Half the Chairs Were Empty: 5 Team-Building Lessons From This Week
This week I ran 3 group interviews. Only 30–50% of the people scheduled actually showed up.
If you’ve never built a team, that number probably sounds like a disaster. If you have, you’re nodding. Empty chairs aren’t a sign something’s broken. They’re just part of the math, and the sooner you plan for them, the less they sting.
That week got me thinking about the handful of lessons I keep relearning about building a team. Here are five of them.
1. Book 3x the people you need
You can’t schedule like everyone will show. They won’t.
So if I need a full room, I book about three times the people I need. Not because people are bad, but because life happens: a class runs late, a ride falls through, someone gets cold feet the night before.
The mistake is treating no-shows as a feeling instead of a number. When you plan for them, a half-empty room is still a full interview. When you don’t, it ruins your day and you start doubting the whole plan.
Try this: look at your last few interviews, meetings, or appointments. What percent actually showed? Use that number to plan the next one.
2. Shrink the impossible number into a daily one
Big goals are scary on purpose. “100 deals this quarter” is terrifying. “8 real conversations today” is just a Tuesday.
That’s how I think about almost every target now. Take the big number, break it down until it fits in one day, and then go hit the daily number. Do that and the big one takes care of itself, or at least you find out early that it won’t, while there’s still time to fix it.
The daily number is also the only one you can actually control at 9 a.m.
3. Being the best salesperson on your own team isn’t the flex
I used to be the best salesperson on my own team, and I was weirdly proud of it.
Turns out that just meant I was the bottleneck with a nice title. If everything good runs through you, nothing grows past you.
Training people to do better than you is true leadership. That’s the mistake I’m still correcting: spending less time being the hero of every deal and more time building people who don’t need me in the room.
4. Make the scoreboard so clear nobody’s ever surprised
A team isn’t a family. Families can’t fire Uncle Dave. Teams can.
That doesn’t mean you stop caring. It means the kindest thing a leader can do is make the scoreboard so clear that nobody is ever surprised about where they stand.
Care is the culture. The KPI is the contract.
And one lesson I paid for: the bad hire isn’t the expensive part. Keeping them around because you feel guilty is. Clear numbers make those conversations honest instead of personal.
5. Let AI handle the follow-ups, and spend your energy on people
I run half my week with AI assistants now. After a recent meeting: transcript in, automatic recap out, and 7 calendar follow-ups created. Names blurred, no busywork. The work after the meeting used to be the meeting.
But here’s what AI can’t do. It can’t get a room full of nervous 19-year-olds to believe they can actually do this. That part didn’t get less valuable when the follow-ups got automated. It got more valuable, because now I have more time for it.
If you’re building a team, hand off everything that’s just paperwork, and put that time back into the part only you can do: belief, coaching, and the conversation nobody else will have.
The short version
- Plan for no-shows. Book about 3x what you need.
- Turn the scary number into a daily one.
- Stop being the bottleneck. Build people who can beat you.
- Make the scoreboard clear enough that nobody’s surprised.
- Automate the busywork so you can spend more time on people.
None of this is complicated. It’s just easy to forget when the room is half empty and you’re wondering what went wrong. Usually, nothing went wrong. You just needed a bigger list.
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