When Your Best People Stop Being The Right People: Understanding Growth-Stage Talent Mismatch
When scaling your company, one of the most difficult issues you’re bound to face is talent mismatch.
When building your start-up team, you chose people you believed could grow your company and fulfil your vision.
However, the people who are key to the initial success of your company are not always the ones who can see it through to its next stage. The skills that thrive in an early-stage environment are often very different from those required to lead and deliver at scale.
In a conversation with Alexis May, Director of Mayday Strategy, a consultancy firm that specialises in unsticking growth for B2B communities, he highlighted the struggle of talent mismatch:
“Sometimes the people who get you to X aren’t necessarily the people who get you to Y. This can be really painful. One of the biggest challenges is the point that you’ll have to say — our highest performers aren’t right for the business anymore.”
High performance and business alignment are not the same thing. A person can be excelling in their role while quietly becoming a mismatch for where the business is heading.
Although this is a painful realisation for many business owners to face, it is one that must be tackled head-on. Because loyalty to your team does not always equate to loyalty to your business.
And it’s better to respect your employees’ contributions and encourage them to succeed elsewhere than to keep them in a place that isn’t benefiting the business, and subsequently not benefiting them.
When it comes to recognising talent mismatch, you need to assess whether your employees’ seniority matches the work that they’re doing.
This can be subtle. Is a senior hire spending more time on the ground than leading their team? Is someone who joined as a passionate visionary beginning to appear disengaged? When you learn to notice these signs, you can start to build a clearer picture of what talent mismatch looks like in your business.
It is also important to recognise that you are likely not the only one feeling discomfort. Those who have outgrown their role, or no longer feel aligned with it, often sense the shift before anyone else does. This is why open and honest conversation matters more than a clean exit. When both sides can arrive at a mutual understanding, the end of a working relationship becomes something far more respectful than it might otherwise have been.
And if you don’t address the mismatch? You risk slowed growth, a frustrated team, and good people leaving because the wrong person is blocking progress. Your business vision can quietly go off track, not because of a lack of talent, but because of a reluctance to make a difficult and necessary call.
The businesses that scale successfully are not always the ones with the most talented people. They are the ones with the courage to keep asking whether the right people are in the right roles.