Colleen Moore

Do Companies Really Want High Performers, or Someone Who Will Toe the Line?

A common theme among job seekers and employees is, "Do companies actually want a high performer, or someone who will toe the line?" It's a valid question in today's job market and one that deserves consideration.

I've spent over a decade in Talent and HR, and one pattern shows up again and again: key hiring decisions are made with little reflection beyond the bullet points of a job description.

Critical questions when planning your next hire should include:

• What characteristics are needed to be successful in our business environment?
• How tolerant are we of change?
• What are the team dynamics?
• Is the job description a true reflection of the realities of the role?
• What type of leader will be supporting the new hire?

Hiring is a key business process. Clarity, alignment, and honesty during this process are essential to setting both the business and the new hire up for long-term success.

Leaders often say they want High Performers. Top Talent. Game Changers. Builders. Problem-Solvers. Innovators. Job descriptions frequently include terms such as innovate, improve, and elevate.

But there is a truth that organizations may not be considering:

High performers don't just elevate an organization. They disrupt it.

The cost of a bad hire is steep. Financially, the wrong hire could cost upward of 30% of an annual salary, and some experts suggest the cost is much higher. Culturally, it could result in increased turnover and decreased morale. Operationally, productivity and results suffer.

The importance of fully understanding your needs and recruiting beyond the bullet points cannot be emphasized enough.

Martha Ekdahl (2025) discussed Purposeful Leadership, which "prioritizes meaning, values, and long-term impact." This idea should start well before a job is posted.

As leaders, we are responsible for understanding business needs and then aligning our hiring criteria with those needs. So, before you post that job looking for your next "Rock Star," "Powerhouse," or "Unicorn," here are a few considerations.

High Performers Do Not Follow Broken Systems; They Fix Them

High performers are not satisfied with "That's how we've always done it." They examine processes, identify inefficiencies, and make improvements.

A high performer will not accept outdated technology or the manual workaround that no one has gotten around to fixing. They will question decisions, offer solutions, and hold their leaders accountable.

These attributes of high-performing team members can cause discomfort because they openly challenge the status quo, call out inefficiencies, question why projects are "stuck," and expect progress.

High Performers Will Not Accept Excuses

Excuses like "We don't have the budget," "Revenue is down this quarter," "We've always done it this way," or "Let's revisit this when we're better staffed" will not stop a high performer.

Rather, they will view these statements as problems to solve—and then they will find solutions.

High Performers See Possibilities, Not Problems

When you offer an excuse, be prepared for the high performer to find the budget, challenge the "way it's always been," or figure out how to execute with existing resources.

Once the excuse is out of the way, the high performer will expect action.

High Performers Have High Expectations

High performers hold high expectations for themselves and those around them. They expect clarity, timely decisions, and follow-through. They are comfortable with accountability, including holding their leaders accountable.

If a leader struggles with honest feedback, transparency, or being challenged, a high performer can be mislabeled as "difficult."

Once labeled, even unintentionally, the focus can shift to managing the employee instead of leading them. Energy is spent "dealing with," "keeping in line," or even "managing out" the very high performer who is working to support, improve, and level up the organization.

Similar energy is misplaced on the employee side.

If a high performer is continually asked to maintain outdated processes, accept vague direction, or work with leaders who avoid feedback or fail to act, their energy also shifts—from the job to the job market.

All of this is wasted time, misdirected focus, and preventable turnover. All the while, the business suffers.

If you have been in this situation, or are currently in a situation like this, think about whether your search, qualifications, requirements, and interview questions were aligned with the realities of the role and the daily work environment.

The Responsibility of the High Performer

This article focuses on a company's role in hiring, but I want to note that it is not only a company's responsibility to reflect on and understand its hiring needs.

It is equally important for the job seeker to reflect on their own needs and characteristics.

Hiring is a two-way street. As a job seeker, reflect on your expectations and the work environments in which you thrive.

Ask yourself:

• Do you like to fix things, or are you comfortable with a good workaround?
• Do you tend to manage up and provide feedback, or do you keep quiet?
• What type of leadership do you work well with?
• What type of work do you love doing?
• What type of culture allows you to perform at your best?

