One of my business partners asked me a question a couple weeks back that stuck with me. “What does it actually take to hire the rockstars everybody brags about? The Spotify, Netflix, Anthropic kind of people.”

My answer surprised him.

Sometimes it takes money. But most of the time? It takes a shot at glory. Once in a while, it takes both.

Here’s what people get wrong. They think great talent is the expensive option and mediocre talent is the budget option. Nope. They both cost a fortune. Great talent you have to pry loose from someone else who already figured out how good they are, and that’s pricey. Poor talent bleeds you slowly, every single day, by not delivering the thing you actually hired them to do. One bill comes upfront. The other one never stops.

I stopped looking for finished people

I’m outcome-driven to a fault. So somewhere along the way, I quit hunting for the polished, already great hire and started hunting for the hungry one. The person sniffing around for a platform. A stage. A place to do something worth remembering.

Then you give them just enough.

Set a clear direction. Get out of their way. That’s basically the whole recipe.

And they’re going to fail. A lot. Reward that. When someone fails fast, that’s a win, and you treat it like one. It’s kind of like when a kid faceplants learning to ride a bike. You don’t ground them. You pick them up and point at the pedals again.

What you do not reward is the slow stuff. Prolonged failure. The same mistake showing up a third time wearing a different hat. That’s not learning. That’s a pattern, and patterns tell you everything.

The people who turn into your future greats? They’ve got a few tells. They never make the same mistake twice. They automate anything they catch themselves doing more than twice. And they police their own commitments without you standing over them. I don’t have to chase them. They chase themselves.

Hate to lose, not lose gracefully

This is the part I care about most.

I’ve spent years as an executive leader building teams of people who take real pride in finishing what they start. And the trait I keep coming back to is simple. I need people who hate to lose.

That’s not the same as being a good loser. A good loser shrugs and moves on. The people I want stew on it, then try again, then again, and keep going until the thing is done. It’s the difference between what I started calling the corporate paycheck hunters and the people who actually want to break something open and rebuild it better.

One group shows up for Friday. The other shows up because the problem is still unsolved.

So how long does it take to grow one of these people from scratch? In my 25 years around product innovation, somewhere between six months and a year and a half. Faster now, honestly, with the AI tools we’ve got.

And I know I’ve got a real one when they keep surprising me. When the work comes back better than I could’ve drawn it up myself. When they show me a way to do something that nobody on the team had even imagined. The research backs the long game here. Anders Ericsson’s work on deliberate practice found that elite performance comes overwhelmingly from focused, effortful reps, not some genetic lottery ticket (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993).

Not everybody gets to be a rockstar

Here’s a thing nobody likes to say out loud. You don’t want a team full of rockstars.

Too many and you’re running in a thousand directions at once. You want a handful. Everyone else needs to be a solid A player. Your B players will sometimes leap up to the A level for a stretch, and that’s great, but they can’t hold it long term. Doesn’t mean you don’t need them. You absolutely do. They keep the whole thing balanced and moving.

What you cannot carry is a C player. Same mistakes on repeat. No self-improvement. Never once jumps a level, even briefly. Usually a bad attitude riding shotgun. Cutting that waste fast is just as much the leader’s job as growing the talent.

The Burnout Connection

Here’s where this quietly turns into a burnout story. When you reward fast failure and refuse to punish smart risk, you give people permission to breathe. Edmondson’s research on psychological safety showed that teams who feel safe taking interpersonal risks learn more and perform better (Edmondson, 1999).

The opposite is a place where every mistake gets you grilled, so people stop trying, stop telling the truth, and start quietly burning down. Carrying a C player does the same damage from another angle. Your A players end up dragging the dead weight, resenting it, and eventually wondering why they bother. Great teams don’t just produce. They protect the people inside them.

Trust Your Instinct

You already know who your hungry ones are. You can feel it in how they take feedback, how they hate losing, how they fix something before you even flag it.

Here’s what to do this week. Pick one person on your team with that fire. Hand them something slightly bigger than they’re ready for. Set the direction, then back off and let them swing. Watch what comes back.

And if you’ve got a C player you’ve been tolerating because firing is uncomfortable? That discomfort is costing your best people more than it’s costing you.

If you want help building a team that grows talent instead of grinding it down, come find a time and let’s talk: https://book.drdegnan.com

Bibliography

Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363