Module 2:
Hiring Your First Employees
Why this matters
Hiring your first employees does not just increase capacity.
It fundamentally changes how your company works.
Until this point, your company has worked largely through shared context:
💡 Founders know what needs to be done
💡 Decisions happen quickly
💡 Roles flex naturally
💡 Accountability is informal
🩷 What used to be informal becomes visible.
🩷 What lived in your head must now be shared.
🩷 What felt flexible starts requiring structure.
🩷 What you tolerated privately starts affecting others.
In reality, hiring is about creating dependency, responsibility and structure
- whether you are ready or not
The moment someone new joins, this changes.
Hiring changes the business
not just the workload
Many leaders approach the first hire as a way to reduce pressure.
In practice, hiring:
Increases coordination needs before it increases speed
Exposes unclear priorities
Tests leadership alignment
Makes decision-making visible
early hiring decisions are always business decisions
— not just people decisions.
From founder mindset to leadership mindset
Before hiring, founders often operate in:
🩷 Shared Context
🩷 Fast Decisions
🩷 Implicit Trust
After hiring, leadership requires:
🩷 Role clarity
🩷 Explicit expectations
🩷 Consistent communication
🩷 Conscious prioritisation
This shift is uncomfortable - especially for founder teams.
Letting go of “we all know what to do” is one of the first real leadership transitions.
Authority signal
— responsibility over control
“Leadership is not being in charge.
It’s about taking care of those in your Charge”
-Simon Sinek
Source: https://www.youtube.com/@SimonSinek/featured
Hiring introduces responsibility long before it introduces hierarchy.
Leadership becomes less about control, and more about creating clarity others can rely on.
Role clarity Before Recruitment
One of the most common early mistakes is hiring into a role that exists only loosely
Research Insight
- Role Clarity & Performance
Research in organisational psychology consistently shows that role clarity is strongly linked to performance, engagement and psychological safety.
When roles are unclear:
Decision-Making slows
Accountability Diffuses
Conflicts become personal instead of practical
This has been widely documented in leadership and team effectiveness research, including work published by Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review.
It starts when:
Before you recruit, you should be able to answer:
What decisions will this person own?
Where does responsibility clearly start and end?
What does success look like after 6 months?
What will not be part of this role?
Flexibility without clarity creates tension, not freedom.
Hiring as a founder team
When companies are founded by more than one person, hiring introduces a new dynamic.
Questions that need explicit answers:
Who leads this person day to day?
Who gives feedback?
Who makes final decisions when founders disagree?
Are values and expectations truly aligned or just assumed?
Hiring does not fix founder misalignment. It exposes it.
Alignment before hiring prevents conflict later.
Leadership presence after
the first hire
Hiring does not only create a role.
It creates visibility.
Before
the first hire, leadership often happens implicitly:
Decisions are made quickly
Context is shared
Expectations live in conversations
After
the first hire, leadership becomes visible in
everyday moments.
Not in strategy decks but in behaviour.
How decisions are explained when someone is new
How feedback is given when expectations are missed
How mistakes are handled when responsibility is unclear
How priorities are protected when everything feels important
These moments answer questions no job description ever will:
What actually matters here?
How safe is it to speak up?
What happens when things go wrong?
People learn leadership expectations faster from behaviour
than from words.
The hidden cost of
“we’ll figure it out later”
Early hires often operate in ambiguity longer than intended.
This leads to:
unspoken expectations
mismatched assumptions
silent frustration
leaders feeling disappointed without
knowing why
Clarity does not reduce agility. It reduces unnecessary friction.
HEART perspective
— what early hiring actually tests
From a HEART perspective, early hiring is not primarily about roles or processes.
It is about how leadership choices start to land on people.
Especially in the early stages, hiring tests five things simultaneously:
Human:
Are people seen as humans before roles are defined?
Expectations:
What is clear, shared — or left unspoken?
Awareness:
Does leadership notice its impact early enough?
Responsibility:
Do leaders step in when clarity is missing or tension rises?
Trust:
Do actions consistently match words?
In early teams, trust is not built through values statements.
It is built through everyday leadership choices.
Reflection
Take a moment before moving on.
💡 Where do I tend to delay clarity because it feels uncomfortable or premature?
💡 How visible is my leadership today, through behaviour, not words?
💡 If I hired someone tomorrow, what would they learn about this company from how I act?
💡 Which part of HEART feels hardest for me right now — and why?.
Tools & frameworks
(use when needed)
You don’t need to use all tools at once.
Use them when a decision feels heavy or unclear.
Available tools for this module:
🩷 Leadership visibility check (HEART lens)
🩷 Hiring readiness snapshot
🩷 Optional: Founder alignment mini-check
Books
Who: The A Method for Hiring
– Geoff Smart & Randy Street
A practical, structured approach to hiring that helps leaders avoid guesswork and bias — especially useful in early-stage recruitment.The Ideal Team Player
– Patrick Lencioni
A simple but powerful model for identifying the behaviours that matter most when building early teams.Scaling People
– Claire Hughes Johnson
How to build hiring, people and leadership practices that scale with the company — written from an operator’s perspective.
Talks & videos
Laszlo Bock
– Hiring and people decisions at scale
On structured hiring, decision quality and avoiding intuition traps.Reid Hoffman
– Hiring in fast-growing companies
Founder-level thinking on building teams when roles and structures are still evolving.
You don’t need to consume everything.
Use these when you want perspective, not answers.
Further reading & perspectives
If you want to deepen your thinking around leadership, people decisions and early-stage responsibility, these resources are worth your time.
What’s next
Once you understand how early hiring reshapes leadership,
the next step is learning how to recruit without guessing.
→ Next: Module 3 — Recruitment Basics