Yesterday I wrote about the Right Person, Right Role, Right Stage model with hiring. How all three need to be emphatic ticks for a successful hire. What do I mean by Right Person? I have a cascading model of:
They are sequenced this way because they are sequentially more malleable, meaning trainable, meaning a deficit in a lower area is less significant than a higher one. In my experience, reliability is very malleable. Standards are fairly malleable. Ability is not that malleable, especially over a short time horizon that you need someone to be effective in, but it is a bit malleable. Whereas integrity is not at all malleable..
It is cascading because if the higher level is a no, there’s no point considering the other levels. This is important from a decision discipline perspective. It can be very easy to misguidedly rationalise a deficit in integrity due to an abundance of ability. Whereas assessing each in isolation as sequential gates prevents this. He has different categories beyond integrity, but Warren Buffett puts it brilliantly when he says: “You’re looking for three things, generally, in a person. Intelligence, energy, and integrity. And if they don’t have the last one, don’t even bother with the first two”.
I’ll dive deeper into each of the four levels in subsequent posts.