Make do with the people you have initially but clear out mediocre employees as you grow

By | People

(Excerpt from Whatever It Takes by Stephen Schwarzman)

Even when you are small, though, and your resources most constrained, finding the right people is the most important thing you can do. You typically won’t have access to the best, who are working elsewhere at much higher compensation levels. You have to make do with the people you get. That means, at a minimum, you must reduce your criteria to a simple question: Does this person have the same zealous commitment to the mission of this business as you do?

When Phil Knight was building Nike, he hired other distance runners to work with him because he knew that whatever they lacked in terms of business knowledge, they made up for in stamina. They would never give up. They would take the pain and make it to the end of the race despite the difficulties.

When you start a company, you are usually happy to find anyone of quality willing to go on the journey with you. But as you grow, you realize that some people are like wide receivers in football with hands of stone. You throw to them, and the ball just bounces off them. Others have hands like glue. As a decent person you think your role is to coax the bad ones along, to find workarounds. As employees, these are 6s and 7s out of 10. If you keep them, you will end up with a dysfunctional company, where you do all the work, staying up all night with the few people who can make it happen.

You have two options: either run a middling company going nowhere or clear out the mediocrity you created so you can grow. If you are ambitious, you have to fill your company with 9s and 10s, and give them the difficult tasks to do.

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