Dear Danielle,
Bear with me as I talk about sports for a second.
On one of the recent episodes of “Dear Hank and John” (which as you know is the name inspo for our blog!), John shared the latest news on AFC Wimbledon (an English Football League One team where John is a minor investor).
They just wrapped up their season and barely staved off relegation. Now their focus during the offseason is to figure out how to do better next season (for us Raptors fans, this sounds painfully familiar).
AFC Wimbledon is a small market team, so they don’t have all the money in the world to acquire big-name players and improve the caliber of the team overnight. They recognize they have to work hard at developing the talent they already have to get better. John said something on the podcast that really stuck with me: “We can’t buy stars, so we have to make them.”
Deep down, I think what John is getting at is something most leaders know but struggle to practice: we need to have the patience to develop the talent we already have and see that through.
We’re wired for instant results. This is especially true in tech, where we move at breakneck speed so we can get to our next set of milestones and sprint towards the next one even faster. Now supercharged with AI, there’s seemingly “no excuse” to be slow. You wrote about all of this in your very insightful piece on drawing the distinction between speed and momentum.
The interesting irony in all of this is that our obsession with speed doesn’t give people enough room to show us what they’re truly capable of. We hire someone, put them on a team, and start the clock. But how focused their product area is, how collaborative their stakeholders are, how stable the org structure is when they join, how different the culture and ways of working are from wherever they came from — all of these things massively affect how quickly someone finds their footing. It takes a lot of luck for all of that to line up perfectly out of the gate.
And that’s what makes stars — not talent alone, but leaders with the awareness to recognize that someone is struggling because of their environment, not their abilities. Yes, there are expectations for them to adapt, especially the more senior they are, but sometimes they just need a bit more patience and grace to succeed.
We don’t always hire instant stars on our teams. But in the cases where we gave someone more runway — moved them to a different product area, worked with them to find a more focused assignment, paired them with a stakeholder who had the bandwidth to collaborate — I’ve watched those same people become some of the strongest contributors on the team.
I don’t have a formula for how much patience is enough. Three months probably isn’t. A year with no signs of progress probably is too long. The answer, as with most things in leadership, lives in the uncomfortable middle.
What I do believe is that we can do better as an industry. The tech industry loves the narrative of the overnight success, the 10x hire, the person who walks in and immediately transforms the team. Those people exist, but they’re the exception, not the rule. And building a team strategy around exceptions is how you end up constantly hiring, constantly churning, and never actually building the institutional knowledge and trust that makes a team greater than the sum of its parts.
So we can all be a little more patient, a little more curious about what’s going on beneath the surface, and a lot more intentional about creating the conditions for people to succeed before we decide they can’t.
That’s the AFC Wimbledon lesson. You can’t always buy the star player. But more often than not the star player is already on your roster. You just need to invest the time to make them.
From explaining the offside rule to my kids for the hundredth time,
Dave