This year I have a goal of improving my VO2 Max by three points, and generally improving my “Hill Score” on Garmin (I didn’t quantify this goal because I’m not familiar with the metric).
I took my fitness goals and turned them into habits. I chose a barbell strategy; hill sprints and Zone 2 training.
Every week I put in the work. I run even when I don’t feel like it. I slow down to keep my heart rate low for Zone 2 running. I do the mileage.
Day over day it doesn’t feel like anything is happening. It feels like I run at the same pace every time I go out there. It can be discouraging in the short term.
But today, over five months into the year, I can say that in reality things have improved. My VO2 Max has improved by two points (goal of three). My Hill Score has gone from 39 to 50! I tested my 5K time recently and hit a modern record (for me - maybe I’ll tell you the story soon).
I’m putting in the work…and it’s working.
As they say, success is a lagging indicator. You’ve got to focus on habits and think long term.
How are things going with your goals? Have you turned your goals into habits? If you’re discouraged, just remember that you may not notice improvement in the short term, but if you stick with it, you’ll see progress in the long term.
Let me know how things are going by emailing me at heykev@kevinnoble.xyz. I’d love to hear what’s working, and what’s not working!
Kevin
A Quote
“
Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.
— Viktor E. Frankl in "Man's Search for Meaning"
Three Things
1 - 💡 Leadership Lessons from Dev Ittycheria, CEO of MongoDB - Dev, the CEO of MongoDB, shared some good leadership lessons on the latest Invest Like the Best podcast. What stuck with me was; being judgmental, hiring for characteristics, and how to improve accountability.
2 - 📘 Richard Rumelt’s, “The Crux,” on Improving Strategy - I was recently trying to think through where goals fit in strategy. I know goals by themselves are not strategy, but they are relevant! Richard Rumelt asserts that they come after strategy. This is a great book to add to your list if you want to improve your thinking on strategy.
3 - 💃 How do you practice finesse in communication? - Wes Kao recently wrote about communicating with finesse. It’s one of those subtle skills that’s easy to see, but hard to do. She’s got a good example in this article and gives ideas on how to cultivate it.
Deeper Dive on Hiring for Characteristics
When hiring, what do you look for? Experience? Skills? Education?
Those things are all surface-level and don’t tell you much about whether someone on your team will succeed or fail. You need to look deeper.
I’ve hired hundreds of people and performed thousands of interviews across my twenty-year career. I will share insight from that experience to improve your odds of finding the right person for your environment - how to hire for characteristics
I’ll share why it’s important and how to identify them. I’ll provide some examples, then I’ll go into how to interview for them and how to continue testing during onboarding.
It’s true that systems are very powerful, but every bad system that’s ever been toppled has been overcome by people. People can identify bad systems and replace them with better ones.
Just about everything that happens in your business happens because of the people.
Customers generate their feelings on a company based on their experiences working with the people in that company. You can have a killer logo and marketing campaign, but if your customer has a bad experience with an employee, that’s the experience they’ll remember and tell their friends.
You better get effective people!
Why should I hire for characteristics?
If we all want good people, what’s the best way to identify them?
You could try based on experience and education (e.g. a bachelors degree in engineering with five years of experience), but that just gets you in the rough ballpark. You need something better.
You can refine further by skills. If your employee will write SQL code 50% of the time, you better check that they can write SQL.
Skills themselves won’t tell you whether you’ve got an A-player on your hands. You’ll find lots of people with the skills you need, but many of them could still fail in your environment. You need something better.
Enter characteristics.
As I’m defining them, characteristics are the innate traits and qualities of an individual. They develop over a lifetime of experiences. They’re deeply ingrained and tend to be relatively stable. They don’t change through training.
A person’s characteristics (innate qualities) affect their behaviors (what they do).
The collection of everyone’s behaviors is what defines your culture (“people like us do things like this”).
Your culture is what affects whether, and how well, you’ll achieve your goals.
Since characteristics are so ingrained, and have such a large effect on behaviors and ultimately goals, they’re critical to look for during hiring.
The first step is figuring out what characteristics you need.
How do you identify the characteristics?
