Coaching practices for Hiring for Character

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Hiring for Character, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • I keep hiring for the most impressive resume and then watching them work purely transactionally, and I want to start screening for whether someone actually believes in what we’re doing
  • I’ve got a new hire starting and the lazy move is to just hand them whatever’s piled up in the backlog
  • I have abstract ideas about the kind of person I want to be, but in a hard moment I freeze because I don’t actually know what that looks like in practice
  • I keep nailing down the exact plan before I’ve sorted out who’s actually in the boat with me, and then the plan shifts and the wrong people can’t adapt
  • I look around at the people I’ve hired and they all think exactly like me

Practices that may help

  1. Hire people who share the Why, not just the skills
    Skills can be learned; shared belief cannot — filtering for Why-alignment at hiring is the highest-leverage culture move.
    Start With Why: Leading Through Purpose
  2. Use genius mapping in onboarding
    Surface a new hire’s geniuses early so you design their role around energy, not just skills.
    The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni)
  3. Choose and study role models deliberately
    Select a specific person whose character in a specific domain you want to internalize, and study how they act — not just what they say.
    Virtue Ethics, Made Practical
  4. Get the right people on the bus before setting direction
    Prioritize who is doing the work before deciding what to do.
    Level 5 Leadership: Humility and Will in Great Leaders
  5. Build a team whose combined strengths cover all four domains
    Hire and assemble deliberately for domain coverage, not for people who think like you.
    Strengths-Based Leadership, Made Practical
  6. Build and work a target list of roles and organisations
    Replace passive job board browsing with active research into specific organisations you want to understand.
    Informational Interviews: Career Research That Builds Your Network
  7. Assign project phases to genius-matched people
    Route early ideation to Wonder/Invention geniuses and execution phases to Tenacity geniuses.
    The 6 Types of Working Genius (Patrick Lencioni)
  8. Building character through deliberate repetition
    Choose one character quality you want to embody and perform one specific act of it daily until it no longer requires effort.
    Aristotelian Eudaimonia: Flourishing Through Virtue
  9. Become a talent magnet: attract and deploy people at their best
    Multipliers find what people do naturally well and put them in conditions where that genius is essential.
    Multipliers: How Leaders Amplify the Intelligence Around Them
  10. Make core values operational, not decorative
    Use core values in hiring, recognition, and decision-making — not just on the website.
    The Rockefeller Habits: Scaling Up with Rhythm and Focus

Related concerns

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