Hiring early adopters: finding your hidden leaders

The first time I rolled out a big change at one of my companies, I made the obvious mistake. I went after the loudest sceptic in the room.

I figured if I could convert him — the senior person with crossed arms and a “we tried this in 2014” for every idea — everyone else would fall in line. So I spent weeks on him. Meetings, one-on-ones, data, the whole charm offensive. I lost. He stayed exactly where he was, and worse, I had spent all my political capital arguing with the one person least likely to move while the people who wanted to move quietly waited for permission I never gave them.

That failure taught me something I now treat as a rule: do not start your change with the people who resist it. Start with the people already leaning forward.

The misallocation almost every founder makes

Resistance feels urgent, so it grabs your attention. The sceptic is visible, vocal, often senior. You feel that if you don’t win him, the change is doomed. So you pour your energy uphill, against your own design.

Meanwhile, somewhere in your team, there are two or three people who lit up the moment you described the new way. They are the ones who tried the beta on their own. Who asked “can I take this and run with it?” while everyone else asked “is this mandatory?” These are your early adopters. And in almost every rollout I have been part of — the good, the bad, and the ugly — they were the difference between a change that took root and one that quietly died in a slide deck.

Look for individuals who are open to new ideas and willing to take risks. Often they are your high performers, your innovative thinkers, your future hidden leaders. They are your early adopters to change.

I wrote a version of that line in the book, almost as a footnote inside a chapter on communication. Over the years it has become one of the ideas I lean on most. So let me unpack it properly here.

Why the risk-tolerant ones are your champions

Here is the part that took me too long to understand. Openness to risk is not a personality quirk you tolerate. It is the exact trait change requires.

Every change, even a good one, asks people to give up something certain — a familiar tool, a comfortable process, a sense of mastery — for something uncertain. Most people, very rationally, refuse that trade until the new thing is clearly, overwhelmingly better. Your early adopters are wired differently. They will take the leap on a maybe. They will absorb the early friction — the bugs, the confusion, the half-baked rollout — because the upside excites them more than the downside scares them.

That tolerance for the messy valley is rare and precious. Because here is the thing about any new behaviour: at first it is genuinely harder than the old one. You are paying the cost before the payoff arrives. Most of your team will not cross that valley voluntarily. Your early adopters will — and once they are on the other side and the new way has become the easy way, they become living proof for everyone still standing on the edge.

Spotting them: signal over title

The trap is to assume your early adopters are your senior people. Usually they are not. Seniority correlates with comfort, and comfort is the enemy of risk-taking. So ignore the org chart for a minute and watch for behaviour instead.

The ones to look for tend to:

• Volunteer. When you float a half-formed idea, they say “I’ll try it” before you ask. They self-select into pilots.
• Tinker without permission. They have already built a workaround, a side-project, a janky little script. The instinct to improve things is the instinct you want.
• Ask “why,” not “do I have to.” Resisters ask whether the change is mandatory. Champions ask what problem you are solving — because they want to help solve it.
• Recover fast from a bad first attempt. This is the big one. Watch who tries the new thing, hits a wall, and comes back versus who tries once and uses the failure as a reason to quit.

You are not looking for the most talented person. You are looking for the most forward-leaning one. Sometimes that is a six-month-old hire nobody has noticed yet. Often that is your hidden leader — someone with no title but real pull, the person colleagues quietly ask before they form an opinion.

Recruiting them: give them the keys, not a memo

Once you have spotted them, the worst thing you can do is treat them like everyone else. A mass email does not recruit a champion. Ownership does.

What has worked for me:

1. Bring them in before the rollout, not after. Show them the change while it is still wet clay. Let them shape it. People defend what they helped build — and a champion who co-designed the change will sell it harder than you ever could, because now it is partly theirs.
2. Give them a real problem, not a checklist. Don’t hand them tasks. Hand them an outcome and the autonomy to reach it. Risk-takers shut down under micromanagement; they come alive with ownership.
3. Make them visible. Celebrate their early wins out loud, in front of the room. This does two things — it rewards the champion, and it quietly shows the fence-sitters that the people moving forward are the ones getting noticed.
4. Protect them from the sceptics. Your champions will take arrows for moving first. Stand between them and the “told you it wouldn’t work” crowd, especially when an early experiment stumbles.

This is also a hiring lens, not just a rollout one. When I interview now, I am no longer only asking what someone has done. I am probing for whether they have ever bet on something uncertain and stuck with it through the ugly middle. That trait does not show up on a CV. You have to dig for it — ask about the time they adopted something before it was obvious, or championed an idea their team thought was foolish. The answer tells you whether you are hiring a maintainer or a mover.

The effortless flywheel

There is a Delta-4 logic underneath all of this — the idea, from Kunal Shah, that people only switch permanently when the new way is a massive, irreversible improvement over the old. Most of your team will not feel that delta on day one. The new way is still uphill for them.

But your early adopters cross first. They hit the effortless side. And then they become the proof — the colleague at the next desk who is visibly faster, calmer, happier with the new way. That is far more persuasive than anything you could put in a deck. Resistance does not melt because you argued harder. It melts because the person beside the sceptic stopped struggling.

A ball is hard to push and easy to keep rolling. Early adopters are how you get it moving — so the rest of the team feels momentum, not force.

So stop spending your best energy on your loudest resister. Find the two or three people already leaning forward, hand them the keys, and let them pull the rest across. The job was never to convince everyone yourself. The job was to find the people who would do it for you — and then get out of their way.

If you want the survey templates and the change-champion checklist I actually use to spot these people, they are in the resources. And if you want the longer story of how I learned all this the hard way, that is what the book and my own journey are about.