Organizations have finite energy. The ones that win spend it building what comes next instead of defending what they already have. I have never seen a company shrink its way back to relevance. Measure growth, chase it, and let everything else be a question of priority.
The best teams are built, not assembled, and building takes longer than hiring. Be kind, not nice. Niceness lets problems sit; kindness says the hard thing because it respects the person enough to be honest. Create conditions where everyone can win. If only some people can win, the rest are just waiting for someone to leave.
Give people responsibility before they're comfortable with it, and support them when they stumble. The constraint is almost never the person. Set the standard high, get out of the way, then go find out whether it's actually happening.
Belief is cheap. I built mine into tools I run every week: a decision brief that forces the call, an anti-sycophancy check that kills the flattery, and a review board that argues back.