Don't Let New Leaders Hire Their Own Team

Never let a new leader blindly hire their own team into the organization. You hear this a lot with really bad or poorly run companies. They go, Hey, we're gonna let that leader hire their own team. Nope, that's not how we operate.

When we use a structured interview process like top grading or WHO, that's the organization's way or discipline of hiring. That ensures we get A players. That ensures we don't get C players or B players into the company. When we have that 90% predictability that we're gonna get the right person in the right seat.

So it's very, very critical for us to be able to have a an early on conversation with that person to say, Hey, we would love to consider candidates that you bring to us, but keep in mind that they have to be able to get through the same interview process that you're going through right now. And that's part of the discipline that we maintain as an organization to ensure that we're helping you build an A-player team. At that point, we honestly, I hardly ever seen a problem with that. I can't even recall a situation where I did.

I suppose someone could say, I'm opting out at that point, 'cause I can't bring my own team members, but I honestly haven't seen it. It's usually a very straightforward conversation. And the risk we run, if we do that is we bring in people with poor behaviors, poor habits, poor routines that does not have their history vetted in the same way that we do with who are top grading. And guess what?

Suddenly we have a team that's not behaving, not performing in the same way that everyone else is on this A player organization that we're building. That creates a real misalignment inside the organization. So we don't just let a leader blindly come in, bring their own team. We make sure that they go through the same discipline process as everybody else.