The typical online job site lists millions of jobs. And just about every one of them is a cry for expertise. From the title to the requirements, companies hire for expertise. Logic helps us understand that only one out of ten people are in the top 10% when it comes to expertise. And that means that most companies are settling for good enough. If the organization needs people with expertise in the top decile, they’re going to have to pay far more and work far harder to find and retain that sort of skill. So most companies don’t try. They create jobs that can be done pretty well by people with a typical amount of expertise. That means that the actual differentiator in just about every job is attitude. From plumbers to carpenters to radiologists to pharmacists, someone with extraordinary soft skills (honesty, commitment, compassion, resilience, enrollment in the journey, empathy, willingness to be coached… the real skills that we actually care about) is going to outperform. If this is so obviously true, then why don’t organizations hire for attitude and train for expertise?

There’s a mythology around people with famous resumes. Folks who have worked for brands we’ve heard of and on projects that have been successful.

We give the benefit of the doubt to someone who did “app development at Slack” or “sales at Google.” But what this generally means is that they were patient and pretty good at going to meetings.

Show us the code you wrote. Show us the difficult presentations you were able to produce. Most of all, show us the work you did when no one asked you to do the work. When you’re on your own, what is important enough to you to ship?

We need teamwork. But we also need people who can master their tools and ship the work.