The risk and reward of hiring can make or break the effectiveness and culture of your team. A hiring misstep can have an unrecoverable impact on team performance. 

We all have them, the puzzle piece that just didn’t fit. Those hires that had “so much potential” but didn’t quite hit the mark. Those that we inherited from another leader, who couldn’t speak highly enough about them, but we just couldn’t find synergy. 

Being twins and leaders in the same fast growing organization, we had a lot of great discussions around what worked and what didn’t. We have both hired hundreds, if not thousands, of people over our tenures. The ones we are talking about are the ones we hired as superstars but unknowingly put them into a role that restricted their unique talents and silenced their communication style. Not on purpose, it was always based on the needs of the business at the time, but misplaced all the same.   

What often looked like underperformance was actually misplaced talent.