You’re only as good as the people you hire. – Ray Kroc
The title and quote should be self explanatory, but the quote albeit great is lacking something essential. It misses out on the importance of improvements.
As a business leader you must and indeed will strive to hire the best people you can find and afford. But once hired your job does not end.
An old boy scout rule states that you should leave things better than you found them. Things might refer to inanimate objects or situations, but you can extend it to people.
Take the time to evaluate your people’s competence, not so much through the perspective of how well they are doing. Focus on how much your people have improved since you first hired them.
It matters not how good you are at this exact moment in time. What matters the most is how much you improve over time.
There was a time in the life of all of us where we knew almost nothing. No manners, no rules, no skills, no talents, nothing at all. Then we started to grow up and surely enough as time passed we learned more and more. Some things good, some things bad but regardless of their intrinsic value, everything we are today is the sum of all past experiences.
So invest in the betterment of the people in your employment. Take your time and adjust your contribution to stabilize their growth. No matter how small the overall improvement might be for an individual employee, if it is a constant improvement then over a sufficiently large timespan when you compare their future selves to their past selves you might stand in awe at how much they have gained.
And the better your people get over time, the better results they can provide you over the same time period.
And any business leader is only ever jealous of other leader’s people, and never of other leaders themselves. The people who work for you set the standard for your business. The higher the people’s quality, the higher is the perceived quality of your business and also of yourself. You’ll do fine.