Every hire is a plus-one or a minus-one

For three years I ran the foundation at Coca-Cola Consolidated in Charlotte, and I reported to Frank Harrison, the CEO. One sentence from Frank has outlasted everything else I learned there. He told me that every leadership hire is a plus-one or a minus-one to your team. No one is ever flat.

Four hundred organizations later, I have never met the flat one. Every team member either moves your culture toward the positive or toward the negative, and there is no middle ground.

Why there are no zeros

When I interview at Novum I tell the candidate this in the first conversation. I look at every hire in three buckets: a plus-one on culture, a plus-one on the actual work, and a plus-one on our revenue goals. I do not think you hire any zeros. You are plus-one or minus-one in each bucket, and a candidate who is a minus in one of them is a minus, however brilliant the other two look.

Keep one minus-one leader in the room and every plus-one on the team learns what the real standard is.

Every leadership hire is a plus-one or a minus-one to your team. No one is ever flat.

Six to one

If you are trying to pull an existing culture toward a new way of working, the ratio I use is six to one. You need six people on the new side for every one on the old side for the culture to move in that direction. Not a simple majority. Six.

The reason is that people over 40 rarely shift much, maybe 20 percent, absent a crisis or a catalytic event. It just means culture is built primarily through who you bring in, far more than through who you convince. Give yourself five years. It takes five to seven years for a culture to truly shift, and about 18 months before even the finance culture feels like it is working.

There is a companion ratio for risk. If you have six really strong people on a team, you can afford to take a chance on one. That is the room you have.

Where churches get it wrong, and why

In the church world we usually promote because of charisma and chemistry. The person is loved, they get along with the senior pastor, and so they get a title. Then they have a title without the competency to match, which is very common.

Most people who tell me about a bad experience on a church staff were, when I listen closely, experiencing for the first time what it feels like to be led and managed. Clear expectations are not unkindness. Another word for them is accountability.

Pastors have not fixed the charisma problem because the fix costs them a relationship. The minus-one is usually somebody they love. That is the unsaid truth, and it is not a character flaw. It is the price of caring about people, showing up in the org chart.

Level 3 and Level 5

Minus-one is not a verdict on a person’s worth. I have watched the world’s best campus pastors in a Level 3 church, the stage where a leader and a leadership team carry the organization, struggle badly at Level 5, the stage built to scale. Nothing about them got worse; they were never designed to operate at their best in that system. And I have watched people who struggled at Level 3 become excellent at Level 5, because the new system finally fit them.

So before you label someone, diagnose. When a person underperforms on competency, they are either leading at their lid or leading from a place of underdevelopment. If it is underdevelopment, you invest and coach. If it is a lid, you hire an executive over them and demote them, with as much honor as you can manage. The mistake is coaching a lid problem for three years or firing a development problem in three months.

Both sides of the desk

Consider what the person on the other side of your desk is thinking. The minus-one leader usually knows. They can feel the team routing around them, and every month you wait, they read your silence as a verdict on their worth rather than a decision about a seat. The plus-ones know too, and they are quietly deciding whether you mean what you say about standards.

It is really hard to build tomorrow on yesterday’s team and yesterday’s infrastructure. You can do all the change management you want, but if the capacity of the organization does not change with it, it does not matter.

Novum sells HR and the sort of structured hiring I have just described, so read this knowing I have a stake. I will also tell you the version that costs nothing. Find the one seat that is your true bottleneck, the role that is hardest to scale, and make that your catalytic hire. Everything else can wait. Frank was right about the arithmetic, and the arithmetic does not care how much you like someone.