PEOPLE AND OPERATIONS
Your next manager needs more than experience
Hiring for potential or experience is a practical decision about what your business needs now, what someone can learn and how much support you can give them.
You want someone who has done the job before. Someone who can take work off your plate, bring a bit of structure and help the business grow. Ideally, they won't cost too much. And they won't arrive wanting to change absolutely everything.
Fair enough. But look at what you're asking for.
You want someone good enough to move the business forward, affordable enough to fit the budget, and comfortable enough with the way you work not to cause too much disruption. Those things don't always come together. Sometimes the person who can get you to the next stage is going to challenge how you got to this one.
I've seen growing businesses put a lot of faith in experience on paper, particularly when hiring sales, marketing and customer service managers. The CV looks right. The interview is reassuring. Everyone feels they've made a sensible decision.
Then the same problems keep coming back to the owner.
Before hiring again, I would ask a harder question: are you buying the ability to solve the problem, or the reassurance of hiring someone who has seen it before?
When experience is worth paying for
I like experience. If you need someone who can fix a specific problem quickly, go and get them. Pay properly for the judgement you need.
What I don't like is treating a job title and a number of years as a substitute for understanding how someone works. Being present in a successful business isn't the same as knowing how to build one. And inheriting a well-run team isn't the same as making a struggling team better.
Ask what changed because they were there. What did they inherit? What did they have to work out? What did they stop doing when it no longer worked? You're looking for their contribution, not a tour of their former employer's achievements.
The alternative isn't simply hiring someone cheaper. It's finding someone with the aptitude to grow into the responsibility, then paying the development cost properly. That cost shows up in your time, coaching and tolerance for mistakes, rather than entirely in their salary.
If you can't provide that support, don't call it a high-potential hire. You're asking someone to learn a management job while doing it alone.
What those fast-moving teams got right
When I think about my time at Sophos, Bullhorn and WeWork, I remember the energy of bringing capable, ambitious people together. People wanted more responsibility, more customers, better jobs and better money. They pushed each other. You could see what good looked like because someone near you was doing it.
That mattered. But the energy wasn't the whole story.
At WeWork, the proposition at location level was easy to understand: flexible office space that customers could use and pay for. Teams had a clear framework within which to make decisions. At Sophos, there was a recognizable customer problem around protecting businesses and their systems. You could connect the work to something that mattered to the customer.
Clarity made independence possible. People didn't need to invent the purpose of the business before deciding what to do next.
That's the part I'd take into a smaller growing company. You don't need to recreate the atmosphere of a software business. You need people who want to improve, a clear customer problem and enough freedom to act on what they learn.
If your new manager spends their first month trying to work out which of your five priorities actually matters, you've given them confusion, not autonomy.
How to assess potential before you hire
Aptitude is easy to talk about and surprisingly easy to confuse with someone you like. A confident interview, a familiar background or a lot of enthusiasm can feel like potential. None tells you enough about how the person will handle the job.
Give candidates a short, realistic problem instead. Use the same brief and assessment criteria, and keep it proportionate. You aren't asking them to do unpaid consulting for your business.
For a sales manager, that might be a fictional team getting plenty of enquiries but booking very few meetings. Ask where they'd start, what they'd need to know and what they'd try first.
Then introduce new information. Perhaps response times are slow, or the team is contacting the wrong people. Ask them to revise their approach.
The interesting part isn't whether they guessed your preferred answer. It's whether they ask useful questions, recognize what they don't know and change their mind when the evidence changes. Someone who can explain why their first answer was wrong may be more useful than someone who can confidently defend it for another twenty minutes.
Look inside the business too. Who already makes good decisions when you aren't there? Who helps colleagues get better? Who follows a problem through instead of just pointing it out? Give that person a defined responsibility and support before assuming the answer has to come from outside.
A manager changes the pace of everyone around them
The cost of a poor management hire isn't only their salary. It's the work that waits, the decisions that get escalated and the capable people who stop suggesting improvements because nothing happens.
This is why I care about a manager's appetite for learning. Their limitations can become the team's limitations. If every decision has to fit what the manager already knows, you've put a ceiling over everyone else's development.
And yes, the owner can be that ceiling too.
Before deciding your team lacks initiative, look at what happens when someone takes it. Do you let them own the decision? Or do you step in, rewrite the work and teach them that waiting for you is safer?
Good management should increase the number of sensible decisions the team can make without you. That is a more useful test than whether the new manager has made themselves indispensable.
Give your new manager a clear first ninety days
Before you post the vacancy, write down three things you need this person to change. Actual outcomes, not “bring leadership” or “take ownership”. For example: enquiries get a timely response, each salesperson knows their priorities, and the owner no longer has to rescue the weekly pipeline meeting.
Next, decide which skills must be there on day one and which you can teach. Name the person who will coach them and put that time in the diary. If nobody has time, change the hiring plan.
Use the first month to understand the work and establish a baseline. Agree which decisions the manager owns and which need checking. During the second month, have them take responsibility for one improvement, with regular feedback. By the third, review what changed, what they learnt and what they should own next. Adapt the pace to the role; the point is to make development visible rather than hope it happens.
You may still choose the most experienced candidate. Good. But choose them because of what they can do with that experience.
The next stage of your business will ask different things of your team. Hire someone who can learn those things, and make sure you're prepared to help them.