What Matters Most (Hiring Talent Edition)

We have long said that merely assessing head of school candidates for knowledge, skills, and abilities (the famous KSA model) is insufficient. By the time one gets to a senior executive position, KSA presence or absence is pretty well established. What matters most are the "other factors;" e.g., personality variables such as perseverance, reliability, capacity to juggle multiple demands, and emotional intelligence. The importance of other factors, even over KSA's, is evident in the fact that they explain the overwhelming majority of headship failures. In other words, it's not what you know and what you do so much as how you do it.Pat Lencioni's recent post on "What Exactly are We Looking For?" makes this same point using the NFL Combine (an event where American football teams size-up the talent coming out of colleges and universities) as an analogy. Even there, where one would assume that raw physical ability is paramount, it is the other factors that make or break the players in the long run.What "other factors" matter most to the leaders you are responsible for hiring?