Most leaders secretly want to be the smartest person in the room.
It's why they hire people who need them. People who ask permission. People who validate their ideas. People who, six months later, are still waiting for direction on what to build next.
And honestly? That's exactly how companies die. Slowly at first, then suddenly, buried under layers of dependency they built themselves.
Here's the thing that kills me: The best VP I ever worked with had this rule. In six months, if I'm still telling you what to do, I hired wrong. Not "you failed." Not "you need coaching." I. Hired. Wrong.
At first, it sounds insane. Maybe even reckless.
But after watching this philosophy transform three different organizations from good to genuinely unstoppable, I'm convinced it's the only way to build products that matter at scale.
Why We're Addicted to Hiring Down
Let's be brutally honest about what actually happens in most hiring committees.
You find someone smart. Talented, sure. But not too talented. Not threatening. Someone who'll execute your vision beautifully without questioning whether the vision itself is broken. Someone who makes you feel needed.
And look, this instinct makes complete sense. Your whole career you were rewarded for having the answers. For being the expert. For solving problems others couldn't. Then you become a leader and suddenly that same skill becomes the bottleneck.
It feels GREAT. For about twelve months.
Then you realize you've built an entire organization that can't function without you in every meeting. Can't make decisions without your blessing. Can't innovate because they're too busy managing up. Your calendar becomes a bottleneck. Your opinions become gospel. Your blind spots become organizational failures.
This isn't leadership. It's organizational codependency dressed up as "strong management."
Companies consistently hire for "cultural fit," which, let's call it what it is, often means hiring people who won't rock the boat. Who'll nod along. Who'll execute without challenging the strategy itself.
They want concentric circles of similarity. People who validate existing thinking rather than question it.
The Six-Month Rule, Explained
Here's what the rule actually means in practice.
The Prerequisites
If you've given someone clear outcomes, context, and access to customers and data, and at six months they still need you to drive the what and why, that's a hiring mistake. Not a coaching problem.
The rule assumes you've done your job. You can't parachute someone in, give them no context, wall them off from customers, and then blame them for needing direction.
But if you've genuinely set them up? If they have the same information you have, the same access, the same decision rights?
Then six months is plenty.
What Success Looks Like
At the six-month mark, a great hire should be:
- Defining their own roadmap inside your strategy. Not waiting for you to hand them the next quarter's priorities.
- Making most decisions without you. They check in on direction, not on execution details.
- Surfacing problems you didn't see. They're closer to the work. They should spot issues before you do.
- Teaching you things about the domain. If information only flows one direction, something's broken.
If you're still the primary brain and they're the hands? That's not a "development area." That's a hiring miss you need to correct fast.
What Changes When You Actually Do This
When you flip this script, when you commit to hiring people who'll surpass you, three things happen that fundamentally rewire how your organization operates.
1. The Hiring Bar Goes Through the Roof
That statement becomes your North Star during interviews. You start rejecting perfectly good candidates because deep down, you know they'll still need hand-holding in six months.
But here's what's wild. Candidates LOVE it.
The best people light up when you tell them this expectation. They lean forward. Start asking better questions. The mediocre ones? They look terrified.
It's the best filter I've ever seen.
Netflix learned this during the 2001 dot-com crash. They had to lay off a third of the company. What happened? Productivity didn't drop. It exploded. They discovered that eliminating average performers didn't hurt the business, it liberated it.
That's when they started hiring what they call "fully formed adults" who act in the company's best interests without oversight. Not because they're nice people. Because they discovered that exceptional talent doesn't need babysitting.
2. The Power Dynamic Shifts (And It's Uncomfortable)
Your new hire starts pushing back in week three. Not disrespectfully, but with this energy of "actually, I think we should do X instead."
Your ego screams. Your instinct is to pull rank.
Don't.
What you're experiencing is someone who's genuinely thinking about the problem instead of just executing your solution. This is the point. This is what you hired for.
