Over my ten-year journey as a co-founder, my partners and I have twice decided to hire "expert" senior managers with proven track records from renowned companies to help us grow. Both times, this not only resulted in a waste of money due to their high compensation but also a waste of time and energy. Onboarding and managing them took significant effort, yet they failed to deliver meaningful results. Eventually, they left, and we realized that while they had been successful in large organizations with thousands of employees, our smaller, 100-person company may lacked the structure they were used to for delivering results.
We concluded that they were high-level managers with little hands-on experience, accustomed to having large teams to execute their plans. They were often slow to recognize their lack of progress, or didn’t recognize it at all, and frequently spoke about the need for more "strategic" actions when what we really needed was to focus on executing key priorities.
So I related to PG's post.