There are two main ways to identify the characteristics you need; looking at what works, or by working backward.
Looking at What Works
If your team is humming along, crushing goals, and there’s not much you’d change, then use this method.
Look at the best performers on the team. What traits are most common? What behaviors do you observe?
Are people go-getters? Are they helpful? Do they dive deep or stay on the surface? Do they tackle one issue to conclusion, or juggle multiple issues simultaneously?
Brainstorm ideas with your team and get things on a whiteboard.
I did this several years ago with my team. I had just exited someone, and I really wanted to figure out why they didn’t succeed before going back to market. I didn’t want to repeat the same mistake I had just made.
I got a few key people into a room and we did the brainstorming exercise. What did we see in the people who were successful on the team? We got a LOT of ideas on the board. More than 20, even after filtering some out!
Folks having fun coming up with hiring characteristics.
From there, I took those ideas and whittled it down into the small set that resonated with what felt consistent with the culture and values that I wanted, and that matched the broader values of the organization.
The resulting list of characteristics was: drive, curiosity, humility, and judgment. I’ll share more detail about what they mean down below.
People who have shared values and principles get along. People who don’t will suffer through constant misunderstandings and conflicts.
If your team is struggling to work together and hit their goals, then use this method.
Start with your goals, since those are usually defined. Then ask, what culture would be most helpful in driving that outcome?
Would you need team players who lift each other up, or strong individuals with loose connection to the broader team? Do you want deep research or fast speed?
What behaviors would you observe in this culture? How would decisions get made? What would problem solving look like? How would the team execute?
Use this behaviors to define the characteristics of individuals in that team. Focus on getting a list that resonates with you and is something you feel confident in when describing to others.
Let’s look at some example characteristics.
Examples of Characteristics
Let’s start with the four I shared earlier; drive, curiosity, humility, and judgment.
Drive - This is about grit. Responsibility, ownership, and agency. This is being in the arena, not in the stands.
Curiosity - This is fascination and wonder. Being interested in learning more and going deeper.
Humility - This is knowing you don’t know everything. It’s self-awareness, letting go of ego, and thinking of the team.
Judgment - This is making good decisions. It’s drawing conclusions and charting a path forward.
I find these work really well together and balance each other out. For example, someone with humility and no drive doesn’t get much done. Someone with drive and curiosity may go too deep on a subject, but judgment will stop that.
These resonated and worked well in my own environment, but they’re far from the only options!
Patrick Lencioni, in his book, “The Ideal Team Player,” argues to look for people that are humble, hungry, and smart.
Dev Ittycheria (linked in three things earlier!) similarly looks deeper than at a person’s skills and experience.
Do you believe in the value of hard work? How do you measure grit?…How you manage grit? How you manage your ego? Are you comfortable with low status? Are you comfortable being unconventional? Can you delay gratification? Do you have long-term orientation? Those are keys to being really successful, but it’s so hard to do because it’s so contrary to human nature. How do you find someone who can really do those things and what drives them to do those things?
- Dev Ittycheria, CEO of MongoDB, on the Invest Like the Best podcast
Again, whatever list resonates with you and your environment is great!
In case it’s helpful, here are some other characteristics I’ve seen listed out: dependability, determination, ambition, flexibility, integrity, loyalty, self-reliance, confidence, enthusiasm, imagination, and adaptability.
I could go on, but I’m sure you’ve got the gist of it 😀
Now we’ve got a list of characteristics. How do you hire for them?
How do you test for characteristics?
Hiring for skills is easy. You look for it on their resume. You give the candidate a test. Done.
Hiring for characteristics is hard, which is why it’s less common, especially in larger companies. Your HR and Talent teams will push you to focus on skills because it’s easier and clearer to do so. Fight that pressure if you want to have a high-performing team.
There are two principles that are important in thinking about testing characteristics; adversity reveals character, and how you do anything is how you do everything. Since characteristics manifest in behaviors, the best way to test for characteristics is to get examples of how your candidate behaves while doing hard things.
You can do this by giving the candidate something hard to do during the interview. You could try a hypothetical situation, but what people say can be different than what they do.
