Last week’s issue: The Secret to Hitting Every Goal You Set

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This week we’re learning that every hire you make should upgrade your team’s capabilities, not just fill a vacant seat. The painful reality leaders struggle with is the pressure to hire fast when they should be hiring better. The urgency to close a gap often leads to compromising on talent, resulting in long-term drag and underperformance. Great leadership is an exercise in ruthless patience and an unyielding commitment to raising the average quality of the team with every single addition.

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One pile is uniform, high-quality, and structurally sound. The other is a mix of shapes and materials, some good, some cracked, some completely wrong.

You are building a skyscraper. Which pile do you choose?

And honestly? Most mediocre teams are simply the result of a series of "good enough" hires. We allow the short-term pain of a vacant headcount to override the long-term strategic need for excellence. When you hire someone who is merely adequate, you don't just get an adequate person; you lower the performance ceiling for everyone around them.

People don’t fail when they’re capable. Teams fail when the talent bar is set too low.

And that’s on us as leaders.

Leadership, at its core, is the job of the gatekeeper. You are the protector of the team's quality, standards, and future potential. You must be willing to endure the short-term pain of understaffing to secure the long-term leverage of a truly exceptional teammate.

If you’ve ever settled for a hire, the long-term results look like this:

Nothing is explicitly wrong with the person. Everything is just... slower, heavier, and more fragile.

And the irony? Most hiring mistakes aren't because of bad interviewing.

They’re a "Standard Gap."

Not malicious. Not dramatic. Just a failure of nerve to wait for the right person.

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Great leaders don’t walk into the week asking:

“How can I fill this open role in the next 30 days?”

They ask:

“Who is the person that will make everyone else on the team better?”

It’s a completely different lens. Instead of focusing on speed-to-hire, you focus on quality-of-hire.

Instead of managing vacancies, you manage potential. Instead of hiring for the job today, you hire for the job the person can grow into tomorrow.

Here’s what a low bar looks like in real life:

Your team can handle high workload. They struggle with low-quality co-workers.

Raise the bar, and everything changes.

Before extending an offer, ask yourself and your hiring panel two questions:

If you don't get a clear, enthusiastic Yes to both, wait.

Stop prioritising candidates who perfectly match the years of experience in your job description. Instead, focus on Rate of Learning and Curiosity. Ask behavioral questions that reveal how fast they adapted to new technology or challenges.

The person who learned $X$ in six months is often more valuable than the person who has done $Y$ for six years. You are hiring their potential energy.

Mandate that the hiring team discusses the candidate's performance within 48 hours of the final interview. Long gaps allow doubt and discomfort to fade, replacing critical thinking with scheduling convenience. Use a structured scorecard focused on non-negotiable attributes (e.g., Ownership, Judgment, Communication). No "gut feelings" allowed—only objective evidence from the interview.

People think successful teams are just lucky in who they find.

In reality, they are simply disciplined in who they let in.

The commitment to the high bar is invisible work; it's the vacancy you leave open for 60 more days. But you feel it in everything:

An exceptional team isn't an accident. It's engineered by patience and standard-setting.

That is leadership.

Ask yourself this week:

Your people don't need you to hire fast. They need you to hire the person who will make their day-to-day work better.

Most leaders interview resumes. Great leaders interview potential.

This week’s Premium Toolkit gives you the operating systems to do exactly that:

💡 1. The Bar-Raising Scorecard - A structured template for evaluating candidates against cultural traits (e.g., Candor, Judgment, Ownership) rather than just skills.

🧱 2. The Role-Defining Matrix - A framework that forces you to define what exceptional performance looks like 6 and 12 months after the hire.

⚡ 3. The "Potential vs. Experience" Interview Guide - A list of behavioural questions designed to uncover a candidate’s rate of learning and resilience.

📆 4. The Structured Rejection Email Templates - Professional and kind templates for telling "good enough" candidates No while protecting your company's reputation.

🔥 5. Case Study: How One Leader Hired 5 Key Roles with Zero Regret - A real example of a VP who resisted pressure and transformed their team's velocity by waiting for true A-Players.