Jeff Moden (9/30/2013)
The phrase "maverick spirit" sometimes bothers me depending, of course, on how one defines the word "maverick". I absolutely love the "mavericks" that come up with different and, many times, better ways to do something. "Best practices" many times come about by some "maverick" testing for oolies. On the flip side of the coin, I absolutely hate "mavericks" that implement those things without discussion with the rest of the team or any practicle testing because they don't necessarily know the ramifications of their "improvement" as they also don't necessarily know the big picture.
You are using "maverick" there to describe two completely different things: someone willing to propose a different way of doing things rather than succumb to the herd's "knowledge" is a maverick; someone who goes ahead and does something different without first discussing it with the team because he knows he always knows best is also a maverick. That causes a problem with using that term as a guide to recruiting: you have one word that can mean either "the sort of person that we neeed on the team" or "an unemployable incompetent". Then there's the social fit issue, which is even more worrying when misused. I can imagine someone "educated" in the new social fit ideas describing the first person, who is willing to rock the boat when that's what is needed to recover from its being grounded, being labelled a misfit and not employable, while the second person is employable (according to HR guidlelines) because will never rock the boateven whether the reason for that is that he doesn't have the imagination to realise that it could go aground that he wouldn'be able to rock it though being too dim to pour piss out of a boot even given a detailed instruction manual including pictures. And it can be used to "justify" a sexist, racisist, homophobic, or religionist recruitment policy, which is not a pleasant thing.
Don't think that I'm saying social skills don't matter; some whose lack of social skills would disrupt the team is not suitable for the job.But what we are seeing is more and more misuse of the social fit concept to exclude people who do have the necessary social skills because they are not going to refrain from pointing out problems, or will want to have a reasonable amount of time to work and think without distraction, or will want to have someone they can talk problems through with, or will refuse to trim their resource estimates unless the task's functionality and quality characteristics are trimmed enough to justify the trimmed estimates, or because their skin is the wrong color, or because they are the wrong sex.
Tom