Exceptional Talent

Everyone wants exceptional talent. Yet most companies struggle to both find and retain truly exceptional people. After over a decade of building teams and companies, I’ve noticed we keep looking for the wrong signs!

To many leaders, the exceptional employee tend to be the vocal, fast-moving type. The person who jumps into Slack with instant solutions. The developer who stays late to fix production issues. The engineer who always has stories about the disasters they’ve averted.

We celebrate these firefighters and this bias toward the visible shapes how we hire, how we promote, and ultimately, who we consider exceptional.

You see this in sports too. Everyone knows about Michael Jordan, but fewer remember Bill Cartwright. Bill wasn’t a standout on the scoreboard, but he talked to everyone on the team, making sure they felt valued and supported. The Bulls wouldn’t have been the Bulls without MJ, but it also wouldn’t have been Bulls without Bill.

I’ve been fortunate enough to work with my own Bill Cartwright. Let’s call him Glenn*, and he taught me everything I know about recognizing quiet excellence. I first met Glenn at university and he was the first person I hired when tasked with building a team in Beijing (and later rehired at Devies).

Glenn is not your typical fast-moving hero employee. Glenn speaks slowly, eats slowly, and types slowly (about half my WPM). If you don’t know him, you might think he’s not getting much done in a day.

But Glenn has this uncanny ability to think five, six, seven steps ahead. Every action is deliberate. Every line of code he writes is meticulously placed in just the right spot. When he is done with a task, it does more than just close the ticket he’s working on. His work becomes building blocks for everything else. Glenn also loves also involving others. Through whiteboarding solutions and sharing knowledge in pull requests, he makes everyone around him better.

I think Glenn is exceptional, yet in many companies he could easily be overlooked. So why do we keep missing these quiet system thinkers, in favor of our vocal firefighters?

First, there’s the allure of immediately visible work. When someone jumps in to solve an urgent problem, their contribution is clear and measurable. “Sarah fixed the database issue in two hours!” is an easy story to tell. “Tom’s architecture choices prevented database issues for the past year” is harder to quantify and easier to overlook.

Second, we’re culturally biased towards extroversion. We tend to associate leadership and competence with outgoing personalities, quick decisions, and constant communication. This bias runs so deep that we often mistake introversion for lack of initiative. Note though that I’m not saying we shouldn’t promote extroverts. But rather that we should look at the output of the work, not how much the person speaks.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we often mistake motion for progress. Activity feels like productivity. Someone running from crisis to crisis appears to be working harder than someone spending hours thinking through system design. But as any experienced builder knows, time spent thinking before acting often saves weeks or months of work later.

These biases shape our entire organizational culture. They influence who we hire, who we promote, and ultimately, what kind of talent we retain. The real challenge lies in recognizing excellence that doesn’t match our expectations.

So the next time you're evaluating talent, whether it's someone you've hired or want to hire, pause and ask yourself: Are you seeing their whole impact, or just their loudest moments?

​ ​* True to form, Glenn is not much for publicity and asked to remain anonymous for this piece.