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This tension is real, and most female founders don’t talk about it honestly enough.
We’re socialized from early on to keep the peace. To be liked. To hold the team together. And for a while, especially in the early years, that instinct actually serves you. You need loyalty, scrappiness, and a team that believes in you personally.
But when you’re scaling, that instinct becomes a liability.
The shift I had to make at BrightStar was moving from hiring for comfort to hiring for what the business actually needed next. I stopped asking “Do I like being around this person?” and started asking “Does this person make us better?” Those aren’t always the same question.
On the “cultural fit” vs. “cultural addition” framing, I think that’s exactly right. Cultural fit too easily becomes shorthand for “someone who doesn’t challenge me.” Cultural addition means bringing in someone who fills a gap, even if that creates friction. That friction, done right, is growth.
One tool that helped us get out of our feelings on this was the EOS People Analyzer. It forced us to evaluate leadership against our core values and GWC — Get it, Want it, Capacity to do it. When someone had two or more minuses on core values, or any “no” on GWC, the data told the story our gut wanted to avoid. It removed the ambiguity and, frankly, the guilt.
Now, what about the high performer who’s toxic? This is the one founders get wrong most often. They keep the person because the numbers are good, and replacing them feels too costly. I’ve made that mistake.
Here’s what I learned: a toxic high performer is never just a performance issue. They’re a cultural tax that everyone else on your team pays. The hidden cost — in morale, in the people who quietly leave, in the leadership capital you spend managing around them, always exceeds the output you’re protecting. Always.
The hard truth is that tolerating it sends a message to your whole team about what you actually value. And once that message lands, it’s very hard to unwind.
When the Resume is Perfect: Red Flags to Look Out For
The best resume I ever received belonged to someone I didn’t hire.
Everything on paper was right. The pedigree, the trajectory, the logos. They interviewed well, poised, articulate, and had an answer for everything. And that was actually the first flag. Every answer was too clean. Too packaged. No scar tissue.
When I ask an executive candidate to tell me about a failure, I’m not looking for the rehearsed “I work too hard” version. I’m looking for specificity. What actually went wrong? What did you do about it? What would you do differently? The candidates who’ve done the real work can answer that without hesitating, because they’ve lived it. The ones who haven’t give you a polished non-answer that sounds humble but reveals nothing.
A few other things I watch for:
How they talk about former bosses and teams. If every previous employer was broken, every former boss was the problem, and they were always the ones who saw it clearly, that’s a pattern, not a track record. Self-awareness shows up in how someone talks about their past, not just their future.
Whether they ask hard questions. A truly strong executive candidate is evaluating you as much as you’re evaluating them. They want to understand the real challenges, the leadership dynamics, and what success actually looks like in year one. If someone only asks about comp and title, or worse, asks nothing substantive at all, they’re either not serious or not operating at the level the role requires.
How they treat everyone in the process. Not just you. How they interact with your EA when they arrive, and how they engage with team members who aren’t the decision-maker. People reveal themselves in the moments they don’t think are being evaluated.
On AI-generated resumes — yes, this is real, and it’s accelerating. The resume tells you less and less. Which is actually an argument for spending more time on the reference calls that candidates don’t expect you to make. Not the ones they list. The back-channel ones. The person who worked alongside them, not above them. That’s where the real story lives.
Questions worth asking:
- Tell me about a decision you made that you’d make differently today. Walk me through your thinking at the time.
- Describe a time you had to deliver news to a team that didn’t go well. What happened?
- What does a bad day look like for you — and how do you handle it?
- What do you need from a leader to do your best work? (Listen for self-awareness vs. a list of demands.)
- What are you still trying to get better at?
The goal isn’t to trick them. It’s to get below the performance and find the person.
Testing for the “Founder’s Fire”
You can’t manufacture this. And you can’t interview it out of someone who doesn’t have it.
But you can design a process that surfaces it, or exposes its absence.
The first thing I look for is what someone does before they walk in the room. Did they use our product? Visit our locations? Talk to a franchisee? Read beyond the website? The candidates who have genuine fire show up having done work nobody asked them to do. That unprompted effort tells me more than anything they’ll say in the interview.
