When Are They Gonna Get It?
Photo by Nishant Das
Why do good hires fail and why do founders so often conclude they “can’t find good people”? This essay looks at hiring, onboarding, delegation, culture, and the hidden standards employees are expected to absorb inside founder-led businesses.
In my management days, for a few months, I had the opportunity to co-chair a monthly regional HR conference call. Its purpose was to advise store managers who were struggling with hiring and retention.
Once the HR rep and I filtered through the grievances, exasperation, and general confusion, the collective complaint of those managers could usually be reduced to one question:
“When are they gonna get it?”
They, of course, meant their employees.
My response—sometimes gently, sometimes a little more stridently—was usually some version of:
“Well… when are you gonna get it?”
Meaning:
Stop blaming your employees to investigate your own hiring, training, delegation, and retention practices.
Why Good Hires Still Fail
In the mid-to-late 2000s, a friend who worked as a graphic designer at a successful founder-led firm recommended me for an open position there.
The company was essentially a middleman operation: they sourced a variety of widgets and sold them to independent businesses throughout the United States.
It was also a stereotypical founder-led business…
The founder was the impresario of the entire operation—his energy and ideas cascading through the hallways and offices, his presence somehow overseeing everything: accounting, sales, distribution, graphic design—while a mysterious “manager” or “right-hand man” dashed about behind him.
My only interview was with the founder himself: an intense, brief twenty-minute Q&A squeezed in before he left for a flight to visit four satellite offices in the western U.S.
“Yup. I like you. I want to hire you.”
“Okay…cool,” I remember nodding. “What is the…position?”
The founder smiled while hurriedly packing his carry-on backpack.
“Oh…it’s kind of a, uh, temporary position that will move into a manager role. You have what I’m looking for. I just need you to learn the business from the ground up, right?”
“Okay.”
“Start next week in accounting, and then a few days later move to sales…”
Then, he vanished.
The friendly HR lady escorted me to her office to fill out all the requisite paperwork.
“When you come in Monday, Sandy will show you to your cubicle. Then Wednesday or Thursday, you’ll meet the sales team.”
Already, I was smirking.
Monday arrived and I met Sandy.
She was a stereotypical Office Space-esque character who invited me first to my undecorated cubicle, then over to her elaborately decorated one, where she oriented me to the “accounting process.”
“See, when the phone rings, you answer! It’s one of our clients calling in their order. They’ll give you the catalogue number, you put it into the Excel sheet, it tabulates their cost—which nobody cares about!—and just make sure you have their location number so when Mary does our end-of-day tomorrow she knows where to ship it. So all we’re really doing is logging their order! Go ahead! Take the next call!”
Already, I was smirking.
Excel spreadsheet? Lady, where is the goddamn ordering portal for these clients? It’s 2009!
After observing a few calls, Sandy guided me through my first.
I answered, introduced myself, and started typing catalogue numbers, manually verifying them while rapidly paging through an immense, physically bound catalogue, processing the order on the Excel sheet.
“Oh, you learn fast!” Sandy chirped.
Soon I was back in my cubicle answering phones, already looking for workarounds to the archaic ordering system.
“May I have a copy of your Excel sheet?” I asked Sandy.
“Oh, just make your own!” she laughed. “There isn’t a set one. Just go in and put in your own equations!”
Already, I was smirking.
I had a preschool-level knowledge of Excel.
So…
Jake created his own “accounting sheet.”
At the end of the day, I met Mary.
“Mary, I’m the new guy—”
“Oh, I heard we had a new hire!”
“Supposedly there’s no uniform Excel sheet? I kind of just created a Word file, formatted it, and…”
“Oh, will you look at that! Perfect!”
Already, I was smirking.
On Tuesday, after Sandy, Mary, Lisa, Tess, and Ernie had—with almost cult-like veneration—implored me to decorate my cubicle, I started answering phones and logging orders.
Then…
I realized something.
I was the only one answering.
“Oh, you’re a fast bugger, ain’t ya!” Ernie shouted from his corner cubicle.
After a few shouts from the other cubicle dwellers—
“Oh, Jake! Take a break!”
“We got these calls, you silly goose!”
—I started investigating the computer system.
Eventually, I found a secret lair:
An ordering portal.
I logged in with my employee number and…
Orders from yesterday.
“What the fuck?”
I got up from my cubicle and walked over to Mary’s.
