The cult of the ‘self-starter’ is killing your team
Luke Amasi, senior client director at iProspect, a Dentsu company, writes about the widespread desire to have an entrepreneurial, self-starter on the team – and what that actually looks like in practice.
Luke Amasi
What if I told you nearly half of all new hires flame out within eighteen months?
That’s not bad luck, that’s a systemic failure. And yet, scan any job ad and it reads like a corporate cliché drinking game: entrepreneurial, self-starter, hustler. I even had ChatGPT scrape Seek.com and found “self-starter” shows up 4.1x more often than humility. Which probably explains why so many workplaces feel less like businesses and more like tense family reunions — everyone’s pretending they want to be there, until they don’t.
And here’s the kicker: how often would you hire someone who slaps “confident self-starter” on their resume? Probably more often than you’d like to admit. On paper it sounds like an ambitious go-getter who’ll take things off your plate, right?
Wrong. That’s the kind of hire who snatches things off your plate, drops them, and runs off chasing something shinier, while the rest of the team cleans up the mess.
