The best hire you ever made is now your biggest problem.
Not because they changed. Because the company did.
In the early days, you needed people who could do everything. Build the product. Pitch to customers. Handle the chaos. They were exactly right for that moment.
Then the company started becoming real. Roles got narrower. Processes started forming.
Specialists arrived who knew more about one thing than your generalists knew about anything. And the people who saved you in year one started to struggle in year three.
You see it first in the small things. Missed handoffs. Quiet resistance to new processes. A vague feeling of something that used to work doesn't anymore. You think the problem is performance.
It's usually not.
It's that you never redesigned their role to match the company you were building. And the person in it never got the support to grow into something new. The hiring decision was right for that time. The support that should have followed wasn't.
What feels like the wrong person is often the wrong fit for the moment. What looks like a performance problem is often a growth conversation that never happened.
The gap between who you hired and who you need isn't always closed with a new hire. Sometimes it can be closed with a real conversation.
Imported from Post Archives — APR Posts Week 04-06.docx