Remember that the WHO is more important than the WHAT

The instinct in most organizations is to write the job description first and then go hunting for whoever fits it. I learned to reverse that: find people with the right character and capabilities first — integrity, curiosity, and above all the ability to face reality honestly — and then design or adjust the role around what they're actually good at. Specific skills matter, but skills are comparatively easy to teach. What's hard to teach is how someone behaves under pressure, how they respond to being wrong, and whether they default to learning or to defending.

In practice this means looking for patterns rather than credentials. How does this person behave the moment they discover they were wrong — do they take responsibility for it, or do they immediately start explaining why it wasn't really their fault? Do they treat a mistake as data to learn from, or do they quietly repeat the same one under a different name a few months later? Those behavioral patterns predict long-run performance far more reliably than how well someone performs in a single polished interview, because an interview measures how a person presents themselves for an hour, not how they operate under real pressure over years.

Understanding a person's underlying values, abilities, and skills — in that order — becomes the actual hiring and placement tool. Values tell you what someone believes matters; abilities tell you how they naturally think and behave; skills tell you what they've been trained to do. A resume mostly captures the third category, which is the least predictive of the three.

Putting WHO ahead of WHAT also changes what leadership means day to day. Your job stops being “solve every problem personally” and becomes “build a team capable of solving problems well, then place each person in the role that fits how they're wired.” When the match between person and role is right, the organization becomes genuinely stronger than any single leader inside it — including you.

That is why the most important decisions you make are about who is responsible for what. Choosing the right responsible parties, and holding them to clear outcomes, matters more than any individual plan they will carry out.