Knowing what great looks like

Founders, executives, and managers all have to hire for roles they have never done themselves. Most people anchor a career in one craft. They were a great engineer, a great salesperson, or a great designer, and then they have to build a team around work they have never practiced. A founder hires across every function the company needs: individual-contributor engineers, salespeople, marketers, specialists like revenue operations, someone to run finance. Early on the company is too small for a real executive team, so they hire specialists whose jobs they barely know; later they build out functional leaders for sales, marketing, engineering, product, and finance. The chance that one person has done all of those jobs is zero.

Knowing what great looks like is the calibration you do before you evaluate anyone. You use the MOC to define the mission, the outcomes, and the competencies of the role, and then you figure out what the best people in the world at that job actually do: the behaviors they have, the values they hold, what their week looks like, who they hire. Without it, the interview defaults to whoever is most impressive in the room.

It is not doing the job yourself, and it is not having done it. You will never have been a great CFO before you hire one, but you do need to know a thing or two about finance. For any role, it is hard to know what a 4 or a 5 out of 5 looks like if you have not gotten yourself to a 1 or a 2 [2]. A CEO building software has to understand how software gets built; a CEO building shoes has to get into the materials and the manufacturing, or the odds of making a great shoe are low.

Ultimately, knowing what great looks like is a virtue with a vice on either side of it [1]. On one side is abdication: hiring someone and checking out, with no way to monitor the work or even tell whether it is any good. On the other is perfectionism: believing that even great people should have no flaws, and ending up with a team of excellent people you are constantly disappointed in.

Someone who is great at this, first and above all, recognizes when they are not an expert. Second, they are not afraid to admit it, and not afraid to take action to learn.

They actively curate a network, knowing they will draw on it again and again, and they use it to ask two questions:

1. Who is best in class at this?
2. Who would know the people who are?

From there they route quickly toward the four kinds of people worth talking to:

1. Those who have done the job and are great,
2. Those who know other great people,
3. Those who have hired and managed the great, and
4. Those who have worked alongside them.

The more roles you hire for, the more you see that greatness has function-specific dimensions, but also a common spine of behaviors and mindsets.

The general markers are recognizable across every function: curiosity, self-motivation, and high agency. They take responsibility and do not deflect or blame. They give feedback well, they think about the team and the company before themselves, and they are good to be around. When they are curious, they are self-learning, keeping up with their field and their tools, thinking of themselves as craftspeople. They work hard, often to the edge of obsession, because they enjoy the work.

The deepest version of great is that you develop your own opinions about what great is, because you have seen firsthand what works and what doesn’t, and you trust that more as you go. You are not afraid to get your hands dirty on a role you have never done. You go get smart, at minimum asking an AI what great looks like, you read books and articles, you learn the vocabulary of the world you are hiring into. And you are curious about greatness itself.

If your job is to find great people and you are not interested enough in the subject to build lasting relationships with high-performing people, or at least to read a couple of books and listen to a few podcasts about what separates the great from the rest, it is hard to see how you become one of the best in the world at building talent.

The first step is the most counterintuitive: get to know more people who are great at anything. Great people tend to spend time with other great people, so a great designer tends to know great engineers and great finance people. The more time you spend around people who are excellent at their craft, the more you start to intuit the general principles of greatness. Meeting them is simple. If you love someone’s writing, send them a note. If you admire someone’s design work, tell them. This is not transactional networking in the Dale Carnegie sense; talented people make great friends, and a friendship built on real admiration for someone’s work is a foundation that makes warm introductions easy later.

When you actually need to calibrate for a hire, I’ve curated a set of tools that work together.

1. You start by trying to write the MOC for the role, and you get frustrated, because you are not sure the outcomes are right, and if the outcomes are wrong you cannot know the competencies.
2. Next, you run Calibration Calls: you go to investors, founders, and people whose judgment you trust, and you ask who is best in class and who knows the best in class. You talk to the people who have done the job, hired for it, or worked alongside someone excellent at it. Those conversations get you from novice to advanced beginner, and they give you a real picture of what competent, proficient, and expert look like.
3. From there you run the competency stack against what you heard, localizing the standard to your role, your level, your company’s values, your stage, and your team. A salesperson at a ten-person company is a different hire than one at a thousand-person company, and the first salesperson on the team is different from the eighth.
4. Finally, the terrain-test keeps you honest about an impressive candidate whose success came from a different stage.

Writing the MOC, running the Calibration Calls, working the competency stack, and starting to do the job yourself all happen in parallel, and together they give you a clear enough picture of great to hire for it.

Founders get this wrong on both sides of that virtue: the vice of deficiency and the vice of excess.

The vice of deficiency is the dangerous one, and it is far more common. It is not putting in the work to become even an advanced beginner, not making the calibration calls, not maintaining a network of great people, and expecting to post something on LinkedIn and have a world-class person appear. There is a more subtle version of the same failure: you can make a hundred calibration calls, but if they are all with merely competent people rather than the proficient and the expert, you will get an inaccurate picture and hire someone competent who believes they are an expert. The signs are everywhere. The loudest complainers about how their team isn’t good enough are almost always the ones who never did the work to find out what great looks like.

The vice of excess is subtler. One form is vanity: becoming a socialite who spends every day around talented and famous people under the guise of networking toward greatness, while still never climbing into the work, which is really just deficiency in disguise. The other form is perfectionism. Everyone great at anything has weaknesses, and if you think greatness means the absence of weakness, you will never hire great people. As Ben Horowitz puts it:

I’d learned the hard way that when hiring executives, one should follow Colin Powell’s instructions and hire for strength rather than lack of weakness. [3]

Its mirror image is just as costly: keeping someone good but not great on the team under the cover of “nobody’s perfect,” when what you are really doing is protecting mediocrity that is not going to improve.

Underneath all of it is the hardest thing to look at. The team you build is a reflection of the standards you hold for yourself and the company. When a founder sees that in a coaching session, it’s a painful gut punch, because the excuses fall away. There is an inner game here, and it is its own kind of mean: you have to believe you belong in the room with the most talented people in the world, with enough confidence to hold a high bar, but not so much that you curdle into an overinflated, malignant narcissist.