You hire someone with an incredible resume. They’ve worked at impressive companies, have years of experience, and have seemingly accomplished a lot. So you’re very excited for them to join your firm, transform it using their skill set, and take it to the next level.
Then, some time in, you check in, wondering where the results are. They seem to be attending all the meetings, having endless conversations, but you haven’t felt any tangible changes.
You ask and get some variation of “The things are in motion!” or “We’re making a lot of progress.” What things and what progress exactly? It remains unclear.
If the situation sounds familiar, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you may have ended up with a passenger: someone who sends emails, calls meetings, is always “putting pieces in place,” but is never valuable in the long term.
Activity isn’t the same thing as impact. And there’s a difference between effort and results.
Plenty of people have spent years at prestigious companies and know how to market themselves and make it appear like they can do valuable work, when in reality, all they excel at is blending into the office furniture.
The longer you allow that ambiguity to exist, the harder it becomes to determine whether you hired the right person. That’s why you should start testing people early.
Yes, new team members need onboarding. They need to learn about the business, understand your systems, meet the team, and get familiar with how you operate. But you still shouldn’t wait until 90 or 100 days to determine if they’re the right fit for your company. You should start expecting results in month one.
One of the best ways to do that is by giving someone a KPI. Not ask them to “develop a strategy” or “explore opportunities,” but actually provide a tangible, measurable progress report.
Start with a baseline result of a specific metric: client referral rate, intake conversions, or anything else relevant to their area of expertise. Then, you either give them a number they need to move the needle by, or better yet, let them pick it. Something objective and realistic within your timeline, but still large enough to prove that this person is a valuable hire.
People who are great at pretending to be valuable by seeming busy hate these kinds of assignments because there’s a massive difference between “we’re working toward X” and “here is how much closer we are to accomplishing X since I’ve gotten here.” The former can go on forever, but the latter is a measurable number.
If you continue rewarding someone simply for showing up, they’ll have very little incentive to change. They’ll happily keep driving to the office, attending all the meetings, and company retreats; they’ll keep cashing their paychecks and taking all the vacation days you provide until you run out of money and/or patience.
So take a look at your team members and see if you maybe have a passenger in your midst, and take appropriate steps to weed them out. Because your job as a leader is making sure that the right people are creating meaningful value. That doesn’t happen by measuring how much activity someone creates. It happens by measuring what changes because they’re there.
