We have reached our scaling limit with legacy, organic hires and need to make our first outside leadership team hire, but I am terrified they will bring a slow, corporate playbook that kills our speed. How do we filter for this?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

To hire your first outside executive without ruining your culture, you must look past their resume and focus on their conative makeup and cultural alignment. Corporate executives often succeed because of the massive infrastructure supporting them, not because they know how to build from scratch. If you drop a corporate manager into an entrepreneurial environment, they will try to build safety by creating unnecessary bureaucracy and status management behaviors.

Start by mapping out the exact seat on your Accountability Chart before you look at a single candidate. Make sure you define the five core roles of the seat clearly. When you interview, test them against your core values to ensure they have the GWC, which means they Get it, Want it, and have the Capacity to do the work.

To ensure they can handle our fast pace, use the Kolbe A™ Index during the hiring process. Look for candidates who have a natural instinct for taking action without needing permission or massive corporate resources. You want someone with enough adaptability in their Follow Thru score to handle changing systems and enough Quick Start energy to handle uncertainty. During interviews, ask for real examples of when they had to build a process with zero budget or existing templates. If they cannot show a history of rapid experimentation, they will fail in your business.