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REACH LX - Leadership Performance The REACH Ecosystem is the world's leading evidence-based solution to help teams, leaders and workplace culture perform to their full potential.

The REACH Leadership Performance Platform helps teams, workplace culture and leaders perform to their potential using the worlds leading people performance ecosystem. The Ecosystem provides you with all the resources you need to take action and measure your impact - or we can provide the services for you - the choice is yours.

What actually predicts a good hire, ranked worst to best. Most hiring leans hardest on the weakest signals.Near the bott...
14/10/2026

What actually predicts a good hire, ranked worst to best. Most hiring leans hardest on the weakest signals.

Near the bottom: the CV (where someone has been, not whether they will do the work well here), the panel's gut feel (mostly a measure of how much a candidate reminds the panel of themselves), years of experience (twelve years of the same year is not twelve years), and the reference check (useful for behaviour, close to useless for whether they were any good).

Better: a skills test that mirrors the real job. If the task looks like a normal Tuesday, the result means something.

The top two are the ones most interviews never test. Strengths, meaning what gives a person energy rather than just what they are good at, which predicts whether they are still trying in month seven. And at number one, what a person does with a question about something that went wrong: whether they reach for the cause inside themselves, or outside themselves. It wins because everything else on the board can be coached, and that one is very hard to shift.

Which of these is in the wrong spot, and where should it sit?

The person doing the bare minimum did not go lazy. The job quietly went heavy.It starts with what a strength really is. ...
13/10/2026

The person doing the bare minimum did not go lazy. The job quietly went heavy.

It starts with what a strength really is. Using Marcus Buckingham's definition, a strength is not what someone is good at. It is what gives them energy while they do it. A weakness is what leaves them flat afterwards. Those two are not the same, and that is where leaders get caught out.

A person can be genuinely good at something that exhausts them, and only average at something they would happily do all afternoon. Skill and energy are different measurements. Fill a week with skilled work that drains them plus admin that drains them, and they push through anyway, because it is the job and they do not want to let their leader down. Until they drop to the minimum. Not out of laziness, out of depletion.

The fix is smaller than most leaders expect. Look at the shape of their week, find the two most draining tasks, and swap them with someone who finds those two easy. The old, engaged version of the person usually comes back, and it costs nothing but a conversation.

Where is a strong performer quietly running on empty, and being read as disengaged instead?

You are not short of good people. Your job ad is quietly filtering them out.A founder hires three people in a year and n...
12/10/2026

You are not short of good people. Your job ad is quietly filtering them out.

A founder hires three people in a year and none stick: no ownership, no care factor, everything has to be chased. The instinct is to conclude something is wrong with people. The better question is what the job ad actually said. Usually the usual: great culture, fast growth, come be part of the journey, a promise to look after the team.

Those hires are not failing the job. They are doing the job that was advertised. Advertise a journey, and the people who apply are passengers, the ones who want to be carried rather than to take ownership.

The fix is not to make the role sound horrible. It is to make it sound true: high standard, hard work, real reward, and plainly not for everyone. That cuts the number of applications, and roughly doubles the ones worth hiring.

The proof: one role pulled 25 applications, with one worth a call. A single honest sentence was added, a commitment to invest in people's growth from the day they join. Same role, same money. Sixty applications, and twelve with real potential. The goal was never volume. It was the right twelve.

Where is a job ad filtering out the exact people it is meant to attract?

11/10/2026

The best salesperson in the building brings in 90% of the revenue. He is also always late and ignores the rules. Should he be fired?

Yes. And it is not reckless. For a lot of founders, it is the only option left.

The fear is legitimate: if that revenue dried up for a month, the business would be in serious trouble. But leaving him in place is not the safe choice it looks like, because of what it tells everyone else in the building. There are no standards here.

Now there are two problems, not one. His behaviour, and the lesson the whole team just learned, that performance buys immunity. Everyone is watching to see what leadership does. They already know what he is like. What they are deciding is whether the standards are real, or whether leadership will do anything for a dollar.

And the part nobody wants to hear: he only has that much leverage because the business never got good at attracting the right people. If one person walking out would end the business, that is not a top performer. That is a single point of failure that has been getting called a top performer.