“Mary, I found the ordering portal. Why are we manually typing in orders?”
She smirked.
“Oh, the team doesn’t like the computer!” she said with a jolly laugh.
Then:
“Also… you’re supposed to be working with sales today. Didn’t anyone tell you?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Welp, silly. Go down the hallway. Third door!”
When I sauntered into the “sales team” room, I encountered what looked like a 1980s Hollywood tableau: a cynical khaki-and-polo contingent bragging about golf scores.
“Bout time,” they laughed when I entered.
“Hey… heard you’re gonna be the new—”
The salesman raised his fingers into air quotes.
“—manager.”
A chorus of synchronized laughter followed.
“Yup,” I answered.
More laughter.
On Wednesday, I quit.
You Can’t Outsource Culture
For some, my decision to quit will seem rash…
You didn’t give it time!
For others, you probably see something from one of your own founder-led hiring experiences…
Oh, I had to do that the other month. No wonder they quit.
And others:
Liar. That didn’t happen.
I can assure you, it did.
And more than twenty years later, those few days are still vivid. They gave me lessons I carried through my own years of interviewing, onboarding, orienting, mentoring, managing—and now advising.
And right now, someone reading this is probably thinking:
You weren’t gonna get it anyway.
Exactly.
That is one of the unconscious traps founder-and owner-led companies create:
The interview was great
Their experience is great
Their credentials are great
And
They will just…
Show up.
And…
Start working.
That’s not how humans operate.
No matter someone’s education, experience, intelligence, or self-reliance, people still need to…
Know.
They need to know how your company operates.
They need to know your standards.
They need to know how decisions are made, who owns what, when to ask, when to act, what good work looks like, and…what your business considers unacceptable.
Because if you don’t convey those operational standards, they will fill in the blanks themselves.
They will bring their own processes, habits, assumptions and ordering sheets converted to Word files.
That communication gap still communicates.
It communicates by osmosis.
And that osmosis gets filled with years’ worth of operational standards learned somewhere else. Standards that may have very little to do with the quality, pace, judgment, or expectations of your company.
And then there is something even earlier:
Their first taste of culture.
That first onboarding session.
That first introduction.
That first handshake or Google Meet.
The first time someone explains:
This is how we do things here…
That is the first transmission of expectations.
But I can already hear the founder-owner respond:
I Don’t Have Time For That!
But you…
Have to.
Hiring reveals one of the more brutal truths a founder-owner eventually encounters:
Do you have a continuous, parallel operating practice for hiring?
Not just recruiting, interviewing and onboarding. Not just those opening days and weeks of orientation and mentoring…all of which require allocating and reallocating payroll. But are you, the founder-owner, creating time for it?
Are you creating time to feel, taste, smell and interpret the signals of your culture?
Do you know who is lagging?
Drifting?
Exhausted?
Cynical?
Detaching?
Ready to leave?
Have you created the time to actually interact with that culture?
Not:
Oh, I did during the project call!
But a separate check-in.
A call.
A visit.
A moment to feel the vibes.
To answer questions.
To respond to expectations.
To recalibrate the transmission of standards.
Because if you haven’t, eventually you will be saying:
I Can’t Find Good People!
Well…
Are you creating an environment hospitable to good people? Are you cultivating a culture that develops good people?
Modern leadership loves to espouse:
Delegate!
Outsource!
But…
Hiring and culture are different.
Sure, you need a specialized hire? There are excellent recruiting firms that can source all kinds of expertise.
But in an age of AI and rapidly expanding automation, you still can’t make time to engage in one of the most expensive—and consequential—processes of operating a business?
This business is your creation.
Your work.
Your ethos.
Why build it on an outsourced foundation?
You can outsource the search…
You can outsource some of the administration…
You can outsource pieces of the process…
But you cannot outsource the transmission of your standards.
You cannot outsource your relationship with the people doing work.
And you certainly cannot outsource the culture they are entering.
And yes…
Sometimes, you made the wrong hire.
Sometimes, someone simply isn’t capable of meeting the standard.
But before arriving there, have you actually given them a standard to meet?
So the next time you think,
“When Are They Gonna Get It?”
Ask yourself:
“When Am I Gonna Get It?”
Hiring, onboarding, delegation, culture…none of it exists in isolation.
If your people & processes problems keep repeating, there may be something deeper in the way the business is operating.