Most of the time you’ll be probing for challenges in their history and diving into the candidate’s behaviors. What exactly you’re looking for will depend on your list of characteristics.
For each characteristic on your list, write down what positive examples of it look like, and write down what negative examples of it look like. This will get it clear in your own mind, and allow you to train other people on your interview panel.
Example of testing for Judgment
In the interview, when I’m testing judgment, I’m looking for big changes and testing decisions. I’m less interested in what decision they made than why and how they made it.
I want to see if the candidate can clearly share decisions they’ve made, and the rationale behind them. I want to hear their decision making process. I want to see whether their decisions prove effective more often than not (but cross-check / balance with humility!). Do they learn from their decisions / experience or just move on?
Bad signs are where they can’t articulate why they did something, or they point to someone else telling them what to do. I look for where they didn’t have the right information to make a decision, but the candidate was blind to it. I look for poor career decisions. I look for an inability to synthesize and sort information.
At the end of the interview panel, I ask the candidate to tell me what the role is, and articulate the risks and challenges. If they can’t do that well, that’s a big red flag for judgment.
Interview Panel Setup
You want everyone on the hiring panel to be educated on, and operating consistently with, the characteristics you want to hire for. The interviewers should have the characteristics in mind while interviewing, and poking into areas of curiosity based on what the candidate says.
Characteristics are not binary. Drive is not a true / false. Judgment is not a true / false. It’s about shades of gray and how characteristics manifest in certain environments.
That means that everyone will have some risk areas, so you can’t let that prevent you from making a hire. Just be clear on what those risk areas and hypotheses are, because your work doesn’t stop once you make the offer.
Onboarding
My mental model is that every person has a “shape” that defines them.
A person has a sense of shape.
The interview process gives you some idea of that shape, but even in a long interview process, the hiring manager may only have spent two hours with the person. That’s not a lot!
At the time you make an offer the person’s shape will still be blurry. The onboarding process is where you get clear on the shape of the person, and whether that shape fits well into the puzzle of your team.
Remember how adversity reveals character? You need to give your candidate some real work to do.
You’re doing this to get a truer sense of who they are. You want to see how and why they do what they do. The skills they might be missing can be developed, so that’s interesting, but not critical at this stage.
Be clear on your hypotheses and give your new employee a clear onboarding plan, with clear and prioritized outcomes. What are the three things you need them to deliver?
Then, get to work! In your 1-1s make sure you’re covering these top priority areas. What you’re listening for is validation or invalidation of your hypotheses so you know what to do next.
No one is perfect, so don’t expect them to be. But understand that characteristics are hard to move, so you want to get a strong sense of these before you go too far.
Bringing it all together
Just about everything that happens in your business happens because of the people, so you better get effective people!
Education, experience, and skills might get you in the ball park, but what you really need to test for are characteristics.
A person’s characteristics (innate qualities) affect their behaviors (what they do). The collection of everyone’s behaviors is what defines your culture (“people like us do things like this”). Your culture is what affects whether, and how well, you’ll achieve your goals.
There are two main ways to identify the characteristics you need; summarize what successful people on your team are like, or work backwards to the characteristics that will help your team achieve goals.
What’s important is that the list of characteristics resonates with you and that you feel confident when describing them.
Interviewing for characteristics by getting examples of how your candidate behaves while doing hard things.
Testing for characteristics doesn’t end at the job offer; it continues during onboarding. Provide a clear onboarding plan that allows you to validate or invalidate your hypotheses.
Call to action
Starting this week, create a clear list of characteristics and write out the positive and negative signals for them.
The process can be really fun, and is typically very educational. You might be surprised what you discover!
Once you’ve got your list, start putting this into practice. If you’re hiring, employ this in the interview panel. If you’re not doing any hiring, assess your staff with your new rubric.
Where people are exemplifying the characteristics, celebrate it. Let them know!
Where people have gaps, get curious. Have conversations with the person. Use knowledge of the gap to provide feedback and development.
I'm super interested characteristics! Email me at heykev@kevinnoble.xyz and let me know what you hire for.
Kevin
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