Where is a business protecting a top performer who is actually just concentrated risk?

10/10/2026

Stop praising the result. Praise the process, and you get more of the thinking that produced it.

That is Paul Findlay's take, from his conversation with Rob Way on the ReachLX podcast, built on Carol Dweck's research.

Working to build curiosity in his son, he found that acknowledging the questioning and curiosity itself, the process, led to more question-asking in more contexts. Praising the outcome did not. Dweck's work was mostly with children, but as Paul puts it, the mechanism works with everybody.

The catch for leaders: most workplace praise is outcome praise. Hit the number, well done. It feels motivating, but it trains people to protect results and avoid the risks and questions that growth needs. Praise the process instead and you reinforce what produces the next result, not just this one.

What does a team actually get praised for, the outcome, or the process that produces the next ten?

10/10/2026

People go stale for a reason that does not look like a problem: they got comfortable.

That is Paul Findlay's warning in his conversation with Sabrina Schwaighofer on the ReachLX podcast.

The trap is quiet. Someone stops being willing to challenge themselves, not from laziness, but because growth is genuinely hard. Real growth means stepping into circumstances where you know that you do not know, where you have not done it and you are not the expert. That discomfort is the signal that growth is happening.

So the move is almost paradoxical: keep yourself uncomfortable on purpose. When everything feels easy and familiar, be suspicious, because comfort and staleness are often the same thing under different labels. Keep yourself uncomfortable, focus on growth, and stay true to your values.

Where has comfort quietly turned into staleness, and what would it take to feel like a beginner again?

09/10/2026

Company values on a poster achieve nothing. The real test is whether a company would hire and fire by them.

That is the point Paul Findlay sharpens in his conversation with Sabrina Schwaighofer on the ReachLX podcast.

Most organisations treat values as a branding exercise: pick five words, print them, frame them in the lobby. But a values poster on the wall is decoration. What turns the words into actual values is decisions, specifically hiring and firing by them. When a company turns down a talented candidate who clashes with a value, or lets go of a strong performer who violates one, the value has teeth.

That is also what genuinely creates culture. Culture is not the poster. It is the pattern of decisions people watch leadership make, especially the costly ones. A value nobody is ever held to is a slogan, not a value.

Which of an organisation's stated values would survive being used to fire someone?

Culture fit is the hiring instinct that feels safe and quietly builds a weaker team.The culture-fit hire rarely looks li...
09/10/2026

Culture fit is the hiring instinct that feels safe and quietly builds a weaker team.

The culture-fit hire rarely looks like a mistake. The candidate interviews well, everyone likes them, the call feels easy. Months later the meetings feel heavier and the manager is quietly redoing work they delegated. The instinct is to blame a bad read on people. Usually it is a target problem instead: hiring for fit selects for people who think the way the team already thinks, and a team of matched instincts ends up sharing one blind spot nobody inside it can see.

The stronger target is culture add: hiring for the strengths a team is missing rather than a copy of the room. Yes, difference can cause friction, for about a month. But that friction is almost always the difference being read as an annoyance instead of the reason the person was hired. The fix is to name the gap out loud. Here is what the team is strong at, here is the gap, here is who fills it. Named that way, the difference stops being friction and becomes the job.

Where is a team most likely to be hiring for fit when what it really needs is culture add?

09/10/2026

Using AI does not mean thinking less. That much-shared study suggesting it does is only right in one narrow context.

That is Paul Findlay's read, from his conversation with Palash Nandy on the ReachLX podcast.

The study found low brain activity in students who had generative AI produce their assignments. But those students were novices by design, producing an output that was prescribed for them. A person with little domain knowledge generating something someone else defined is barely thinking, with or without AI. Low brain activity is the expected result there.

Change one thing, domain expertise, and it reverses. When an expert is actively steering AI toward a specific output, correcting it and judging what is good, that is a significant cognitive load, not an absence of one.

The error is taking a result about novices and stretching it to everyone. AI is most powerful when it amplifies existing creativity and expertise, not when it stands in for thinking that is not there yet.

Is AI being used to skip the thinking, or to amplify thinking that is already there?

08/10/2026

How to manage people properly?

Some of the lessons I learned whilst I was scaling my businesses...

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