You Finally Made the Right Hire. So Why Is the Team Still Drowning?
Six months ago, you brought on a new hire. And they are wonderful. Sharp, full of good ideas, the perfect culture fit, and a hard worker who genuinely cares about the future of your company. This person was exactly what the team needed.
For a few weeks there, you were sleeping through the night. Pouring your coffee in the morning and thinking excitedly to yourself about how things are looking up. In business development calls, you have a renewed sense of focus and drive.
Now six months have gone by, and reality has fully settled in.
The team as a whole is still missing deadlines, still misaligned to client expectations, and not delivering at the level you deeply believe they’re capable of reaching.
The new hire is still (objectively) solid. Six months in and they’re already emerging as a high performer.
So the devil and angel on your shoulders start talking to each other. Behind the scenes, you’re frustrated. Not with the new hire, but rather with yourself.
Why does this keep happening?
Am I the problem?
Is the team the problem?
Did I just look for the wrong things in the hiring process?
How do I get us to the point where we can deliver at our full potential?
Why is this so hard?
The Questions Nobody Asks
What if the new hire isn’t the right variable to be looking at in this situation?
Think about it. New hires inherit the existing systems, they alone cannot shift the systems and behavior of a company. So if the infrastructure they onboard into is one of chaos and misalignment, although they might introduce new ideas and best practices, they’re going to inherit the chaos and misalignment.
You could take the best seed and plant it into dead soil and it will never grow. You could travel the world buying the best and brightest seeds and no matter what, they won’t be able to grow in that dead soil. Because the seed isn’t the problem, it’s the environment (the soil) they’re placed in that’s the issue.
What This Looks Like In Real Companies
This is a systems issue, not a people issue. The issue is not you. It’s not the new hire. It’s not the veterans on the team. It’s the systems surrounding all of you.
In 11-50 person SaaS companies, one of the most commonly broken systems is client onboarding. When they were 0-10 people, they were experimenting and testing client onboarding workflows. Something clicked, and they grew rapidly. As they grew, the “onboarding best practices” just continued to live inside of client success manager or account managers heads. This led to inconsistencies between business development and the delivery teams, a new onboarding experience for every client, and disjointed delivery systems that directly impact retention and satisfaction.
In 11-50 person branding agencies, as the team grows, so do the handoffs. Whether you’re coordinating a handoff from business development → account management → strategists → creative → social → paid ads, those handoffs need to be tight. And the reality is, when you’re dealing with siloed information and systems, those handoffs only get messier and messier.
Where Things Are Actually Breaking Down
The real issue here lies in the operational risk to a company. We regularly uncover six figures worth of operational risk in companies only by examining:
Tribal knowledge
Tools that don’t talk to each other
Department silos
Operational debt
Undocumented processes
It’s difficult to see this in an 11-50 person company because everyone is still relatively “close to the business”. So what you see is more of the symptoms, which appear to be “people problems”:
Accountability
Attention
Attitudes
Change The Environment, Not The People
Before posting another job (we’ll help you get to that, we promise), direct some of your focus to the foundation the company is being built on.
We know, this is incredibly unsexy work. But it’s important and your greatest unlock to the sexy stuff.
If you bring another person into your current foundation, you only get more of the “current state” you’ve been living in. Your best bet right now is to change the environment your team is working within.
How does one do that?
Map out where the institutional knowledge lives: what’s documented vs what lives in your team’s head?
Identify all of the handoffs and understand which one’s carry the highest risk of dropping the ball
Build an operational foundation that allows your team to reach their full potential
This allows new hires to thrive and the veterans to final breathe easy again.
Don’t Find Out The Hard Way
Here’s the thing about patterns: they don’t just get better on their own.
Operational debt works exactly like financial debt. You can ignore your credit card balance and the sun will still rise tomorrow morning. The interest will compound quietly in the background until you’re up to your ears in debt. The same goes for operational debt. You can ignore it while it quietly compounds and all of a sudden you’re spending all of your energy on managing the debt instead of running the business.
Nobody has ever gone bankrupt suddenly and out of nowhere. They go bankrupt slowly, but the end is quick.
Every quarter you wait to seal these cracks, the tribal knowledge gets deeper, handoffs get messier, and you keep expensing new hires without being truly ready for them.
The next step is to understand where you’re exposed operationally. Doing this proactively saves you from finding out the hard way:
You lose a great client
You lose a high-performer
Your P&L has an extra six figures on it that seemingly came out of nowhere
We built a 5-minute quiz that asks the questions we used to ask in discovery calls. It’ll give you a high-level look at where your operational risk likely is.
Take the Operational Exposure Quiz →
It takes five minutes. What it shows you could save you months.
