I’ve written about the Right Person, Right Role, Right Stage model with hiring. Then how Right Person was a cascading gate model of Integrity, Ability, Standards and then Reliability. The last post covered the Integrity gate. This post covers Ability.
The most important thing I’ve learnt is to hire for strengths vs lack of weaknesses. Everyone has weaknesses. There is no such thing as a meta gold medal heptathlon/decathlon when it comes to individual ability. A successful team, and consequently a successful business, can only be built on strengths. That is not to advocate being wilfully blind to weaknesses. It is imperative to identify them and ensure they can be mitigated within the team. But it’s peoples’ strengths that will determine whether we get to where we aspire to get to.
There is hard and contextual ability. Hard is the raw, genetic skills to be able to perform. The vast majority of people have this. It’s not like an athletic pursuit that requires raw physical traits. Intellect is fluid. The great irony of the IQ test is that its inventor, Alfred Binet, originally designed it to identify those not benefitting from the educational system, so new approaches could be designed. It rests on the premise that intellect is malleable. When it comes to hard ability, it is really then about a person’s ability to learn. I’m a big (at times too big) believer in hiring for slope vs Y-Intercept for this reason.
Contextual ability is compatibility. Does that person’s strengths (and weaknesses) suit our industry, team and the product or service we sell? Do they have the skills and experience for the role we’re hiring them to do (next stage of the model, future post). Is there an intrinsic source of passion for them? That’s key as I don’t believe a person can be great at something they’re not passion about.
With more experienced hires it can often be hard to assess their skills and experience. They likely will have much more experience than me in their domain. There’s a risk of falling foul of Batesian Mimicry and being seduced by buzzwords. Two things I’ve learnt on this: 1) ask them to explain things to you like a 5 year old. True masters of their craft are always masters of the simplicity beyond sophistication, 2) find someone who does have experience in that domain, who knows what great looks like, who you trust, to help you assess.
That’s Ability. Next stop, Standards.