Soft Skills, Hard Skills, Attributes, Traits, Competencies—these words sometimes get used interchangeably when we talk about assessment and team building. As the momentum around skills-based hiring increases, it is important to know what we really mean when we talk about skills generically and how exactly we are measuring someone’s ability to do a particular role.
My guest this week is Rich Diviney, founder of The Attributes. Rich is a former Commanding Officer in the US Navy SEALs, where he was responsible for assessing and selecting the elite of the elite for the famous SEAL Team Six.
He now speaks and writes about the use of attributes in team building and hiring. We had a fantastic discussion about the difference between skills and attributes in the context of hiring and development. We also discuss my somewhat surprising results from taking Rich’s attributes test.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Identifying the elite of the elite for SEAL Team Six
• The difference between attributes and skills
• Understanding how people react in times of stress, challenge, and uncertainty
• How do you measure and assess attributes?
• Are soft skills and attributes the same thing?
• Can you develop attributes?
• The difference between perseverance, resilience, and tenacity
• What are companies getting wrong when it comes to skills and hiring?
• The “Dream Team Paradox”
• When AI takes over skills, attributes become even more critical.
• What does the future look like for hiring and managing talent?
You can get 15% of The Attributes Assessment by using the code RECRUITING15
Follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from smart Recruiters. Smart Recruiters is your all in one platform for faster, smarter hiring, making recruiting easy and effortless. Smart recruiters are making some big changes, revamping their user experience, adding AI features and refreshing the ui. I know from experience that they truly are a company that really values the recruiter and the practitioner. They understand the intricacies of the recruiting business and this has always been reflected in their functionality and customer support. So it’s exciting to hear that they’re making a bunch of updates. If you’re ready to be part of the future of talent acquisition, head over to smartrecruiters.com and find out what they’re up to. Trust me, your team and your future hires will thank you.
Matt Alder [00:01:10]:
Hi there. Welcome to episode 647 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Soft skills, hard skills, attributes, traits, competencies. These are all words that get used, sometimes interchangeably, when we talk about assessment and team building. As the momentum around skills based hiring increases, it’s important to know what we really mean when we talk about skills generically and how exactly we’re measuring someone’s ability to do a particular role. My guest this week is Rich Diviney, founder of the Attributes. Rich is a former commanding officer in the U.S. navy SEALs who was responsible for selecting the elite of the elite for the famous Seal Team 6. He now speaks and writes about the use of attributes in team building and hiring. We had a fantastic discussion about the difference between skills and attributes in the context of hiring and development. We also discussed my somewhat surprising results from taking Rich’s attributes test. Hi Rich and welcome to the podcast.
Rich Diviney [00:02:19]:
Well, thanks Matt. Good to be here.
Matt Alder [00:02:20]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Rich Diviney [00:02:26]:
Sure. Yes. I’m Rich Diviney. I am an author and former Navy Seal. I was in the Seal teams for about 21 years and wrote a book about human performance which came out in 2021. And now we go around and help individuals and teams become better and more high performing with our with our kind of our unique performance approach centering around attributes.
Matt Alder [00:02:49]:
Fantastic stuff. And I’ve read the book and it’s kind of an absolutely fascinating account of kind of attributes and what you do with them. Give us a little bit more of the backstory. Tell people what you used to do when you were in the Navy Seals.
