One of the harder leadership lessons is that good people can be wrong for the job.
That sounds obvious until the person is loyal, well-liked, committed to the mission, and has been around for eight years.
Then it gets complicated.
Leaders often think about staffing too broadly. We ask whether someone is talented, experienced, trustworthy, or hardworking. Those things matter. But the sharper question is whether this particular person has the strengths, judgment, temperament, and motivation required by this particular role.
That’s a much higher bar.
Start with character. Skill can be developed. Experience can be gained. Character problems tend to become organizational problems.
Pay attention to how people handle pressure, disagreement, confidentiality, mistakes, and power. A resume tells you what someone has done. Their behavior when things get uncomfortable tells you who they are.
But character is only the beginning.
You also want evidence that the person can produce results. Not necessarily in the identical job you’re filling, but somewhere. There should be a trail of things made better because they were there: a team improved, revenue grew, a troubled project got finished, turnover dropped, a program became more effective.
Past success doesn’t guarantee future success. But a complete absence of demonstrated success should make you curious.
Then there’s fit.
A great finance director may be a terrible COO. A gifted fundraiser may hate managing people. Your most reliable program leader may not be the person who should lead a major organizational transformation.
Promoting someone because they’ve been successful can accidentally remove them from the work they’re actually good at.
We do this more often than we admit.
Nonprofits have an additional complication. Loyalty and mission commitment carry real moral weight. They should. But that can make us reluctant to say something equally true: someone can be deeply committed to the organization and still be occupying the wrong seat.
Leaving them there usually doesn’t serve them either.
There’s also something worth noticing during recruitment: does the person actually want this job?
Compensation matters, particularly if you expect excellent people to stay. But enthusiasm matters too. You want someone who sees the opportunity, understands the challenge, and is energized by the work itself. If the only compelling part of the offer is the salary increase, you may be renting talent rather than building a team.
Every leadership team should periodically ask a few uncomfortable questions.
Who’s thriving in the job they’re doing? Who’s struggling because the role asks for strengths they don’t naturally possess? Where are we tolerating mediocre results because we like the person? And where might someone become dramatically more effective if we simply moved them into work that fits them better?
Good organizations don’t merely collect good people.
They put people where their strengths can actually matter.