Too often, it’s the ego that drives the founder. It takes life experience and humility to step back and reset when things go wrong, to prioritise the things that are important and to focus on team and culture. - Janey Martino, Chair and Co-founder Smiling Mind, Investor, Advisor. When it comes to hiring people for your high-growth business, there is a common temptation to hire the smartest people.

Hiring mistakes can be costly to your business in many ways. Firstly, there is the financial cost of hiring. For those doing the hiring, it’s a waste of time, energy, and effort. For the team, it is bad for moral, and can be quite disruptive and unsettling. Then, there is the lost productivity, and time taken to re-train the next hire. It can damage your business’ reputation and with the current global talent shortage, make hiring even more challenging.

In my recent blog You’re holding your (drum) sticks backwards, I described startups as a garage band and scaleups as a jazz band. The shift is the introduction of necessary processes and principles. It’s less of a free-for-all and more about developing useful guidelines, practices and philosophies to enable your business to scale. — It’s like moving from overwhelm to organised. Cracks are starting to form, and they must be addressed before they consume your business.

How you behave ‘when no one’s looking’ is a reflection of your moral qualities, your values, and your beliefs. It affects how you respond to challenges, how you celebrate success, and how you support your team in the good times and the bad. It feeds through everything you do as…

Last year, I was engaged to work with a scaleup that was going through a major transition, likely to be exiting within months. I had been briefed that Jason, who was a very valued member of the senior leadership team, had become disengaged. The founder was finding him difficult to…