Very shortly before we started working on crowdSPRING in the summer of 2006, I read an article in BusinessWeek about Alex Zoghlin. Alex and I were classmates (and at one time, debate partners) at New Trier High School. In the interview, Alex said something that’s stuck with me. When asked what his primary role was at the various successful businesses he started, Alex said that his job “is, and always has been, to hire people who are significantly smarter than I am.”

The last 13 years (since the early days of commercial activity on the Internet) have shown that most technology start-ups fail. In fact, having smart people doesn’t guarantee success. But – a start-up cannot succeed without smart people. I believe this today more than ever. And I believe that this is the most important lesson anyone who wants to start a company (or who has already started a company) can learn.

Notice that I wrote surround yourself with smart people – not just hire smart people. What do I mean?

After we completed our initial market research in the Fall of 2006, we had sketched out a very rough idea of what we wanted to do with crowdSPRING. We found three people in our network and approached them with our very early plans. When we thought about the types of people with whom we could share our plans – we wanted people who’d question our every decision. We looked for the smartest people we knew because we needed a reality check. We needed to find skeptics – people who would not be afraid to tell us we would fail, and who would patiently explain HOW we would fail.

One of the three had founded and ran a very successful software company that was responsible for a substantial amount of innovation in games development for consoles and PCs. Another taught at a Top 2 MBA program in the United States and also had 17+ years of successful operating experience with a Fortune 500 company. The third owned and operated a very successful business.

I still remember the day we met with the MBA professor – we walked out of that meeting (this was early Fall 2006) feeling like we just went 10 rounds with Muhammad Ali. We could easily have folded then – in fact, that’s precisely what he suggested we do! But that meeting re-energized us. We spent the next 2 weeks researching, revising, re-revising, re-analyzing, and re-thinking. After 2 weeks, our ideas were crisper, stronger, more relevant, more refined, and smarter. We could not have done that without the pounding we took two weeks earlier.

We had the same experience with the other two people. After each meeting, we had to go back and deconstruct our thinking, review and rethink our plans, refocus our efforts, and improve what we were planning to do. And with each meeting, rather than become discouraged, we became crisper in our thinking, sharper in anticipating problems, and smarter about the future. All three people (and there were others too) pushed us hard to refine, rethink, re-research, and revise our plans.

We applied the same principles when building our team. We wanted to hire people who were significantly smarter than we were – people who would push us to be better and people from whom we could learn. We looked for people who were motivated to build something out of nothing, who were not afraid to fail, who were challenged by the fast-pace of a start-up, who were comfortable challenging our own thinking and assumptions, and who were comfortable challenging the status quo. We didn’t want people with a lot of attitude or those with unbearable personalities, and we’ve been very fortunate in that regard.

We weren’t looking for people with a strictly fixed skill set. In a start-up, there are few specialists – everyone is asked at one time or another to wear multiple hats (Mike and I take turns doing the dishes). We wanted people who had great skills in their core area, but who could also contribute on many other levels.

How do you know if someone who works for you is smarter than you? And even more importantly, how do you know if someone you are considering hiring is smarter than you?

There are a few telltale signs. During the interviews, focus on that person’s experience in prior jobs. For example: are they most proud that they recommended new ideas and solutions at those jobs, or most proud that they executed ideas and solutions recommended by others?

If you’ve already hired the person, ask yourself how often that person recommends great ideas that you didn’t think about first. Do they do this every day? Multiple times per day? Every week? Every month? You want to hire people that’ll bring great ideas to the table many times per day. Those are the types of people who will make your company better.

Now – there is an important distinction between smart people and intelligence. When I talk about smart people, I certainly include people who are intelligent. But mere intelligence – the ability to solve logic puzzles, for example – doesn’t mean that person is the right person for your team.

So what’s the difference? We looked for people with drive – those self-motivated to succeed. People who will not take failure as a defeat. People who will work hard to make sure that they succeed. People who will want to make everyone else better and smarter. These are rare traits – and not every highly intelligent person has them. Some people have them, while others don’t.

We’ve been very lucky to have built a great team in such a short amount of time. We’ve made several hiring mistakes along the way (which we’ve corrected by being disciplined and prompt – more on that later). By focusing on hiring smart people and creating an atmosphere that gives them every opportunity to contribute new ideas and solutions – we’ve given crowdSPRING a better chance to succeed and us a greater opportunity to learn. And that’s one of the reasons I love coming to work on Mondays.

