Editor’s Note: The following feature by Arizona Game and Fish Department Commissioner Jeff Buchanan appeared in yesterday’s edition of The Hunting Wire. It’s a good lesson on picking the right people for your organization or business, so we thought we’d share it with you today in The Outdoor Wire.
Most outdoorsmen and conservation professionals I know make a lot of decisions about people: which guide to recruit and hire for my outfitting service, or which game warden should I send for an extra developmental opportunity or advanced education, or who do I promote and who do I let go? We even face “people” decisions as clients or consumers: guide services, taxidermists, and butcher shops are just a few examples.
When making personnel decisions, there’s a tendency to focus on skills rather than character and that leads to problems. I’ve learned that character beats skills.
In 2017, I was part of a gathering of military leaders and college football coaches. We were there to learn from each other. Though we came from vastly different worlds, we listened, learned, and came away richer from the experience. Most of our conversations focused on how we could best recruit and develop elite talent. The following example from that discussion is based on recruiting, but it could apply to nearly any personnel decision. Consider this simple graph:
The people we want to recruit are in the upper right quadrant. They have the most skills and the most character. We instinctively understand that they will have the best possible effect on our team, not only because of the talent they bring to the organization, but also because of their character: they will help to make the entire team better. Our typical assessment systems, however, usually only measure skills: how much can a man bench-press, how well can a woman shoot (either a basketball or a rifle), how fast this person can write code and how fast that one can run a 40-yard sprint. Because of this narrow assessment, three key insights arise.
The first insight is that we get what I call “false positives.” The false positives are in the lower right quadrant. These are people with tremendous skills but little in the way of character. If we only assess skills, we leaders can become blinded with the potential of the recruit we are trying to lure to our team: “Wow! He can throw a football 60 yards in the air…if we had him, we could compete for a national championship!” It is not very hard to think of a very highly drafted college football player who self-destructed once he made it to the pros. They had a lot of skills but little character. They end up as “has- beens,” or worse, in prison.
The second insight is that we miss the “false negatives.” False negatives are in the upper left quadrant.These are people with tremendous character, but who have far less skills. Since we don’t typically assess character, we are more likely to dismiss or overlook them.
The third insight may be the most important: it’s far easier to move somebody to the right (teach skills) than it is to move them upwards (build character).
I was discussing this insight with one of the coaches I worked with in that workshop, and he agreed that character was critical. I then asked him how he measured the character in the recruits he was pursuing, and he said: “I always take them to dinner. I don’t care what they eat; heck, they could even order a banana split.I can teach them to eat right. What I watch for, though, is how they treat the wait staff. If they don’t treat these people with dignity and respect, I don’t want them on my team and I don’t care how far they can throw a football. Life is too short to coach a turd.”
As a commissioner for the Arizona Game and Fish Department, I’ve seen a number of guide services who regretted hiring a specific guide. Every single time, the regret comes from a lack of character rather than an absence of skills. The guide inevitably gets caught doing something wrong and gets fired, and the reputation of the guide or outfitting service always suffers. Clients may even get caught up in this and suffer consequences as well. A lack of character is never worth the risk, and as I said, it’s a lot harder to build character than teach skills.
The next time you have a decision to make about which of your team gets the nod and the promotion, consider the character of each candidate. You can train somebody to run faster or shoot straighter far more easily than you can teach them to choose the harder right choice over the easier wrong, especially when nobody else is watching.
Character is more valuable to your organization than pure talent. Consider this graph the next time you have a tough personnel decision to make., and good luck in all your outdoor pursuits!
– Jeff Buchanan
Jeff Buchanan retired as a Lieutenant General from the Army in 2019. He had four combat deployments to Iraq and one to Afghanistan. He also led the military forces supporting FEMA in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and commanded more than 6,000 troops on the Southwest border in support of CBP. He and his wife live on a small ranch outside of Patagonia, Arizona and he is one of five commissioners for the Arizona Game and Fish Department