Our series of book recommendations to empower talent and fuel brands.
Why Perpetual recommends it
Robert Glazer’s Elevate Your Team makes the case that the most sustainable way to grow a business is to grow the capability of the people already in it, rather than treating hiring as the default answer to every capacity problem. Glazer, who built his own agency using these exact principles, focuses heavily on structured performance reviews, clear core values, and genuinely developmental one-on-ones as the engine of team growth.
The book is particularly strong on the idea that most performance management systems are backwards-looking and punitive by design, when the more useful frame is forward-looking and developmental, less here’s what you did wrong and more here’s the capability we’re building toward together. Glazer backs this with the specific tools and cadences his own company used to scale.
Glazer is also honest about burnout, arguing that elevating a team includes protecting people’s capacity, not just stretching it. A genuinely elevated team is one that’s growing sustainably rather than one that’s simply being asked to do more with the same resources indefinitely.
This mirrors how we think about talent development at Perpetual: growth without sustainability isn’t really growth, it’s borrowing performance from next quarter.
- Growing existing people is often more sustainable than hiring your way out of capacity problems
- Forward-looking, developmental feedback outperforms backwards-looking, punitive reviews
- Structured one-on-ones are a growth tool, not just a check-in ritual
- Sustainable performance requires protecting capacity, not just demanding more of it
A practical starting point is auditing your team’s one-on-one agendas. If they’re mostly status updates rather than development conversations, that’s an easy, high-leverage fix.
We give this book four out of five stars.
