In my essay about going it alone, I mentioned a strange quirk about the first dot com gold rush. It was called the “war for talent.” For those of you who weren’t in the business arena yet, it’s a strange thing to think about – a war for employees. It was McKinsey who first coined this phrase in 1997, and they actually meant it to extend beyond simply hiring the best people to your company. The main premise was to focus on the principles of attracting, developing and retaining the best leadership talent.

There was another phrase that fell out of that dot com period that had a similar ring to it, and you see it persisting to this day. “Rock stars.” The myth of the rock star CEO was one which was perpetrated on the VC funded companies by those holding the purse strings. It was believed that one rock star CEO could take a company from contender to champion.

Not to be outdone, or more likely not wanting to be left behind in what could be called a land grab for options and cash, line employees started referring to themselves as rock stars. Engineers started taking this meme to some strange extremes, and in fact began referring to themselves as ninjas. I always found that one a bit strange. Why would you willingly invite a shadow warrior, known not for their honor bur their ruthlessness and viciousness, into your company? An army of one, with little in the way of allegiances seems a strange thing to ask for when loading up on talent. I would prefer to fashion myself a Shogun looking for some good samurai rather than some stab-you-in-the-back-while-you-aren’t-looking ninjas. But I digress.

What is it about this notion of the best of the best being the only thing that will do? I would love to think I am the best of the best, but I know I am not. I learned one of the most important lessons about hiring very early in my career. I was told that I should always look to hire people smarter than me, give them the tools they need to succeed, support them, and get out of the way. Nothing about that said hire rock stars.

Team building and company achievement isn’t about the cult of personality. It’s a very rare company where they can make the claim that their CEO is the recipe for success. There’s a survivorship bias at work here, because I can all but guarantee there are readers right now saying “what about Steve Jobs?” What about him? What about Ken Lay from Enron? What about Sanjay Kumar from Computer Associates? What about Bernie Madoff? These were all “rock stars” and things at their companies went horribly, horribly wrong. I guess when people go to jail, people forget that these leaders were once lionized as rock stars. The public can be so fickle.

The second best lesson I have learned about building teams I take from a line from the movie “Miracle” about the 1980 US Olympic Hockey team. I don’t know if it was what he said in actuality, but in the movie, Coach Herb Brooks was asked about the team he had selected and was slightly admonished for not selecting some of the “best players.” He said “I’m not looking for the best players, I’m looking for the right ones.”

We’ve all seen this in all-star teams. No one knows how to play as part of a team because each of the individual players is the star on their own team. The US Olympic basketball team demonstrated this fact a couple of times in the Olympic tournament by simply not living up to the hype. The team wasn’t a team, but rather a collection of really, really good athletes.

When I set out to start IMSafer, I was concerned that I wasn’t going to be able to get the top talent I thought I would need to get the software built. Living in Houston, TX at the time, software talent is a bit thin compared to other tech hotbeds. Most of the guys who I regarded as the very best developers were in Seattle and Silicon Valley. It was pure luck that I hooked up with the guys with whom I founded the company. They were not the very, very best at what they did, but they were good. As a team, however, they were spectacular.

Each of the three technical founding team members brought very different skills to the table. At the time of founding, none of them would have been considered rock stars in the Valley. They hadn’t done anything of note. They had, however, already worked together for a couple of years. They also were subject matter experts who knew enough about their own stuff to be devastatingly effective, and had enough overlap with at least one other team member to pick up slack as needed, and provide thoughtful reviews.

I could not have had a better founding team. They were the right guys. They weren’t rock stars. I certainly wasn’t a rock star CEO. Far from it. In fact, during the term sheet negotiations with the tier 1 VCs, they all made it pretty clear that I was going to be shown the door when they put in their money. That’s fine with me. Owning a smaller percent of a huge success beats owning a huge percent of a large failure. Further, this tied back to the original lesson, which was to hire people smarter than you and get out of the way.

If you can’t trust the guy sitting in the cube next to you, you are in trouble. Hiring rock stars and ninjas is inviting trouble because they are likely to be glory seekers who are thinking about their own personal rewards, and less likely to be thinking about the team. Even worse for the team is the highly paid mercenary consultant. Those guys have no allegiances to the team or the company, they don’t care what breaks along the way, and ultimately drain spirit out of the company.

The moral? You don’t need to hire the best employees, just the right ones. Make sure that the early team complements each other well, and provides air cover for potential weak spots. No one person should make or break your team, but if you are the leader, your primary goal should be to elevate the game of those people around you.