Hiring and leading aren’t HR functions. Well, they shouldn’t be anyway. If you want a genuinely high-performing team, it can’t be about compliance: filling out the right forms, staying out of trouble, checking the boxes that keep you safe from a lawsuit. That’s the floor, not the goal.
Building and maintaining a high-performing team is critical to your bottom line, and it comes down to three basic parts: hire well, lead well, fire well.
Hire Well
Doing this well requires a good system. Here are four steps that will help you avoid the mistakes most businesses make when they hire.
Build an unconventional hiring team. Recruit at least 3 people, and as many as 10. Here’s a secret: not everyone on your hiring team needs to be on your payroll. In fact, including at least one outside voice often leads to better hiring outcomes. They just have to care about it. Customers, peer business owners, people who’ve watched you build this thing from the outside, they all count.
Get everyone on the same page about what you’re actually looking for. Build a success grid: the cultural components, the critical skills, and the personality traits that matter for this role, spelled out clearly enough that everyone on the hiring team is evaluating the same things.
Design and implement at least a four-step process, include an assignment or more and don’t let anyone skip a step. The steps you skip are usually the ones that would have told you the most.
Require every hiring team member to assess each component for each candidate, every time they engage with one. And don’t accept an assessment without a written statement of why they scored it the way they did. If they can’t explain their reasoning, it’s not an assessment, it’s a gut feeling wearing an assessment costume.
Lead Well
Again, a system is very helpful here.
Develop a clear set of responsibilities and expectations for each employee. This is what drives self-accountability. This isn’t a “job description.” It’s a clear list of responsibilities not tasks. When expectations are clear, your people know when they’re doing well and when they aren’t, without needing you to tell them every time.
Every six months, sit down with each employee and walk through those responsibilities together. Assess how it’s going, and again, put it in writing: why you assessed them the way you did, why they see it the way they do. The written part matters. It’s what turns a vague impression into something you can both actually talk about.
Get intentional about your culture. Identify the drivers and the mood you actually want, then infuse it into every process you run, including performance reviews and professional development. Culture isn’t the poster in the break room. It’s what your systems reward.
Fire Well (dun dun duun)
Yeah, I know. Firing people isn’t fun, and it never will be. But here’s what’s true: getting clear on the effect a toxic person is having on your team, and then acting once the ramifications are too much for the team to absorb, does something for everyone else who’s still there. It increases their trust in you. And that trust increases the whole team’s capacity to perform.
So while HR might be the one who processes the paperwork, the decision to let someone go isn’t an HR decision. It’s a leadership one, and it has to weigh fit for your culture just as heavily as performance.
Your Turn
A few questions worth sitting with:
Who’s actually on your hiring team right now? Is it just you, or people who genuinely understand what “great” looks like for your company?
If you asked each person on your team what’s expected of them and how they’re doing against it, could they answer without hesitating?
Is there someone on your team right now who you already know isn’t working out? What is staying quiet about it costing everyone else?
You don’t have to fix all three parts at once. Pick the one you’re furthest behind on and start there.
Leave a Reply