Photo by Jan van der Wolf.
“I love your whole team. They are so great to work with.” Minor wistful sigh. “You’re lucky. We just need to find our insert-name-of-Raw-Signal-Group-team-member.”
This happens a lot. Like, a lot, a lot. And there is no greater compliment than everyone who comes into contact with your team wanting to hire them or someone like them. Truly. Our team rocks and our greatest wish is for everyone to have a team that rocks and for them to do great work together.
Societal norms dictate that when someone says something nice about you, you say thank you. It takes effort. If you are a person who was socially conditioned to respond to “I like your outfit” with “It’s a million years old” then you already know. Getting this right is surprisingly hard. But, with practice, we’ve gotten better at saying, “thank you, we’ll tell them you said so.”
And for most compliments, in most situations, that’s enough. Someone is saying something nice. Say thank you. Don’t be a weirdo. But the specific issue of people complimenting our team in this way is that it’s very difficult to stop there. Because yes, we’re lucky to work with a great team. We are full-to-bursting with gratitude that anyone would choose to spend so many of their waking hours, alongside us, working to make work better.
So thank you for noticing that our team rocks. We agree. And also, you’ve stumbled into a common attribution error conflating luck and skill. In actual fact, luck is a very small part of the very big story of how you build great teams.
When every problem looks like a hiring problem
Earlier this month, we were hanging out with a ton of startup founders. This is one of our happy places. Picture a room full of leaders who are working hard to build great teams and who genuinely feel the weight of every hire. This is not to say the 200th person to join your org doesn’t have profound impact. They do. But these were early-stage folks. Often cofounders looking to hire their first non-founder role, where the new person will be either a quarter or a third of the team. Putting aside the day-to-day responsibilities for a moment, the potential for culture swing at this stage is massive.
In every discussion, the founders struggled…
We need to find the right person for this role. We’ve tried to hire for this before but the person wasn’t a good fit. So we are looking again and need to make sure we get it right this time. How do we get someone super-senior so we won’t have to tell them what to do all the time?
Ah, the unicorn hire. A startup tale as old as time. The idea that once you find the exact right person, everything will come together. And until that point, you have blanket permission to fumble because you don’t have the right team in place. It’s a neat trick to have a person who hasn’t even started yet act as a scapegoat for all the places the org is falling short. Sky-high expectations, zero appetite for risk. No pressure (har har).
We understand the appeal of a perfect hire that requires no direction and just knows what to do in every situation. The appeal is that you don’t have to manage. We get this. Management is a lot of work. It takes effort. And if you don’t have that skill set (yet!), or you don’t even know what the word means (yet!), you have a limited set of tools you can deploy to get a high-performing team.
To make matters worse, the only person who can succeed here is someone doing exactly the work they’ve done before. This means you’re looking at a hard search and an even harder sell. Most people don’t deliberately choose stagnation. A position where there’s no stretch and every day is a replay of problems they’ve solved before? This isn’t a compelling pitch for even a mildly ambitious person.
Rather than sit with this discomfort, many leaders will return to the slot machine. And hope they get luckier the next time around. They pride themselves on hiring fast. And firing fast. And they find themselves doing an awful lot of both.
Hire fast, fire fast, fail to learn, repeat
On the one hand, there’s A good rule for management advice is that the more it sounds like something Andrew Tate would say, the more likely it is to be bullshit. Not because there aren’t times when you need to hire a team quickly. Not because there aren’t valid reasons in an organization to fire someone on the spot. But because, empirically, the people who lead with this advice are often red-flagging themselves. In practice, “hire fast, fire fast” typically translates to “hire recklessly. Fire capriciously. Utterly fumble the act of management for those who remain, all the while complaining that you’re surrounded by incompetence.”
The conceptual flaw with this advice, with so much hiring advice honestly, is the way it tunnels a fixed mindset into your org. If you look for it, you’ll see it everywhere. Advice that sort of says, without saying it directly, “When it comes to your org, there are worthy and unworthy people in the world. Or at least good and bad fits. Circles and squares. That worthiness is intrinsic to who they are, and immutable. Your job as a manager is to identify them through the hiring process. And if you get unlucky and hire the wrong type, you should fire them quickly.” The people who like puzzle theory like it a lot.
But this makes hiring carry so much. It asks hiring, which for most roles involves something like 5-10 hours of contact surface between candidate and organization, to scrutinize and predict everything about how the next 10,000 hours are gonna go. Like the die is already cast and your job as a manager is just to have a lucky moment and pick the right unicorn from the catalog.
No facts support this approach, by the way. It’s not what the research says about building thriving teams. Or psychological safety. It doesn’t make room for the idea that the org’s needs will change over time, or that your people will change, too. The thing it gets most deeply wrong is the way it ignores operating context. Sit with it for a minute and it’s obvious — the same candidate will have vastly different impacts in a well-managed organization than they will in a chaotic, directionless dumpster fire. Yes, even if you write “must thrive in fast-paced environment” in the job spec.
Bosses have lots of comforting stories about why it’s okay to put this all on the candidate. Maybe if they were more adaptable, more high agency, they would have succeeded. Maybe real builders don’t need to have everything spoon-fed to them. Like, shit, maybe you haven’t seen your manager in six months. We’ve both been there. But none of it lets you off the hook.
You should want better for your team
A decade of working with bosses has taught us that very few leaders get into senior roles without collecting a whole pantry of management stories. Jars labelled “absentee boss,” and “new priorities every Monday,” and “the one who yelled.” Whole, dusty cases of “nice enough but basically ineffective” shoved into a corner. And, if you’re lucky, there are a couple of shinier shelves in there, too. Maybe you lucked into a “taught me everything I know,” but honestly even “got great work out of me,” or “had my back when it mattered” are pretty solid.
In each of those contexts, though, you were still you. When it was impossible to get anything done and every day felt like a guessing game about how you were doing and whether your work even mattered. And when doing the best work of your life, alongside a team that was doing the same. People change and grow and adapt, for sure, but we don’t think it’s very controversial to say that the team you’re a part of matters a great deal. The magnitude of the difference there — the difference between you at your best, and you struggling to function — is not explained by a hiring process alone.
And it won’t be for your team, either.
So by all means, run a good hiring process. But if you find yourself hiring unicorns fast and then firing them in search of better unicorns, you’re focused on the wrong problem. You hire a person once, you manage them every day. An easy litmus test is that, directionally, you should be investing at least 10x more in management than you do in hiring.
That candidate who didn’t work out and wasn’t the right fit. What was their onboarding like? Did the org have clear goals? Were those goals communicated to the team? Did the person understand the link between those goals and their work? Did they know how that work was being measured? And when the work fell short, did anyone ever say that out loud? Did they know there was a problem early enough that the issue could have been resolved?
Every single person who is strong in their role. Every single one. That is one part them bringing their own skill and expertise to bear. And that is also one part a whole org or an individual boss creating the conditions for that person to do great work. It’s not that hiring doesn’t matter. It’s not that luck isn’t a factor. It’s just that management (you knew where we were going with this) matters much, much more.
— Melissa & Johnathan