As a job seeker myself, I have recently reflected on my previous roles and asked myself what I liked most and least about each one.

These answers provided a starting point.

From there, I identified my ideal roles—there is more than one—as well as the leadership style, culture, and other factors that are important to me.

I also thought through the questions I need to ask to ensure that a company or client is the right fit for me.

Reflection and Next Steps for Companies

Hiring quickly and hiring the right person for the right seat both matter, and leaders owe it to their organizations to hire with intention and in alignment with business needs.

When companies neglect this type of reflection, the costs can be high: lost time, damaged morale, rework, turnover, and ineffective or disruptive changes to the culture.

Before your next hire, take a beat and reflect beyond the job description.

What do you think about when planning for your next hire?

References

Ekdahl, M. (2025, November 5). Leading with purpose in a constantly changing world. SHRM Linkage. Retrieved November 17, 2025, from SHRM Linkage.

In the early stages, informality can be an asset.

One person handles HR. Policies live in someone's inbox. Managers step in where needed. Decisions move fast. It works because the business is small enough that everyone knows the answers.

Then you grow. You add locations, headcount, and management layers. And the informal systems that were a strength become a liability.

When HR lives in someone's inbox

I worked with an organization where a single manager handled new-hire system access across multiple platforms simply because they'd always done it. Over time, other people got involved in onboarding and never knew that manager completed that step in the onboarding process. It just worked.

When that person left, onboarding stopped working. New hires showed up with no system access, and no one could point to where the breakdown happened.

That's what happens when people operations rely on memory instead of structure. One departure and the whole process disappears with them.

Doing all the work isn't the same as having a process

In a lot of small businesses, "the people stuff" lands on one person - the owner, an office manager, or whoever was willing to take it on. They handle recruiting, onboarding paperwork, compliance, payroll setup, system access, and first-week training. And these things usually aren't their main background experience and might not necessarily be their strength. It's just the seat the work landed in, on top of everything else they're already doing.

That setup can work for a while. But here's the catch: even when one person owns every task, the process often doesn't exist. It lives in their head. Steps happen in a different order depending on how busy the week is. One week new hire paperwork is completed before Day 1, another week, it's completed within the new hire's first week. The next week the new hire's email gets set up on day three instead of day one. Training is "we'll figure it out as we go."

When that "go to" person is sick, traveling, or buried in another fire, the whole thing stops. And no one is at fault, because no one was ever told or shown what the process actually is.

I advised a client regarding a long-tenured manager who terminated an employee with no documentation, no formal warnings, no HR or leadership involvement. At the time, there was no termination policy, just someone making a call in the moment. The result: a wrongful termination claim. The process was eventually clarified, training was added, and clear ownership was established. But the exposure and the cost of getting there were avoidable.

Small gaps in process produce real consequences. An employee disciplined inconsistently because there's no documented standard to follow. A new hire who misses their first paycheck because the payroll setup step was the one that got pushed this time. These feel like isolated incidents but they are signals that the process hasn't been built but is still living inside one person's head.

How to know you've hit the turning point

Three questions worth asking:

Are your leadership meetings dominated by staffing, onboarding, or HR issues? If strategy conversations keep getting pulled into people firefighting, your systems haven't kept pace with the business.

Are senior leaders spending more time resolving day-to-day HR issues than working on the business? When executives are in the weeds because no one else clearly owns the process, growth stalls.

Do critical processes rely on specific people rather than documented systems? If things slow down or stop when a key person is out, the informal approach has outgrown its usefulness.

If the answer to any of those is yes, you have a clear structure problem.

What the fix actually looks like

The fix might not necessarily require a full HR department or a 100-page policy manual. It simply requires intention.

Centralize your policies so they're findable by anyone, not living in one person's inbox. Standardize your onboarding so it runs the same way whether or not the hiring manager is in the building. Document decision ownership so managers know what's theirs to resolve and what requires escalation.

The right systems don't add bureaucracy. They remove the friction that's already there - the friction you're currently managing around.

You've Outgrown Your People Operating Structure

It's 9:47 p.m. on a Tuesday.