Rich Diviney [00:03:03]:
Yeah, so I mean, I went in in 96 and of course, you know, SEAL training, as many people now know, is some of the, some of the toughest in the world. So went in in 96. So our class, we think we started with 170 candidates and we graduated with 38. So that’s about average in terms of attrition, it’s about an 85 to 90% attrition. And when, you know, obviously the first few years in the, early in the late 90s, there’s nothing going on. After 2001, September 11th, obviously things got very busy and I ended up deploying many times to both Iraq and Afghanistan. I also served for almost half of my career at Seal Team 6, which is kind of our, one of our elite commands. No one really knew what that command was until, until of course, we got Bin Laden. But I was there and I ran the selection and assessment there as well to include, and also commanded a squadron there. But it was during that time frame I really began to deconstruct and really dive into what A, what, what makes up high performing teams and B, what kind of makes up performance in general and began to really think about how to articulate what’s going on when individuals and teams are in fact performing. And one of the things that happened to me as I was running this, this very difficult Seal Team 6 training is that the leadership really wanted me to better articulate why guys weren’t making it through and why guys were making it through. And it was, it was going to be more, more complex than just saying a guy couldn’t shoot very well or couldn’t, couldn’t skydive very well. It just didn’t. That, that seemed disingenuous. It seemed just not the answer. And that’s when I really began to bifurcate the difference between these attributes and skills and, and subsequently began to look at those in training. And then when I got out of the Navy, recognized that businesses and organizations, teams were having the same problem kind of articulating these qualities that are very hard to see and measure sometimes. And so that’s why I wrote the book and has been the impetus of all the work we’re doing now.
Matt Alder [00:05:02]:
I think one of the interesting things about reading that part of the book was you kind of developed this because the people that you were selecting were already kind of the elite of the elite. And it was kind of give feedback about what the difference was between people who already have very high levels of skills, wasn’t it?
Rich Diviney [00:05:20]:
It was, yeah. And you’re talking about at this particular command, we were getting guys from all over the. Right. The other SEAL teams who were already outstanding, they had outstanding performance reviews, early promotion, all that stuff, all the great stuff. And yet some of them. And yet we were getting a 50% attrition rate, which of course is okay. I mean, any selection course implies attrition. But what wasn’t OK that we were, we weren’t able to say why guys were attriting. And when you tell a guy with that level of competency and experience, he can’t shoot very well, I mean, that’s a guy who’s probably shot more rounds than most people in the military. Right? So it’s, it’s disingenuous to them, it’s disingenuous to us. And of course, the leadership starts to ask some very difficult questions. And so, so what I recognized was actually we weren’t in fact looking for these. These visible skills. We were actually looking for these qualities that told us that these certain individuals either had what it took to do the particular job we needed to do, or did not have what it took. And that’s really what became the beginning of kind of defining these things quite deliberately, I suppose.
Matt Alder [00:06:26]:
Just to clarify for people, what do you see as the difference between an attribute, which is what you’re kind of identifying and working with, and a skill?
Rich Diviney [00:06:37]:
Yes. So the quick distinction is skills are not inherent to our nature. So in other words, none of us are born with the ability to ride a bike or throw a ball or in the military case, shoot a gun. We’re trained to do those things. We’re taught to do those things. Skills direct our behavior in known and specific environments. So here’s how and when to throw a ball or ride a bike or shoot a gun. And then finally, skills are very visible, which means they’re very easy to assess, measure, and test. You can see how well anybody does any one of those things. You can put scores around skills, you can put statistics around around skills, you can put skills on resumes. Which is why we often get seduced by skills when we’re picking teams or hiring. Because they’re the easy button, they’re easy to see and measure. The problem with skills is they don’t tell us how we’re going to show up in stress, challenge and uncertainty. Because in an unknown environment, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to apply a known skill. And so this is when we lean on our attributes. Attributes, on the other hand, are inherent to our nature. In other words, all of us are born with levels of patience. Adaptability, situational awareness. Now, we can certainly develop attributes over time and experience, but you can see levels of this stuff in very small children. Anybody who has kids or who has dealt with small kids will agree with me when I say there are one and a half year olds who are patient