MARCH 2026: Issue 2
Properly Scaling Your Team
Before You Hire: The Questions That Predict Success
Hiring feels like progress, but often functions as relief.
When leaders experience overload, they look for another set of hands. That response is understandable, but it can skip the work of understanding what is actually breaking down:
What outputs are expected from this role?
Are those outputs clearly defined and understood?
Do current team members have the resources required to produce them?
Is the workflow structured in a way that supports consistent execution?
Are feedback and consequences reinforcing the right behaviors?
When these conditions are unclear, hiring introduces another variable into an already unstable system. In that case, new hires step into ambiguity. That means effort only increases, and results remain uneven.
When these conditions are clear, hiring becomes precise. The role is built around defined outputs. The environment supports performance. The new hire contributes faster and more reliably, and you hire with a better understanding of the person needed to be successful in the role.
Hiring should follow clarity, not compensate for its absence.
Kate Graham
Principal, Humaneering Performance
Why Most Companies Decide to Hire Too Fast and What to Do Instead
Rapid decisions to add new performers to a company’s roster are often driven by urgency: Deadlines approach. Clients increase. Internal friction rises. Quality drops.
Leaders often respond by adding headcount or they jump straight training.
In many cases, the true constraint is structural. Expectations live in conversation (or worse, in the managers head), rather than documentation. Who owns what is unclear. Someone needs a tool to finish the sequence, but it’s locked in a drawer, hidden behind a paywall, not yet completed due to a bottleneck in the process, or unfindable.
Adding a person to a flawed system distributes confusion into one new performer’s work life, and chances are, their onboarding is going to leave them no better off than if none had happened at all.
When leaders make decisions to solve nebulous problems, those decisions rarely solve the problem unless they stop to make sure they define the root cause(s). The next time you jump to recruiting, take a pause first to clarify outputs, document workflow, and define feedback loops.
You may still need to hire but at least you will be hiring smarter, with a clear picture of what is missing and the hole you actually need to fill. Slower hiring at the front end often accelerates results at the back end.
Tiny Tool: Three Pre-Hiring Must-Dos
Write down the outputs the new role must produce.
Define how those outputs will be measured in the first ninety days.
Confirm the manager has time allocated for structured onboarding and weekly feedback.
REFLECTION QUESTION
What am I hiring to solve?
Recommended Read
Designing for Behavior Change by Stephen Wendel
This book approaches design through the lens of behavioral economics and psychology. While it’s main focus is a very fine-tuned method for user-experience product design, it’s methods work equally well when designing a more performer-friendly workplace.
Welcome to Shifted! We want this to be as helpful and collaborative as it can. With that in mind, if you have any topics or issues you want covered, shoot us as email:
Use the Hiring Readiness checklist before Approving Your Next Role
The Hiring Readiness Checklist walks you through output definition, performance conditions, onboarding structure, and reinforcement planning. Hiring should increase system capability. This checklist ensures you build capacity instead of complexity.
