Care to Deliver answers how a team moves forward once it exists. Grow to Deliver answers how you build that team in the first place. Two systems, both built from first principles over ten-plus years, neither off a template.
Calibrated Hiring
A 6-step method adapted from Top Grading’s 12-step original, with one deliberate change: a candidate scores against your current team’s average, not an abstract industry bar.
Score above 5 and you raise the standard. Below 5 and you lower it. That single rule turns hiring from a gut-feel decision into a calibration exercise the whole team can reason about the same way — and it makes the consequence of a hire explicit before you make it, not a year later.
Potential Map
A 9-box performance and potential framework that replaces “I think they’re doing well” with a specific, defensible assessment across four dimensions: mastery, impact, growth, and performance.
It exists because subjective performance impressions don’t survive contact with a room full of managers who each have a different bar. Once the dimensions are named, the disagreement becomes about evidence instead of about taste.
Why both had to work without me
I put the same requirement on these that I put on technical architecture: a system that only works while its author is in the room isn’t a system yet — it’s a person doing a job.
Both were built to run without me standing next to them, and both did.