and there are one and a half year olds who are impatient. So there’s a nature, nurture element to attributes. The other thing about attributes is they don’t direct behavior, they inform our behavior. They tell us how we’re going to show up to a, to an environment or a situation. So for example, my son’s levels of perseverance and resilience informed the way he showed up when he was learning the skill of riding a bike and he was falling off a dozen times doing so. And then finally, because they’re difficult to see, they’re very difficult to measure and test and assess, how can you, how can you measure someone’s levels of patience or adaptability? So, but the idea is they show up the most visibly and viscerally during times of stress, challenge and uncertainty. And, and if we’re, if we’re ignoring attributes in our performance picture, we’re ignoring a huge, if not the most important piece of what it takes for us to perform. And I would just, I would just offer this quick, quick story, you know, in terms of just relating to SEAL training, to kind of describe this. I was, I was told this by an older seal, you know, and this happened years ago. But he said that one day a kid showed up to Navy SEAL training and he walked into the instructor’s offices and said, I want to be a Navy seal. And the instructor said, okay, well, you have to do a swim test. And the kid said, okay, fine. So they took him out to the pool. I mean, it was an easy test. 50 meters. So 25 meters to one end, 25 meters back to the other end. So this kid gets all ready to go, he jumps into the pool and he sinks right to the bottom of the pool. When he jumps in and he starts walking across the bottom of the pool to one end, he touches the end, and he walks across the bottom of the pool back to the other end. And he comes up, he’s gasping for air, nearly drowning. And the instructor looks at him, says, what the hell are you doing? And the kid, you know, who’s still catching his breath, looks at the instructor and says, I’m sorry, instructor, I don’t know how to swim. And at that point, the instructor pauses and he looks at the kid and says, that’s okay, we can teach you how to swim. And so the idea is, why did the instructor say that? And he said that because he knew that if this kid had the qualities, the attributes to show up to Navy SEAL training and he didn’t know how to swim, he had everything inside of him that we needed for him to be a Navy seal. Teaching him the skill of swimming was going to be the easy part. And so this is what we’re talking about when we’re talking about attributes. So those, those qualities about human beings that tell us they have what it takes to do the job. Not necessarily they know how to do the job, but they have what it takes to do the job. And that’s extremely important in any team or performance environment.
Matt Alder [00:10:08]:
Obviously, you’re really stressing the importance of it, but you also said that they’re very difficult to measure. So how do you measure and assess attributes?
Rich Diviney [00:10:15]:
Well, yeah, so one of the ways is we built this assessment tool. That’s one way. However, absent the assessment tool, the best way to kind of measure those or actually see them is during times of stress, challenges, and uncertainty. So when we’re in environments where the plan doesn’t go as predicted, the, you know, what hits the fan, everything goes into chaos. This is when the attributes come to the fore and we can start seeing in ourselves and each other how much or how little we have of certain attributes. We can see how adaptable we are, or how little patience we have, or so on so forth. And so the best way to see them is when there’s. There’s stress, challenge and uncertainty inserted into an environment, which can be done, by the way, even in a hiring process, you can, you can, you can tweak hiring processes to, to insert a little bit of stress, challenge. And uncertainty doesn’t have to be over the top. It doesn’t have to be Machiavellian or illegal, but, but you can, you can make the environment uncertain, a little bit uncomfortable, and you’re going to start to see these attributes rise to the fore. And that’s kind of the best way you can start to see them.
Matt Alder [00:11:19]:
No, absolutely. And I suppose to, to illustrate this to everyone listening, I actually took your, I took your test, so I did your assessment. You kindly gave me access to it, and it was, it was fascinating. It was fascinating for me. I mean, I’ve done lots of tests of this kind over the last sort of few years or so, but there was, there were a few things in this that I thought was really interesting. So I suppose for background, the kind of attributes that I scored highest for. Didn’t surprise me because I have a fairly unconventional job that I’ve created myself. And it’s kind of around, kind of around my strengths and my attributes. So things like open mindedness and curiosity, adaptability, learnability, influence, they’re all things that didn’t really surprise me. What did, though, was some of the, there were some things in there that I’ve never kind of considered before. So one of them was I had quite a low score for cunning as an attribute, which I never, I only ever sort of thought of cunning in a very negative way before. But reflecting on it, it kind of makes a lot of. It makes a lot of sense.