A little while ago, I had a long talk with a good friend about leadership. She felt that she was not doing a good job leading the people working for her. She wondered whether she was really cut out to be a leader. She wondered whether she could truly lead if it meant having to coerce others into doing things, to manipulate her employees into working hard, and forcing people to listen to her.

Coerce? Manipulate? Force? For a minute, I thought my friend had taken lessons from a character is a Scott Adams comic strip.

Too many people are obsessed with titles, labels, and org charts. I’ve worked for such people. I’ve known and represented (as an attorney) such people – including many C-level executives at large corporations.

When Mike and I founded crowdSPRING, we committed to lead by example, not by title. We committed to apply the very best qualities we had seen in great leaders and to work hard in avoiding the very worst. We make plenty of mistakes and we’ll continue to do so. But we try our very best to show our team that true leadership is not about coercion, manipulation or force.

I recently read an outstanding book about organizational behavior and leadership – Tribal Leadership. The authors, management consultants from CultureSync, a management consulting firm specializing in cultural change, strategy and negotiation, studied 24,000 people at several dozen companies over a ten year period. They found that every organization is a tribe of 20 to 150 people, or a network of tribes, if the organization is large enough. They found that tribes are more powerful than teams, companies, or even CEOs. And they found a common theme: “the success of a company depends on its tribes, the strength of its tribes is determined by the tribal culture, and a thriving corporate culture can be established by an effective tribal leader.”

Immediately after I finished reading Tribal Leadership, I ordered multiple additional copies so that others at crowdSPRING could read it too. No non-fiction book has ever had such a profound impact on me.

Let me repeat: true leadership is not about coercion, manipulation or force. For far too long, people have followed management practices and principles defined decades ago. If you’ve seen the movie Office Space, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

Good leaders inspire people to work hard. Great leaders inspire people to do their absolute best. And in a start-up with very limited funds and small teams, it’s critical that people do their absolute best. Anything less is often economic suicide.

These are the thoughts I shared with my friend and some of the principles (there are many more) that guide us at crowdSPRING:

• Lead by example at all times. You’re not a true leader merely because of your title
• Never stop learning – do whatever it takes to become a better leader
• Use the right words. What you say as a leader always matters
• Appreciate differences. Use people’s differences as a source of strength for the entire team
• Motivate yourself. You cannot motivate others unless you motivate yourself
• Collaborate with your team to innovate instead of pushing ideas on them
• Empower people around you to succeed – give them responsibility and authority
• Treat others with compassion and respect. Don’t just tell them they are important. Show them.
• Promote a collaborative culture where everyone is a leader

Let me offer a few practical examples too – from our own experience at crowdSPRING. Many months ago, during a team meeting, I was frustrated, and took out my frustration on the person leading the meeting. My reaction was stupid. It was anything but leadership by example, much less good leadership. I ignored every principle I listed above. I talked to that person and apologized. And promised to myself not to do that again. Ever. What you say as a leader always matters.

So how do you avoid confrontations and especially situations when someone on the team is being confrontational or stubborn? Here’s what we’ve done. First – we try very hard to channel the confrontational and stubborn attitude of that person in a team discussion into a productive, constructive discussion about their own ideas or resistance to the ideas offered by others. Second – we talk privately to that person after the team discussion to tell them that we love their passion, their ideas and participation, and greatly value their input. And we also explain that how THEY react during a team discussion reflects on everyone. What THEY say always matters. What they do either fosters or detracts from a collaborative culture. We ask them to look at themselves as a leader and to appreciate the impact they could have on the entire team – both negative and positive.

We do our best to use every situation to help others succeed. We do our best to use every situation to help others become a better leader. And we ask only that those people in turn, follow these same principles. Help others to succeed. Help others to become a better leader. There is no magic to building great teams and organizations. It’s hard work and it takes the efforts of everyone.

The above principles apply to every person in an organization because true leaders are not necessarily CEOs – they can be anyone and everyone. And I firmly agree with the authors of Tribal Leadership that the ultimate goal is to build a tribe of tribal leaders. Companies like Apple and Google show how powerful such tribes can be. One day, we want to be such a tribe (not necessarily in size or revenue – solely in attitude) – and this is a goal that should be shared by all start-ups.