You find out who they are by what they catch
I was recently asked what I consider my most important professional achievement. I didn’t name a product, or a number, or a title. I said it was the people: the careers I helped start, the ones I pushed and influenced for the better, and the quiet satisfaction of watching some of them become some of the best in the market.
I meant it. It’s the thing I’m proudest of.
I’ve said nothing about the method behind it, which was far less noble than the answer made it sound. Because the truth is I have been wrong about people more times than I can count.
The person I fought hardest to hire turned out to be the wrong call. The quiet one I almost passed on outgrew the room. I usually didn’t know which way I’d misjudged someone until much later, long after the decision was made.
For years this bothered me, because I thought judging people in advance was the job: read the CV, run the interview, spot the future leader across the table, be right. I’m not sure that skill exists; if it does, I never had much of it. What worked instead was simpler. I stopped trying to predict who would grow and started throwing things at people to see who reached.
A problem slightly too big for the role. A project nobody had owned before. A meeting they had no business being in. You throw it, and you see what happens. Most of the time you can’t tell in advance who will catch and who will let it drop. The ambitious-looking one freezes. The one you’d written off as steady-but-limited reaches up, grabs it, and asks for the next one.
That’s the whole method. You throw constantly. The people who want to grow catch the balls. Some balls drop, that’s fine, that’s expected, that’s information too. You pick them up and you keep throwing. You don’t stop because a few hit the floor.
The obvious question is what happens when too many drop. And for this you should look at the pattern rather than the number. One person dropping repeatedly is about them: either they don’t want to grow, which is allowed, and you respect it by leaving them alone instead of escalating until something breaks; or they’re in the wrong role; or you’re misjudging what they can hold and throwing the wrong size. That’s a conversation, not a verdict. But when most of the team is dropping, it isn’t them, it’s you: throwing balls too big with no context and no support, which is abandonment dressed up as a stretch, or you’ve assembled people who don’t reach, and that you fix at the door, not with more throwing.
The other half of it is cost. You can throw freely only because the balls are cheap, internal, low-stakes, recoverable. The skill is matching the size of the ball to what you can afford to drop. The day the expensive, can’t-take-it-back ones are the balls hitting the floor, you weren’t developing anyone, you were gambling with things you had no business gambling with. Too many becomes too much not when the count gets high, but when the drops cost more than the growth is worth.
The humbling part is that you genuinely cannot do this from a distance, on paper, before the fact. You find out who someone is by what they do with something real in their hands. Not by what they say in the interview, not by how they look on the org chart. By what they catch.
So I’m generous about dropped balls. Genuinely. Missing is part of the deal; if nobody’s missing, you’re not throwing hard enough.
There is exactly one thing I am not generous about, and it sits in a completely different category: dishonesty. Stealing, lying, covering things up. A missed ball is about capability, and capability can grow. Dishonesty is about character, and I have never once seen it improve with patience. The talented dishonest person is the most expensive hire you will ever make. I learned that one the hard way too.
There’s a harder version of getting this right that nobody warns you about. Keep throwing, and the best catchers grow faster than your org chart can keep up with, until one day they’re ready for something you don’t have to give them. I’ve let good people go because they succeeded, and what they needed next wasn’t something I had. I could have dressed up a sideways move as a promotion and kept them another year. I didn’t, because the map they were actually following didn’t run through my department. That’s the part that doesn’t feel like winning, you develop someone well enough and you lose them to it. Keeping good people small so they stay is the worse trade.
People ask whether betting on people is worth the risk, given how often it goes wrong. It is, and it isn’t close, provided you see the risk correctly. A bad bet costs time, money, friction, all recoverable if you sized the ball right; a good one compounds in ways you can’t engineer any other way. The trap is believing the alternative is safe. Throw nothing, hire only the proven, keep everyone in their lane, and nothing breaks, but nothing grows either. The cost of the bet is visible: the dropped ball, the hire that didn’t work. The cost of not betting is invisible: the people who’d have become something and didn’t, because nobody threw them anything. You never see that bill, so you never count it. It’s the larger one.
People sometimes say ‘you’re only as good as your team’ like it’s a slogan. But it’s literally how the work happens. You don’t do it, they do. Your output is their output. Which means the judgment about people, and the constant throwing, and the discipline about who you keep, that isn’t a soft skill you get to alongside the real job.
It is the job.
I should be honest about the motive. A former boss of mine used to say a good manager is someone smart enough to spot every problem and lazy enough to get someone else to solve it. There’s truth in it, but it leaves out the hard part. Handing a real problem to someone who might drop it takes nerve, not just laziness. That’s what throwing a ball actually costs you. It looks like noble commitment to growing your people. Mostly it’s that you don’t want to do everything yourself, and you were willing to risk that they’d fail. The lazy move and the brave one and the generous one all turn out to be the same move.
So here’s the thing you can do this week: throw one ball you wouldn’t normally throw. Give someone a problem that’s slightly too big for where they are right now. Don’t explain it too much. Then watch.
Throwing the ball is the easy part. Anyone can do that much. What you can’t get from a post like this is the judgment underneath it: which drops were theirs and which were yours, and the honesty to tell the difference when it’s your fault. That doesn’t come from advice. It comes from throwing a few hundred and paying attention to where they land.
And keep a few spare balls. Some are going to hit the floor. And the best catchers, eventually, move on.
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