In typical 37signals fashion, the wisdom in these pages is edgy yet

Everybody works
With a small team, you need people who are going to do work, not delegate
work. Everyone's got to be producing. No one can be above the work.
That means you need to avoid hiring delegators, those people who love
telling others what to do. Delegators are dead weight for a small team. They
clog the pipes for others by coming up with busywork. And when they run
out of work to assign, they make up more--regardless of whether it needs to
be done.
Delegators love to pull people into meetings, too. In fact, meetings are a
delegator's best friend. That's where he gets to seem important. Meanwhile,
everyone else who attends is pulled away from getting real work done.

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Hire managers of one
Managers of one are people who come up with their own goals and execute
them. They don't need heavy direction. They don't need daily check-ins.
They do what a manager would do--set the tone, assign items, determine
what needs to get done, etc.--but they do it by themselves and for
themselves.
These people free you from oversight. They set their own direction.
When you leave them alone, they surprise you with how much they've
gotten done. They don't need a lot of hand-holding or supervision.
How can you spot these people? Look at their backgrounds. They have
set the tone for how they've worked at other jobs. They've run something on
their own or launched some kind of project.
You want someone who's capable of building something from scratch and
seeing it through. Finding these people frees the rest of your team to work
more and manage less.

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