beware the credentialed floater

Sometimes there’s a talented experienced person you think will enrich your team just by being around. Their credentials or record or perspective compel you. You want the recipe of your team to include this ingredient. Talent density will increase once they join.

The problem is you don’t have an open role that’s a clear and good fit for them. You have the budget to bring them on but not the bubble in the org chart.

One approach is to make this person a floater. They’re not bound to a particular team or goal. You just want them in the soup, hoping they enrich and brighten and thicken it.

Careful, chef. You can create a confusing mess you have to spend expensive time to clean up later.

Your body needs fat to absorb certain vitamins. The vitamin has to dissolve in something you can digest - otherwise it just runs through you and doesn’t nourish you / strengthen you.

What I’ve seen most often is floaters seeping into and out of an organization like unbound vitamins. The team doesn’t get the benefit of their brilliance. And the floater feels shiftless and superfluous. Time, money, and opportunity are all lost along the way.

To avoid this, put your floater on the hook for something and make them to accountable to someone (or a team of someones). If they’re good enough to hire as a floater, they have a high level of agency and strong work ethic so you don’t need to micromanage them. But they should be brought in to Do a Job or Deliver a Result, even if that job only accounts for a fraction of their time at the start. This might feel arbitrary and artificial, to you and the floater. It’s ok to acknowledge that.

Assigning this will help you explain their place and impact to the rest of the team. It will give the floater a chance to prove their mettle and a sense of purpose. And it sets a floor for what you can get out of the floater - even if you decide this isn’t a long term arrangement, you’ve gotten this job done through their efforts.

-eric