You're reviewing last week's numbers when your phone buzzes. A manager at your First Street location wants to know if it's okay to approve a schedule swap. You respond.

Then a text from Main Street: Someone called out. What should they do? You respond to that one, too.

Then a call from First Street again. The opener needs approval on a vendor order that's $200 over the usual amount.

You take the call.

You've now spent 40 minutes on problems your managers should be solving.

This isn't a bad day.

This is Tuesday.

And it's been Tuesday for the last two years.

You've Outgrown Your People Operating Structure

When a company is owner-managed—one location, maybe two—the owner is the go-to person for both the work and the people. Decisions flow through that owner. Standards are upheld because the owner is present to enforce them. Problems get solved because the owner walks past them, sees them, and fixes them immediately.

This works.

For a while.

The moment a business adds a location that the owner can't physically oversee, it needs a people infrastructure that is written, taught, and embedded in how the management layer makes daily decisions.

Think of this as the parallel to your operating processes.

Whether you are an independent business owner or a franchisee, you have an operational blueprint. This blueprint includes the recipes, the scripts, the service flows, and the steps required to build your product. You follow this system because you know it works.

What you likely don't have—or won't get—is the people blueprint: how you hire, how you manage people, and how you hold people accountable across your company.

Without the people blueprint, you—or your managers—wing it. You improvise. You do what you've seen done in other companies.

You promote your best employee because you want to reward hard work and loyalty. You give that person a manager title and a pay increase, show them how things run at the original location, and then assume they'll figure out the rest.

What you've actually done is ask someone to run a system that hasn't been documented, without the decision-making frameworks to do it, inside a structure where the right answer to every edge case is still:

Ask the owner.

We can't say the manager fails when there is no system in the first place.

Three locations in, this is annoying.

Five locations in, it's expensive.

At ten, it becomes a high-risk liability.

This Pattern Has a Name

Operators who reach out to me describe some version of this situation.

The details change—the number of locations, the industry, the specific decisions being escalated—but the structure of the problem is the same.

They're three, four, maybe five locations in. They've built something real. But they're still the first call, the final word, and the default answer for decisions their management team should be handling without them.

They describe it in different ways:

"I just can't find managers who think like owners."

"We need better training."

"No one wants to work anymore."

These are understandable, knee-jerk responses to a frustrating problem, but they aren't necessarily the root cause of the people issues.

What these owners are describing is Structural Debt™.

Structural Debt™ is the distance between where the business is and where its people operating structure is.

When a company scales faster than its systems, the owner feels that debt.

Every time.

Automatically.

Until it becomes truly limiting.

Structural Debt™ doesn't announce itself or take up a line item on your P&L.

It shows up as Tuesday texts, then Friday night calls, then messy onboarding, then increased turnover, then employee complaints, then full-blown employee relations issues.

Where It Shows Up on the P&L

Every time a manager escalates a decision that should be theirs to make, the owner takes on that debt.

Every time a location operates differently because "that's just how this manager does it," consistency erodes, and employees feel the debt.

Every time the answer depends on who you ask rather than what the process is, the business becomes more owner-dependent and less scalable.

Ultimately, your customers feel that debt.

The cost of Structural Debt™ runs deeper than most operators realize, often becoming apparent only after it has already compounded.

The direct cost is straightforward: when the owner is the decision-maker for questions managers should be answering, the owner is unavailable for the work that actually grows the business.

Real estate.

Relationships.

Strategy.

Expansion conversations.

Every hour spent answering Tuesday texts is an hour unavailable for the work that only the owner can do.

That trade-off has a dollar value, even if it isn't calculated directly.

The indirect costs are quieter, sometimes larger, and they show up across the operation—not just on one line item.

When managers don't have a clear framework for making decisions, the work environment becomes unpredictable.

How a performance issue is handled depends on which manager is on shift.

Whether an employee complaint gets taken seriously depends on who's there that day.

Whether a policy gets enforced or quietly ignored depends on the individual.

Employees notice this quickly, and it's one of the fastest ways to erode trust before you even realize it's happening.