I also pay attention to what lights them up when they talk about the role. There’s a difference between someone who’s excited about the opportunity for themselves, the title, the platform, the comp, and someone who’s genuinely energized by the problem we’re trying to solve. Both might interview well. Only one will still be leaning in at month eighteen when the shine is off.
A question I come back to: Tell me about something you built or fixed that nobody asked you to. Not a project that was assigned. Something they saw, cared about, and went after on their own. That’s the closest proxy I’ve found for owner mentality. People with founder’s fire don’t wait for permission. They identify the gap and move.
The other test I use is giving candidates a real problem to work on before a final round. Not a case study that feels like a homework assignment. An actual challenge we’re navigating. How they approach it, what questions they ask, whether they come back with a point of view or just a framework, tells you everything about how they’ll operate when the job is theirs.
Owner mentality also shows up in how someone handles ambiguity. Employees want clear lanes. Founders and people who think like founders lean into the unclear. So I’ll describe a messy, unresolved situation and ask how they’d approach it. The ones with fire get energized. Those who are quietly looking for a comfortable seat become cautious.
One more thing: I look at their history of staying. People with a genuine ownership mentality tend to go deep first before going wide. If someone has five jobs in six years and each move was purely for a title bump, that’s a signal. Founder’s fire means you invest. It means you feel the weight of the outcome. That kind of person doesn’t leave when something gets hard.
The honest truth is that no hire will ever care exactly the way you care. That’s not the goal. The goal is finding someone who cares about outcomes with the same intensity you do, even if their reasons are different from yours.
How to hire People Who Can Manage YOU.
This is the hire most founders get wrong, including me, the first time.
Early on, I hired people who were impressive on paper but ultimately deferential in practice. They’d nod in the room and execute what I said. And I told myself that was alignment. It wasn’t. It was me surrounding myself with people who were afraid to tell me I was wrong. That’s not a leadership team. That’s an echo chamber.
The unlock for me was getting honest about what I actually needed versus what felt comfortable. A founder’s instinct is to hire someone they can manage. The right instinct is to hire someone who will manage back.
So how do you find that person?
First, I watch how they handle disagreement in the interview itself. I’ll float a position I hold, sometimes one I’m genuinely uncertain about, and see what they do with it. Do they push back with a perspective? Do they ask a clarifying question that challenges my framing? Or do they mirror me back to myself? Someone who can’t push back in an interview, when the stakes are low, and they’re trying to impress you, won’t push back when it matters.
The question I ask directly: Tell me about a time you disagreed with a decision from above and what you did about it. I’m not looking for someone who went around their boss or made it political. I’m looking for someone who found a professional, direct way to make their case — ideally coupled with objective data — and then committed once the decision was made. That’s the balance of confidence and humility in action. Strong conviction. Clean execution.
On the humility side, I look for curiosity more than credentials. Truly confident people ask good questions. They’re not threatened by what they don’t know because they’re secure in what they do know. Watch for the difference between someone who performs expertise and someone who demonstrates it. One talks at you. The other asks great questions.
I also ask: What’s something a former CEO or founder did that you thought was wrong — and how did you handle it? This question separates the people who’ve actually operated at a high level from those who’ve only observed it. Real functional leaders have these stories. They’ve been in the room where the hard call was made. They have a point of view.
The other thing I look for is whether they can articulate the difference between their lane and yours. When I ask “how do you think about the boundary between your role and the CEO’s?” the answer tells me everything. Someone who hasn’t thought about this, or who gives a vague answer about “collaboration,” isn’t ready. Someone who says clearly, “My job is to run my function better than you could and make sure you never have to worry about it”, that person understands the deal.
The goal isn’t to hire someone who agrees with you. It’s to hire someone who’s secure enough to disagree well. That combination of backbone and alignment is rare. But when you find it, it changes what’s possible.
The best leadership teams aren’t built on comfort. They’re built on the willingness to hire people who challenge you, see through the polish, bring genuine fire, and tell you when you’re wrong.
That takes a different kind of confidence as a founder — not the confidence to have all the answers, but the confidence to build a team that doesn’t need you to.
That’s the real job.
Want to learn more about how I scaled BrightStar? Read this next: Implementing EOS at BrightStar Care: A Founder’s Journey from Chaos to Clarity
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