Evidence receipt / prediction
Published · transcript-backedMolly Graham: prediction
4 Jan 2026 Lenny's Podcast The high-growth handbook: Molly Graham’s frameworks for leading through chaos, change, and scale
“The best people in the world in hiring will tell you they have about a 50% average in terms of being right. That means half the hires don't work out.”
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Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Molly Graham
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- prediction
- Recorded
- 4 Jan 2026
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…It's true. It's drag people that are sitting around not pushing the team forward. So, it's painful and it's horrible because it is humans but, when someone doesn't fit, you ... No one is right all the time when it comes to hiring, I actually say most people are wrong half the time. The best people in the world in hiring will tell you they have about a 50% average in terms of being right. That means half the hires don't work out. That means, half the time, you're going to need to fire the person. So, it's such an important skill to get good at particularly when you're going through a lot of change. And the last one is humans are messy and it's very emotional. And when you're a leader, particularly if you have any kind of anagram too or just if you like to make people happy and you want to be liked, it can be so hard to lead teams because you get tangled in the people. Firing people is a painful experience, reorganizing things, layering people, all these things are emotionally painful for the people and they're emotionally painful for you as a manager. But my mantra that almost always leads in the best direction is serve the business, not the people meaning everyone is better off if this company is wildly successful. Everyone looks smart and makes lots of money or whatever if this company grows and does what we all dream it can. So, at the end of the day, the best decisions, the ones that are always going to be right are the ones that are like, "How do we do the right thing for this business?" And it also helps in political situations. Someone's acting weird or their Bob is raging all over the company, technically, everyone has the same goal. The goal is to build the biggest business possible, that's the answer. The answer is always what's the right thing for the business. And the people stuff can fall away when you actually focus on what's the right thing for the business. A really useful tool to do that that I learned from my manager is to think about, when you're trying to decide whether to fire someone or change a project even though it's going to upset someone, is to say, "Okay, if there were no emotions involved, if this person had no negative reaction to this, what would I do?"…
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