THE DUCK OR EAGLE TEST: HOW TO SPOT THE WRONG HIRE BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE
Every leader has a story about the hire they kept too long. The sales rep who was “about to hit their number”, the operations lead who “just needed more runway”, and the manager whose team kept quietly underperforming while their boss explained it as ramp time.
Mike Rasmussen has a name for that hire. It’s a duck.
On Say Less Unscripted episode 5 Mike, an automotive sales veteran who climbed from car salesman to General Manager, survived a near-fatal crash, and now trains top sales team, walked Milton and Jacquelyn through the hiring framework that separates sustainable teams from fragile ones.
This is the Duck or Eagle Test.
The Core Framework
“We get guilty of hanging out with people too long and just hoping to turn that duck into an eagle. A lot of times, understand it’s a duck, buddy, it’s not an eagle.”
-Mike Rasmussen, Episode 5
Mike’s metaphor: on every team, there are eagles and there are ducks.
Eagles: Sore, they find altitude, they hunt, you can point them at a target and trust them to figure out the route.
Ducks: They are fine animals but they can’t just soar. They are built for a different life one with a pond, a flock, and the grounded pace. There is nothing wrong with a duck but if you hired for eagle’s work and got a duck, training isn’t going to solve it.
You were looking for a species that doesn’t exist in your current candidate.
Why Great Leaders Keep Trying to Train Ducks
The reason the duck problem persists is that it doesn’t look like a duck problem at first. It looks like:
“They are new, they just need ramp time.”
“They had a tough territory.”
“Their deal slipped through no fault of their own.”
“They are a great culture fit, the numbers will come.”
Each of those sentences are individually reasonable. Stacked over eighteen months, they become the explanation you tell your CFO for why the team missed its number again.
The leader’s mistake isn’t kindness, it’s pattern recognition. The duck you are trying to eagle-train is showing you the same signals every quarter. You are discounting them each time because you personally hired them, or because you like them, or because firing them feels like admitting a mistake.
How to Actually Run The Test
Three signals that tell you, you are looking at a duck:
Signal 1: The behavior pattern repeats, not the excuse
Eagles make mistakes, get corrected, and don’t make that mistake again. Ducks make the same mistake with new excuses. Quarter one it was the territory. Quarter two it was the comp plan. Quarter three it was the market.
If you are three quarters in and the excuses are different but the outcome is identical, the pattern is the person.
Signal 2: They don’t take coaching on the specific thing
Give a duck the exact feedback “you need to do 50 outbound calls a week minimum” and watch what happens. An eagle will ask clarifying questions, build the system to track it, and come back in two weeks with data. A duck will agree, miss the number, and return with a reason the metric was wrong.
This isn’t about willingness, it is about the specific lens through which they process feedback.
Signal 3: Your eagles are doing their work for them
This is the most expensive signal because it compounds. When you keep a duck on the team, your eagles absorb the gap. They take the duck’s account. They cover the duck’s meeting. They do the cleanup and at some point an eagle does the math and leaves.
The best leaders look at the time their eagles are spending cleaning up a duck’s work. When the number gets non-trivial, the duck isn’t costing you one salary they are costing you the retention of your top performers.
The Incremental-Growth Counterpoint
It is worth saying clearly: Mike isn’t a fan of firing people fast. His broader framework on Episode 5 is built on incremental growth.
“Business is all about the quarters, a little incremental growth. And what you do is, you understand that little incremental growth someday will be huge.”
-Mike Rasmussen, Episode 5, 20:34
Some people you hire look like ducks for two quarters and turn into eagles in the third. They needed runway, not a species changes. The Duck or Eagle Test isn’t about speed of judgement. It’s about honesty of judgement and being willing to run the test instead of avoiding it.
The framework only helps if you actually apply it.
The Internal-Battle Version
Mike’s deeper insight on the episode is that the duck-vs-eagle framing applies to your own internal game too:
“A lot of times the battle isn’t outside, we battle ourselves too.”
-Mike Rasmussen, Episode 5, 04:05
The part of you that wants to avoid the hard conversations with an underperforming hire is a duck. The part that wants to cut losses and rebuild the team is an eagle. The test for yourself is the same test you would run on a hire, is the excuse pattern repeating? Are you taking your own coaching?
The leaders who ship the hard decisions are the ones who notice when they have been ducking their own job.
What To Do This Week
Review your team roster. List each person. Next to each name, write the last three quarterly results and whether they are trending up, flat, or down.
Identify the one person whose name is hardest to write that for. That person is probably a duck. The fact that you don’t want to run this exercise on them is the tell.
Set a 60 day re-evaluation. Give them specific, measurable coaching. Write down what “eagle behavior” would look like on that metric and evaluate on day 60 with data not feelings.
If they hit it: great! They were an eagle who needed runway.
If they don’t: ship the decision, your eagles are waiting.
Listen to the full episode: Mike Rasmussen on Say Less Unscripted. For related leadership frameworks, see Dr. Jada Jackson on Assertive communication.