This is where employee-relations risk starts to accumulate, usually invisibly.

An employee who feels they were disciplined inconsistently compared with a coworker is already forming a narrative.

A manager who improvises through a termination creates potential wrongful-termination exposure.

A team member who raised a complaint that went nowhere is a future liability, not just a morale problem.

None of these situations feel urgent in the moment.

But when they surface months later, they are expensive, disruptive, and often could have been avoided.

Leadership misalignment compounds this further.

When managers at different locations handle the same situations differently, you have inconsistent employee experiences across your brand.

Employees who transfer between locations notice it.

So do long-tenured employees who watch new employees operate under different rules.

The disengagement this creates is often invisible for a long time.

Your best employees quietly check out, update their résumés, or stay but do less than they're capable of doing.

Eventually, the financial fallout starts to compound in every direction at once.

Overtime shifts become the default response to coverage gaps.

Labor budgets creep up week after week.

Turnover increases, driving repeated hiring, onboarding, and training costs.

Managers spend more time backfilling roles instead of leading their teams.

At the same time, inconsistent service experiences suppress revenue in locations that could be performing at much higher levels.

Missed upsells, slower service, and inconsistent customer experiences all chip away at top-line performance.

And the time and energy that should be going toward growth are absorbed by managing the downstream effects of this lack of structure.

This is Structural Debt™ doing what all debt does:

It compounds quietly across multiple line items until the moment it becomes impossible to ignore.

By then, the cost of paying it down is significantly higher than the cost of building the structure would have been.

Paying Down Structural Debt™

People operations is more than the policy manual that collects dust on a shelf in the back office, the training checklist that is sometimes haphazardly checked off, or your company's core values posted on the communication board that, by now, might be covered up with next week's schedule.

Just as the operational work you do follows specific processes and systems, the people doing that work also need documented expectations around roles, responsibilities, decision-making authority, escalation pathways, and answers to the questions your managers are currently calling you about.

Paying down Structural Debt™ typically involves three categories:

• Decision Clarity
• Clear Standards
• Leadership Alignment

Decision Clarity

Decision clarity establishes the guardrails for which decisions belong to managers, which belong to area leadership, and which belong to ownership.

These guardrails should be specific to the decisions that need to be made every day but are currently being escalated:

• Schedule conflicts
• Employee conflicts and complaints
• Hiring and termination decisions
• Vendor approvals
• Customer-service issues
• Staffing decisions

If the answer is always "Ask the owner," the structure isn't built.

Clear Standards

Clear standards address the friction points.

These are documented processes and guides for your teams to follow that often eliminate the need for them to text you on a Tuesday night.

What do acceptable employee behaviors look like?

What's the process when someone calls out?

What authority does a manager have in employee disciplinary situations?

These aren't complicated questions.

But if you are still the go-to person, they are questions that don't currently have clear answers in writing.

Leadership Alignment

The final category is Leadership Alignment.

When you run multiple locations, alignment cannot travel through your physical presence.

You can't be everywhere.

What replaces your physical presence is a shared people infrastructure: every leader, at every level, making the same types of decisions, applying the same standards, and communicating the same expectations whether you're there or not.

This means defining what gets reported, by whom, and on what cadence, so ownership has real visibility into location performance without being inside the daily flow of every decision.

When managers operate from the same framework, the brand and employee experience stop being location-dependent.

And when something goes wrong, you hear about it through the system—not because an upset employee called you directly.

The people infrastructure does not need to be overcomplicated, but it does require intention.

And almost none of it gets built during the growth phase because the owner is wearing all the hats and has little to no time to build a process that doesn't already exist.

The Question Worth Sitting With

The idea of structured processes in business is not new.

Businesses follow some type of structure every day.

The exact amount of ingredients in every item.

The sales flow your team follows with every new lead.

The way you greet and check in guests for their spa day or fitness class.

It's the same process whether you're there or not.

If you're a franchise owner, you're well aware of these processes. Often, they aren't optional; they're written into the franchise agreement.

And they work.

So here's the question worth sitting with:

If you trust structure enough to standardize the way your team makes a burger, why is the employee experience still being improvised?