows and scales.

In addition, there are differences between good rebels and bad rebels and disruptive and disruptive doctors.

In a recent book, Francesca Gino argues the value of staffing an organisation with leaders and employees possessing what she calls “rebel talent.” She backs it up with extensive research, much of it her own.

Gino, the Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, builds her book around the “five core elements of rebel talent.” They are:

• Novelty (“Seeking out the new”)
• Curiosity (“Asking why, why, why")
• Perspective (The ability to “constantly broaden (one’s) view of the world and see it as others do”)
• Diversity (“The tendency to challenge predetermined social roles”)
• Authenticity (Remaining open and vulnerable in order to connect with others and learn from them")

Here are some tips on hiring, developing and promoting rebels on your team:

1. Clarify the expectations.
2. Give a clear job preview. Do you really want someone who will shake things up or do you really just want an operator and team player in rebel clothing. Are you being hired to help with strategy, execution or both? What will be your role in the process?
3. Don't say one thing and do another.
4. Be sure your culture can tolerate rebels in their midst, Will you really be comfortable telling truth to authority?
5. Mentor and coach bad rebels into becoming good rebels.

6. Create clear key performance metrics.

7. Practice radical candour in an environment of trust.

8. Here is a boomer's guide to teaching millennials.

9. Be sure your actions reflect the values you promised when you hired the rebel.

10. Fire fast if they become the problem instead of the solution.

Try not to make these rookie entrepreneur mindset mistakes.

Good rebels can be difficult to work with but you should be accommodating to their personalities and mindsets. Rebels without a cause and bad rebels,, thought, are just a pain.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Twitter@SoPEOfficial and Facebook.