Getting good people around you: talent, players vs pretenders and loyalty

You do not have a talent shortage. You have a room problem. The people around you are the company the market actually meets. Strategy is a story until someone in that room keeps a promise, names a miss, or lets a pretender keep the airtime.

I have run businesses across more than twenty countries. The expensive seasons were not the ones where we lacked résumés. They were the ones where I hired for polish, hoped for character, and then spent a year coaching a narrator who could not own a miss. The room filled. The work did not.

Three focus areas sit together here because they are one system. Get good people around you, or the chief executive becomes a bottleneck with a payroll. Tell players from pretenders, or you will keep the wrong ones and lose the right ones. Create loyalty in the organisation, or every good hire is a short-term rental. Skip any one of those and the other two become theatre.

This is not a recruitment essay. I am not going to sell you a funnel. I am going to talk about the practical behaviours that either attract people who raise the standard — or teach the building that impression is the job. Coaching only the CEO leaves that system untouched. The table is the product. The people on it are the method.

Gallup has been blunt about the manager’s weight in this for years. Managers account for at least 70 per cent of the variance in employee engagement scores, and in later work Gallup puts it as 70 per cent of the variance in a team’s engagement being related to management. That is not a reason to make HR famous. It is a reason to treat who sits around you — and how you run them — as an operating decision, not a vibe.

Get good people around you

Good people are not a recruiting slogan. They are the few who raise the standard when you are not in the room. Attracting them is mostly the job you actually run, not the film you put on the careers page.

I mean something specific by “good” at this altitude. Judgement under incomplete data. Ownership of a miss without a press release. The same person off-stage as on-stage. A willingness to disagree in the room that can act, rather than in the corridor that can only gossip. Skill matters. Character without skill is a kind colleague. Skill without character is a pretender with a forecast.

Serious people read three things before they believe your offer. They read the chief executive: do you snatch decisions, or can they own one? They read the load: is this a real race with recovery, or championship week forever? They read the standard: what happened last time someone senior missed? If those three are dishonest, no employer-brand campaign will save you. The people you want will smell it. The people you do not want will apply twice.

When I was running businesses, the hires that compounded were rarely the ones who “looked like a leader” in the final interview. They were the ones who asked about the miss, the decision rights, and what I would stop doing if they took the seat. They were interviewing the job. That is a tell. Pretenders interview the brand. Players interview the work.

The practical work of attracting them starts before a search. Write the job as a load, not a wish. Name the decisions this person will own in the first two quarters. Name the ones you will keep. Name a miss that is already on the table and how you handled it. If you cannot say those things out loud, you are not ready to hire. You are ready to decorate.

Do not confuse “good people around you” with a court. Courts feel loyal. They are not. They manage your mood. You need a small number of people who will tell you when the frame is flattering, and a larger number who will run the standard when you are in another country. That mix is designed. It is why I treat executive team coaching as work on the table, not as a search for a missing hero.

Compensation has to be adult. You will not attract good people by underpaying and calling it mission. You will also not attract them by overpaying and calling it culture. Pay fairly for the load. Then spend your scarce attention on the three things money cannot fake: a brief that is true, a manager who tells the truth, and a standard that does not collapse when the rainmaker is the one who missed.

Gallup’s manager research is useful here because it names the mechanism. People do not leave “the company” in the abstract. In a study of 7,272 U.S. adults, one in two had left a job to get away from their manager to improve their overall life. You can spend a fortune on talent attraction and still be the reason the good ones leave. The magnet is the manager. The magnet is you.

That is also why regular contact is not a soft extra. Employees whose managers hold regular meetings with them are almost three times as likely to be engaged as those whose managers do not. Players want a working meeting: priorities, proof, help. Pretenders want a performance of meetings: updates that cannot be inspected. If your cadence is theatre, you will attract theatre.

Talent is not a pile of pieces. It is who still plays when you leave the room.

What does this look like this week? You stop writing job descriptions that could belong to anyone. You stop letting a search firm sell you “presence” as a substitute for ownership. You put one live problem in the interview and watch whether the person tries to impress you or to understand the constraint. You tell them something unflattering about the company and see whether they lean in or start managing your feelings.

