A Players Hire A-Plus Players
Make superior functional talent a source of leadership pride
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 99%
Define leadership success as assembling people who perform their functions better than the leader could. Start with a clear standard for excellence, then seek candidates whose evidence exceeds your own capability in that area. The emotional test matters: if superior talent feels threatening, reframe it as confirmation that you are secure and capable enough to build an exceptional team. Once hired, give the specialist real ownership rather than pulling decisions back to preserve status. Kawasaki contrasts this with a downward hiring cascade in which insecure B players choose C players and quality deteriorates. The mechanism compounds in the other direction when strong leaders deliberately add people who raise the team’s ceiling and can repeat the same hiring standard.
Origin
Kawasaki adapted a Macintosh-division saying from A players hiring A players to A players hiring A-plus players.
Core principles
- 01Hire for functional superiority rather than personal comfort
- 02Leadership value is not being best at every job
- 03Insecure hiring compounds downward
- 04A stronger team validates the person who assembled it
How to run it
- 1
Define functional excellence
Specify the outcomes and behaviours that distinguish exceptional performance in the role.
Pro tip Use work evidence rather than pedigree as the primary signal.
Watch out A vague role invites comfort-based hiring.
- 2
Raise the comparison
Ask whether the candidate can do the function better than you or the current team can.
Watch out Do not quietly lower the standard to protect your status.
- 3
Verify superior ability
Use concrete work, references, and role-relevant exercises to confirm the candidate’s advantage.
Pro tip Look for repeated outcomes, not confident self-description.
- 4
Hire without fear
Choose the stronger person and frame that decision as evidence of leadership confidence.
Watch out Hiring brilliance without integrity can create a different failure.
- 5
Transfer ownership
Let the hire lead the function and judge yourself by the quality of the team’s combined output.
Pro tip Make hiring better people part of the team’s own leadership expectation.
Watch out Micromanaging the expert after hiring neutralises the advantage.
In the wild
A CEO hires leaders in product, sales, finance, and operations who each exceed the CEO’s functional skill. Rather than interpreting that gap as weakness, the CEO treats the room’s combined superiority as evidence that the leadership job has been done well.
→ The organisation gains a higher ceiling without requiring one executive to be best at every discipline.
Common mistakes
Hiring for comfort
Choosing people who never threaten the leader’s status begins the downward B-to-C hiring cascade.
Keeping the function anyway
A superior hire cannot improve the team if the leader refuses to transfer authority.
Is it for you?
Best for
It is best for founders and managers hiring specialists whose work they cannot or should not do best themselves.
Not ideal for
It is not ideal when a candidate’s raw ability is high but integrity, collaboration, or role fit is poor.
From the transcript
“the biggest lesson that I learned in employee recruitment and retention and optimization really is to hire better than yourself”
“A players hire A players, B players hire C players, C players hire D players.”
“I've subsequently modified that so that A players hire A+ players.”
From the episode
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