I worked with a salesperson once. A classic lone wolf who was high executing, but quietly toxic. The kind we’ve all had in the building at one point or another. You love the results. You do not love the person producing them.
I ran him through the People Analyzer. Core value by core value, down the line. And here’s the part that stuck with me all these years later: he passed. Clean marks and on paper, a fit.
And everyone in the room still knew he was poison.
Right people, right seat
Getting the right people in the right seats is, I’d argue, the single most important thing in any organization. Not one of. The most.
Jim Collins built a good chunk of Good to Great and BE 2.0 around it. Patrick Lencioni circles it in book after book: The Advantage, The Ideal Team Player. And it’s one of the six key components of EOS®.
EOS® defines it about as cleanly as anyone has: right people, right seat. Right person is a culture fit to your core values. Right seat is someone who gets it, wants it, and has the capacity to do it.
This is one of my favorite things about the whole system. Taking something as slippery as “the right people” and turning it into something you can actually put on a page and measure. That is hard, good work. Thank you, EOS®.
And.
I think there’s more to be done here or, maybe less. Maybe just better.
Where core values fall short as the measure
I still use core values. But over the years I’ve run into three problems with leaning on them alone to answer the question, is this the right person.
1. They take too long to become measurable. Core values only work as a ruler once they’re actually ingrained. Early in EOS® (or right after you’ve refreshed and recommitted to a new set) that can be six, nine, twelve months before they’re rooted deep enough to honestly grade a person against them.
Here’s a gauge I trust: can 80% of your people, 80% of the time, rattle off your core values off the top of their head with no VTO or poster on the wall? If yes, they’re probably baked in deep enough to measure against. If no, you’re grading people on a standard that isn’t real yet. (A company with old, deep, constantly-talked-about values is a different animal. This is mostly a young-EOS® problem.)
2. They get measured by gut, not by fact. Even when everyone agrees on what the values mean, leaders overestimate how well their people actually live them. I’ve watched visionaries, integrators, managers, myself included, quietly grade on feeling. I like this person, bump them up. This one rubs me wrong, knock them down.
And when I push and ask, “Why do you say they meet that value? What are they actually doing that proves it?” the honest answer is often a shrug.
Grading on gut isn’t a crime. The boogeyman isn’t going to jump out and punch you in the face for it. But, when the question is whether someone is right for your team, I want reality. As much as we can manage, this should be behavior- and fact-based, not emotion-based.
3. People pass the test and still feel wrong. This is the one that got me started. You run someone through core values, they clear the bar, and the whole room is still sitting there going, “Yeah… I guess they fit. But they’re not right.” The scorecard says yes. Your team’s stomach says no. Core values, by themselves, don’t always close that gap.
The three words I add: humble, hungry, smart
So, here’s what I’ve leaned on for a long time now, straight out of Lencioni’s The Ideal Team Player: humble, hungry, smart.
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Humble: low ego. Shares credit, more we than me.
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Hungry: self-motivated. Looking for the next thing without being pushed to it.
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Smart: and this one gets misread constantly. Smart here means emotionally intelligent. EQ, not IQ. The person who reads the room, reads people, and knows what their words and actions do to the humans around them.
It’s simple and consistent. It holds up across every person and every organization I’ve put it in front of. And, I’ll be straight with you: I have sniffed out more wrong people with humble, hungry, smart than I ever have with core values. Maybe that just means I suck at core values, but I don’t think that’s it.
Back to my lone wolf.
He passed core values. Ran him through the other three and it’s over in about four seconds. Humble? Not remotely. Smart, as in emotionally intelligent? No. People called him manipulative and mistook it for EQ, but manipulation isn’t emotional intelligence. Emotionally intelligent people read cues and feel a room. He was fantastic at getting people to move and terrible at knowing what it cost them to be moved.
High-performing. Toxic. And now, finally, nameable.
Why not both
That’s the real gift of this. Humble, hungry, smart helps me spot the wrong person and it hands me the language to name what’s wrong. In the best cases, that language lets me coach someone out of it instead of quietly resenting them for a year.
The good news, at least the way I see it, is that you don’t have to pick. Keep your core values and add these three.
Yes, it’s three more columns on your People Analyzer. No, it’s not 100% EOS®-pure. But when you remember that a solid 60% of EOS® traces back to Lencioni’s work in the first place, I think you’ll live.
Core values tell you who fits your culture on paper. Humble, hungry, smart tells you who your team can actually build something with.
I’m not choosing. I want both.