You also look at the people already around you. Attraction is not only inbound. Good people stay in rooms that tell the truth. They leave rooms that protect the narrator. If your last three “A-player” hires became tired and careful within a year, the product is not the labour market. The product is the table.

I do not promise that a cleaner brief will fill the seat. I do insist that a dishonest brief will fill it with the wrong person, and then you will spend two years calling that a talent problem.

If you want a single test before you open a search: would you take this job, knowing what you know about how misses are handled? If the honest answer is no, do not be surprised that good people pass. Attracting talent starts with being a job worth taking.

Players vs. pretenders

A player owns the miss and raises the standard. A pretender narrates the miss and protects the impression. The difference is not charisma. It is what happens when the room is empty and the number is ugly.

I have sat with both. The pretender is often impressive in the first meeting. They have language. They have a map of the politics. They know how to look busy in a steering committee. The player can look quieter. They ask the constraint question. They leave with a date. Three months later you can tell them apart without a psychometric.

Watch the miss. That is the whole diagnostic. A player says: this is what I owned, this is what I missed, this is who else is in the blast radius, this is the next proof, this is the date. A pretender says: the market, the other function, the timing, the board pack, the previous incumbent. They are often not lying about the weather. They are lying about the wheel.

Watch the corridor. After a hard meeting, a player checks the people who have to execute. A pretender checks the people who have to be impressed. One is recovering the work. The other is recovering the brand of the meeting.

Watch the off-stage. Same jokes, same standard, same person with the assistant and with the chair. Pretenders have a public register and a private one. Players have a volume knob, not a second personality. If you need two dinners to find out who you hired, you hired a performance.

Watch what they do with other people’s misses. Players are specific and short. They want the work fixed. Pretenders are generous in public and lethal in private, or brutal in public and absent in private. Either way, the standard is being used as a weapon, not as a floor.

This is where loyalty gets confused. Pretenders can look loyal. They stay late. They agree with you. They tell you what the others will not. Sometimes that information is useful. Often it is a bid for proximity. A player’s loyalty looks ruder. They will disagree while you can still change the call. Then they will run the call they lost.

The cost of keeping a pretender is not only their salary. It is the players who leave. Players can get another job. They have a standard they will not betray for long. Pretenders stay, because the theatre still feeds them. Over two or three cycles you can hollow out a bench and still have a full org chart. The meetings look professional. The company is already gone.

That is why the Gallup finding about leaving a manager should sit on your desk, not in an HR pack. One in two U.S. adults in that study had left a job to get away from their manager. Pretenders in the chief executive role accelerate that. So do good people who will not name a pretender on their own team because the pretender “makes the number”. The number is real. So is the tax.

Regular meetings, done honestly, make the difference visible. Managers who hold regular meetings have people almost three times as likely to be engaged. A working meeting is where a player shines: they come with the miss already named. A theatre meeting is where a pretender shines: they come with a narrative that cannot be inspected. If you only meet when there is a slide to admire, you have built a stage. Stages select for actors.

Players raise the standard when you are not in the room. Pretenders manage the impression of the room.

There is a grey case, and I will not pretend otherwise. Some people are players in one context and pretenders in another. A brilliant operator who cannot tell the truth to a founder. A loyal lieutenant who became a narrator because the last three people who told the truth were punished. Context creates pretenders. Your job is not to diagnose a soul. It is to name a behaviour, put a date on the proof, and refuse to buy the story that “this is just how they are”.

What to do this week. Pick one person you are unsure about. Write down the last miss they were near. Write down what they owned in the room, and what they owned after. If you cannot remember, that is data: you have been consuming narrative. Then have the conversation as a working meeting, not a trial. One fact. One impact. One ask with a date. If they cannot stand on the miss, you do not have a development gap. You have a classification.

Do it as a standard, not a purge. The same questions for everyone, including the people you like. Affection is how pretenders get tenure.

Pretenders fill the room. Players fill the work after the room empties.

If you want a sentence you can use in the next one-to-one: “I need you to own the miss in the same language you use when the miss is not yours.” Watch what happens in their face. Then watch what happens in the following fortnight. Classification without a proof period is just gossip with a title.

