Are you looking forward to the next person you’ll need to bring on board?

I’d like you to think about what their key attributes will need to be, because it’s likely they’ll need to be different from your current people.

It’s easy to talk about job skills, but often those skills will be quite similar to others in the team. More challenging are the other attributes and characteristics, because you’ll want to fill in what’s missing.

Suppose I’ve observed that I don’t really have anyone who does a great job of attending to detail. Sure, I’ve done my best to get by, even getting checklist and task scheduling tools. But ultimately everyone doesn’t relate to them well, because that’s not natural to the way they think.

We remember fondly that Sue used to do this spectacularly well, but she left a few years ago and it feels like we’ve been flailing ever since.

What would happen if our next hire could come on and fill this kind of role? That’s not really a job description, of course, as this attribute is a bit independent of the core job skills. But it’s something we can look for and even ask about in an interview.

Let’s identify some of the key gaps and figure out how to fill them!