See Who's Actually Good and Build an Environment Where They Can Perform

You hire people you think are great performers. Their performance turns out average.

Usually it’s one of three things: You didn’t assess deeply enough and hired someone who sounds skilled but isn’t. You’re controlling instead of trusting. Or you’re not giving them real problems or real people to work with.

Most leaders fix none of these, then blame “culture” or “the market for talent.”

The Assessment Problem

The first challenge is learning to see the difference between someone who knows concepts and someone who has actual competence.

I made this mistake hiring an engineering manager. He knew the theory—had clearly read books, listened to podcasts, could articulate frameworks for human growth, communication clarity, how to handle difficult conversations about performance. In interviews, he sounded exactly like what we needed.

The problem was he’d never actually done any of it. Never grown someone from junior to senior. Never had to deliver truly difficult feedback. Never dismissed someone who wasn’t working out. The gap between knowing the theory and having lived through the messy reality of actually doing it turned out to be enormous.

My assessment process had failed. I’d evaluated his knowledge of concepts rather than his experience navigating the actual situations where those concepts matter.

I’ve also watched this play out with promotions. Skilled contributors promoted to roles in domains where they weren’t skilled yet, which can work if you build the right support structure around them. If they know the gap exists, if they have access to senior high performers in that domain to learn from, if there’s a clear plan for how they’ll develop the missing skills.

What I observed instead: promotions announced without any of that. No plan, no feedback structure, no skilled coworkers to learn from. Just an assumption that because someone was great at their previous role, they’d figure out the new one. Most didn’t, because you can’t figure out what you haven’t experienced when there’s no one around who has.

The Control Problem

Even when you correctly assess someone’s competence, you can still kill their performance by how you manage them.

I’ve watched leaders who constantly need to control everything drive their best people away or down to mediocre performance. They want reports, metrics, dashboards, processes, playbooks, blueprints… endless artifacts that feed what I eventually recognized as a need for “knowledge and control” rather than a need to actually help performance.

I did this myself with one of the best Android engineers I’ve ever worked with. I wasted both our time having him explain his work, justify his decisions, keep me informed of every detail. His performance was fine. Not exceptional, just fine.

Eventually I stopped. I gave him challenging problems and got out of his way. Stopped asking for reports about what he was doing. Started trusting that he knew how to do his work better than I could evaluate it.

His performance exploded.

The trust diagnostic is straightforward: if you can’t trust someone on your team, you’re dealing with either a hiring mistake or a relationship issue. Most of the time, when I’ve seen this play out, it’s a relationship issue caused by the leader’s need for control rather than the person’s lack of competence.

Fix the root cause. If it’s a hiring mistake, address that. If it’s your need for control creating the inability to trust, address that instead. Don’t add more oversight to compensate for your discomfort.

The Substance Problem

Even when you hire well and trust appropriately, great performers will leave if you’re not giving them substance to work with. Not mission statements or vision documents. Actual substance in the form of problems and people.

I’ve seen great engineers leave companies, not for money or titles, but because of the lack of interesting problems to solve or interesting people to work with.

If you hire a great engineer and their only variety is figuring out how to make CRUD app architecture slightly more sophisticated or render JSON on the screen more efficiently (cause they have nothing else to think about), you’re using maybe 10% of their potential. Some will leave. Some will stay and plateau. Either way, you’re wasting what you hired them for.

Great performers may tolerate less challenging work if they’re surrounded by other high performers they can learn from.

A coffee conversation about CRUD architecture with other high performers can be more valuable to them than exciting work with a mediocre team. They need people who challenge them, who they can learn from, who make them better just by being around them.

That’s what I mean by substance. It’s not your beautifully written mission or your inspiring all-hands presentations. It’s who they get to work with and what problems they’re allowed to solve. If you’re feeding them vision statements or trivial tasks instead of giving them real challenges and real teammates, you’re asking them to stay motivated by slogans alone. It doesn’t work.

Why High-Performing Teams Are Rare

High-performing teams are rare, not because great people are rare (they are but not as much rare). They’re rare because most leaders fail at one or more of these three things.

They hire for how someone sounds in conversations rather than what they’ve actually done. They control instead of trusting because they can’t diagnose whether their discomfort comes from a hiring mistake or their own need for certainty. They provide mission statements and call it purpose when what people actually need is challenging problems and real teammates to work with.

Each of these requires work that’s easier to skip than to do. Assessment work. Relationship work. Environment work.

Most leaders skip at least one. Many skip all three. Then they wonder why they can’t build the teams they want and blame everything except the work they refused to do.