At Amazon, Bezos calls these people "builders." Individuals who consistently demonstrate curiosity and willingness to redefine norms. They don't just execute the playbook. They rewrite it while you're still reading chapter one.
But man, it feels weird at first. You'll watch them present YOUR area to the CEO and nail it better than you would have. You'll see them get credit for wins you set up.
Let them.
3. Your Org Starts to Compound
Six months pass. Suddenly, you're in meetings where your direct report is explaining the strategy to you. They're identifying problems you didn't know existed. Building solutions you couldn't have imagined.
Now multiply that across an entire org.
This is what I call organizational metabolism. The rate at which a company can process new information, adapt, and grow. Companies with high metabolism don't just scale faster. They scale differently.
Because instead of adding management layers to handle complexity, you're adding decision-making nodes. People who can see a problem and fix it without a steering committee.
The math here is compelling. Traditional delegation means "you own it but someone else does the work." That's a wider bottleneck, not elimination of one. But when teams genuinely own outcomes? When they're raising their own bar?
That's exponential, not linear growth.
The Implementation Playbook (Without Losing Your Mind)
Okay so you're convinced. But how do you actually DO this without the whole thing falling apart?
Start with One
Don't revolutionize your entire team overnight. Pick one crucial role. Hire someone who intimidates you a little. Someone whose resume makes you think "could they do MY job?"
Good. They probably should.
Reframe Your Role Completely
You're not the genius with all the answers anymore. You're the connector. The context provider. The person who makes sure this brilliant human has everything they need to make you obsolete in your current capacity.
Think about it like this: Your job isn't to have the best ideas. It's to create conditions where the best ideas win, regardless of who has them.
Build the Infrastructure
Smart people without context make terrible decisions. You need:
- Radical transparency on metrics. They should see what you see.
- Direct access to customers. No telephone game where insights get filtered through three layers.
- Decision rights that actually matter. Not fake empowerment where they "own" things but can't actually change anything.
- Regular skip-levels so they're known beyond just you. If they're only visible through your lens, you've recreated dependency.
Measure Different Things
Stop measuring "did they do what I said?" Start measuring:
- How many decisions did they make without you?
- What problems did they identify that you missed?
- How often are they teaching YOU something?
If at six months you're giving them their OKRs, you've failed. They should be proposing OKRs that make you go "damn, I didn't even think of that."
Handle the Ego Hits
This is the part nobody talks about. It's going to hurt sometimes.
Because here's the secret. When your team starts operating above your level, YOU level up. Not by being smarter than everyone. By building something that transcends individual brilliance.
When You Hired Wrong
So it's month six. The diagnostic checklist says you hired wrong. Now what?
Don't let it drag. That's how dependency calcifies into organizational debt you'll carry for years.
You have three options:
- Shrink the scope. Maybe they're great at execution but not strategic thinking. Move them to a different role that matches their strengths.
- Adjust the role. Maybe you framed it wrong. Sometimes the fit is there but the job description was fantasy.
- Correct the mistake fast. If neither of the above works, you owe it to both of you to make a change. Keeping someone in a role they can't grow into isn't kindness. It's cruelty disguised as patience.
The point isn't to be ruthless. It's to be honest. If at six months they can't independently define and drive meaningful outcomes with the context and access you've provided, continuing to hope it'll change is how good orgs become mediocre ones.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Most leaders won't do this.
Not because they don't understand it intellectually. But because it requires letting go of the very thing that got them promoted. Being the smartest person in their domain.
It requires admitting that someone five years younger might understand the market better. That someone with half your experience might build a better product. That your value isn't in having answers but in creating conditions for better questions.
But for those who do embrace it? Who genuinely hire people that will surpass them?
They don't just build better products. They build organizations that compound intelligence. That get smarter every quarter. That solve problems before competitors even see them.
Six months.
That's all it takes to know if you've built a team of dependents or a team of leaders.
The question is: Which one are you building right now?
Because if you're still telling them what to do, you already know the answer. And that should scare you enough to change how you hire this year.