Building A Team That’s Out of This World

Imagine this: you sign up to spend an entire year in a small shelter, only going outdoors in a space suit. In Hawaii. On a volcano. With five strangers. As someone who helps with recruiting, the importance of choosing those six people carefully was pretty apparent, and something I loved understanding more with each episode. But it’s no small task—how do you engineer a family? A group of people who will have each other’s backs? Who won’t rip each other’s heads off before 365 days are up?

“We’ve been choosing astronauts by looking for the best individuals. The one’s with the right stuff. But when we go to Mars, the challenge won’t just be finding one or two exceptional individuals. It’ll be finding a group of people who can become a family. Who can trust each other no matter what. Who can walk together in to that cold, strange Martian landscape. Because ultimately, that’s what we’re talking about here. It’s putting on the space suits and opening the hatch and venturing into the unknown.”

The work we do at Black Sheep is a lot like that unknown—new clients with wild ideas and loads of potential. A million different paths we could take, each with a million different outcomes. And so, just like the astronauts, we have to start somewhere. And that somewhere is our team—the group of brains and personalities that will create meaningful brands and campaigns from nothing. 

We do this by building a family. How?

At the start, we use values to evaluate people during the hiring process, trying to understand how someone will fit in with our team. If we all share the same desire for how work should feel, we can still have diversity of thought and different ideas along the way. Values help us all be different and alike at the same time.

And as we go on, we constantly engage our team to stay true to a meaningful shared purpose, because values aren’t just words that are important to our company’s work. They drive our actions.

And hopefully, that creates a cohesive team of people that embraces shared purpose and finds success in the end. After all, that’s all you can hope for when searching for people to work together. 

I’m happy with the team we built. Like the members of HI-SEAS who lived on “Mars” together for a full year, we’ve had our ups and downs—but we always manage to get through it and produce something we’re proud of. The team I’ve helped develop from the ground up has transformed into a mismatched group of creatives and thinkers that work together to make magic. With the determination and mindsets our group has, I think we could make it on Mars—for real.

(Want to know what our family is like? Good news! We’re hiring.)