The work of telling players from pretenders is also how you build a winning team rather than a talented crowd. Values and attitude do not survive a table of narrators. Neither does morale when it is tight.

Create loyalty in your organisation

Loyalty that helps the company is earned when people can tell the truth, see a future, and trust that the standard will be held when it is inconvenient. Tenure is not that. Perks are not that. “We are a family” is usually a way of making exit feel like betrayal.

I want loyalty from players. I do not want captivity. Captivity looks like loyalty on a dashboard: low regrettable attrition, high tenure in the wrong seats. Players stay because the work is real, the standard is fair, and they can still respect themselves on Friday. Pretenders stay because the theatre still pays.

The Gallup evidence is a loyalty story if you read it that way. People leave managers. Most of the variance in a team’s engagement sits with the chief executive. Loyalty is not an HR programme. You cannot outsource it to a values film.

Earned loyalty has a shape I can inspect.

You keep the promises you can see. If you said the role owned pricing, you do not snatch pricing in week six because you got nervous. If you said misses would be discussed as work, you do not hold a show trial when the miss is public. Broken promises at the top do not stay private. They become folklore. Folklore is how good people decide, quietly, to leave.

You hold the standard evenly. The moment a rainmaker is exempt, loyalty among players starts to rot. They will not make a speech. They will stop bringing you the downside. They will start managing you. That is the beginning of a court. Courts feel loyal. They will also let you drive into a wall with a full tank of praise.

You tell the truth about the future. Not a fantasy ladder. A real sentence: here is where the company is going, here is what that means for this seat, here is what I cannot promise. People can survive a hard year. They cannot survive a story they no longer believe. If the strategy changed, say so. If a role will not exist in that form, say so before the market tells them.

You develop in public. Not a course. A chance to take a pull, with a review afterwards that is specific. Players stay where they can still get better without having to become politicians. Pretenders stay where development means visibility. If your “high potential” list is a proximity list, you are growing a court.

You exit pretenders without theatre. Quiet, factual, fair, final. Dragging a narrator through three performance cycles teaches everyone that the standard is negotiable. Players watch how you fire more closely than they watch how you hire. The loyalty you want is the loyalty of people who saw you do a hard thing cleanly.

There is a version of loyalty I will not help you build. It is the loyalty of people who cannot leave. Visas, golden handcuffs, a town with one employer, a founder who calls dissent disloyal. That is not culture. That is a trap with a logo. Traps look stable until they are not. Then you discover you had attendance, not commitment.

The practical habit is smaller than the speeches. Open the next one-to-one with the miss, not the win. Keep a working meeting on the calendar even when the week is “too full” — especially then. When you change a decision right, say it in the room that lost it, not in a side chat. When someone tells you a downside, write it down before you defend the favourite option. Those are loyalty behaviours. They are also how trust is earned when the pressure is on.

Loyalty is reciprocal. You cannot ask people to stay through a hard quarter if you will not stay in the conversation when it is awkward. You cannot ask for candour if you punish the last person who offered it. You cannot ask a team to be one company if you run a private court. The organisation copies the chief executive. If you want loyalty in the building, practise it in the room that can see you.

This is also why another hire is sometimes the wrong medicine. If the table cannot hold a standard, a new name on the card becomes either a pretender who fits or a player who leaves. Coach the executive team, not just the next résumé. The constraint is often the room.

If you only remember one move: hold the next miss in the open, at the same volume you would if a junior person had caused it. Even standards are how loyalty among players is minted. Uneven standards are how you train a court.

Reflection questions

1. Who around you raises the standard when you are not in the room — and who manages the impression of the room?
2. What happened last time a senior person missed, and what folklore did the building keep?
3. Which of your one-to-ones are working meetings, and which are theatre?
4. If a player you respect left this quarter, what would they say was the real reason?

The next chapter in this guide is about what those people then do together: values that cost something, attitude that is not a mood, and morale when it is tight. Read Building winning teams when the bench is right and the table still cannot hold. If the live problem is the conversation you have been postponing with one name on the card, go to Trust under pressure.

If you want to put the actual table on the table — who is a player, who is a pretender, and what loyalty you are really running — book a 30-minute strategy call. Bring one miss and one name. We can work from there.