Read my comment above[1] and do the opposite. If you are not in management, manage your expectations to do what is best for the whole.

For example, if you are the first employee, do not expect to lead your team just because you were there first.

Here is the positive advice version:

1) Do not promote based on tenure. Talent is not 100% correlated with age or (especially) time at the company. Oftentimes the employees who thrive at early companies are generalists or love diverse responsibilities. These may not be the problems you're trying to solve later.

2) Do not promote into people management roles based on individual contribution. To be sure, knowing the problem domain is important, but, especially in engineering, people management skills are orthogonal to programming ability.

If your HR structure caps salaries for individual contributors to the point where ICs are forced to move into management, either change that or (if you determine there is a maximum value of an IC) stick to it.

3) Choose values that are specific to your company and can be reasonably disagreed with.[2] Stick to them, especially when it is hard. Values don't matter when it is the easy choice; they are defined by what you do when shit gets hard.

4) Narrow meetings to only those who provide knowledge which is Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive. If someone does not add something that no one else in the meeting does, remove them. If others need to be updated, send them a summary.

Having an opinion does not qualify it as useful. This is also the first rule of being a CEO and the first rule of hiring product managers out of MBA programs.

5) Define success first, as objectively as possible. If you have to change the definition of success, it should be because what you're building will be fundamentally flawed without pivoting. If you are changing metrics to optimize results, your metrics for success are too in the weeds. Success is defined by what gets done, not how it gets done.

6) Have one clear decision maker. Do not appoint decision makers who are unwilling to make the right decision if it upsets everyone. Of course, they should be able to explain their reasoning enough that it shouldn't upset everyone, but the first objective is not that everyone feels like they got everything they wanted. Different people have different goals at cross purposes.

7) Effort can correlate with success, but certainly does not predict it. Writing code at 2am is not a priori more valuable than at 2pm (in fact, the opposite is likely true.) People who pride themselves as being busy will naturally resist automation.

As with most things, quantity is not the same as quality.

8) Know what pedigree tells you. Getting into Stanford likely means they thrived in high school. That may correlate with success, but certainly does not predict it. Similarly, thriving at a large organization does not predict the same skill set as thriving in a start-up. Because someone works at Google doesn't mean they have any idea how to build Google; because someone is at a startup does not mean they can turn your company into a startup.

Hope this helps.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11702549
[2]: I wrote a few sentences here: http://seneca.systems/values