Give people a job slightly bigger than the one they expected
Branson built a group of companies by handing people roles they had not quite earned yet. The idea holds, with one condition that his line leaves out.
When people are placed in positions slightly above what they expect, they are apt to excel.
The Virgin group grew by giving people jobs a size too large. A record-shop manager ran a label; someone from the label helped start an airline. Branson has told versions of this for years, and the sentence above is the short form he has repeated: pitch the role just past what the person thinks they are ready for, and most of them grow into it.
Why the stretch works
Expectation sets effort. Someone handed exactly the job they applied for tends to do it at the level they already know. Someone handed a slightly larger one has a reason to learn quickly, and usually knows that the person who chose them is watching and on their side. In a young company this is also a matter of arithmetic. There are more jobs than experienced people to fill them, so every early hire ends up doing something they have not done before. The only real choice is whether that happens by design, with support, or by accident, without it.
There is a quieter benefit too. People who are trusted early tend to stay, and a small company’s biggest cost is often the one it never sees on a spreadsheet: the good person who leaves because the work stopped growing.
Where it fails
The key word in the line is “slightly”. A stretch that is too large is not an opportunity. It is a setup, and it tends to fail in public, which damages the person and the team around them. The difference usually comes down to three things the sentence does not mention: whether the person has someone to ask, whether mistakes in the first months are cheap enough to survive, and whether the new scope was explained rather than simply dumped on them.
It also does not work for every role. Where an error is expensive or irreversible, in finance, security or anything touching safety, experience is not a formality, and a promotion made mainly to see what someone can do puts other people at risk.
Using it well
The practical version is modest. Give a person the next job, not the one after it. Say out loud that it is a stretch, so that asking for help reads as sensible rather than weak. Check in more often at the start than later. And be ready to move someone back without making it a disgrace, because a company that punishes an honest overreach will soon find that nobody volunteers for anything larger than their title.