Rich Diviney [00:12:22]:
It does. Although let me. I’m not, I’m not going to let you off the hook yet on your top five. So let’s just talk about this because it’s really important that we understand and the audience understands that there’s no judgment in any of these attributes or how we score on these attributes. We can kind of think of ourselves as automobiles. Every human being is an automobile, but we’re all different types, right? So one of us, some of us are Jeeps, some of us are SUVs, some of us are Ferrari Ferraris. And there’s no judgment there because the Ferrari can do things the Jeep can’t do and the Jeep can do things the Ferrari can’t do. And so these attributes start to lay out in ways that describe us in a very unique and individual way. And so what I’d say is that when you look at the way your attributes kind of suss out in terms of the order, what you’re highest on and what you’re lowest on, your success as a human, as an individual, and your performance has hinged on the fact that you’re high on some and you’re low on others, right? So in other words, there’s advantages. Your low, your low attributes have served you as much as your high attributes have served you. So, so the way we want to explore this is that we ask ourselves some questions. We say, okay, when we look at these high attributes, these top five, and the reason why we focus on top five, bottom five, even though we have 41, is because when you look at the top five, bottom five, you can actually start to distinguish some very, some very precise behavioral tendencies. You know, the middle ones are kind of the ones we, we kind of are more easily able to kind of shift between the polarities on. But, but when we look at your top five, the question is, okay, how has having these in your top Five served you. And you’ve already just described a couple ways how it served you in terms of the way you’ve, you’ve organized your life, the podcast, the job you’ve created for yourself. But the more difficult question, and this is really the, the art of effective introspection, is to say how has having these as your top five, maybe not served you? What are some ways that these have not served you? And so I would ask you that, are there ways that when you look at those top five, how they have not served you?
Matt Alder [00:14:24]:
Quite possibly, actually, I think yes. Things like a massive sense of curiosity is great a lot of the time, but sometimes you perhaps ask questions when you shouldn’t be asking questions and should be getting on with things. So.
Rich Diviney [00:14:38]:
Right, well, and I would say, let me add to that you have, you are. So it’s a very powerful combination is you have both high curiosity and high open mindedness, which is very powerful in a positive sense because you’re someone who goes and seeks new ideas and experiences and things, but you’re also open to things coming at you. Right. So in other words, the person who’s very high on curious curiosity but low on open mindedness, that’s the conspiracy theorist, that’s the person who, who knows exactly what they want to believe and will be curious to prove themselves. Right. But you’re not like that at all. So that’s a huge advantage. But I think you’re spot. And again, this is not a negative, it’s just a, it’s just something to be aware of, is that sometimes that combination could in fact allow you to actually not focus in on something long enough because you’re just kind of like, oh, you’re so, you’re so excited about the new idea. Whether it’s something you’re exploring or something that’s coming at you, you shift maybe too quickly. And so these are just ways we can start thinking about, okay, how might this not serve me and can I understand that about myself and, and maybe dial it down in certain situations?
Matt Alder [00:15:36]:
Yeah, no, that makes, that makes sense. I think with the interesting thing about this as well is I have adhd, so some of the things that I was kind of scoring lower, I wasn’t really surprised that things like persistence and various things like that were kind of scored lower.
Rich Diviney [00:15:52]:
Yeah, yeah. And so let me add, let’s go to the bottom five real quick and we’ll just ask ourselves a couple of same questions. So looking at these bottom five and you have persistence, discernment, decisiveness, competitiveness and cunning. The Question is, how has having these in your bottom five served you?
Matt Alder [00:16:06]:
I think this came through when I was sort of answering the questions that might have led to this is, you know, I tend to be quite group orientated and group focused and really interested in people succeeding as a group rather than competing with people within the group. And that, that was just one of the things that struck me when I was answering some of the questions.
Rich Diviney [00:16:25]:
Yeah, yeah, that’s totally true. And you know, again, we don’t talk about cunning in a negative way. Cunning is just creative process problem solving. That’s what it is. Now, the way we use cunning can be judged. We can certainly use it in a negative way or we can use it in a positive way. But I think you’re spot on. I would say, you know, discernment is something that’s low for you, but, but what that means is, is you’re not necessarily a detail person, which means you don’t get caught up on details and then it allows you to actually move through things at a greater speed and you can kind of pick goals and you kind of go through things and you’re not going to worry about details slowing you up. Right. So this is, this is an advantage to being a little bit lower on discernment. Of course, now we say, okay, the, the blind spot we have to be aware, and by the way, I’m low on discernment as well, is that sometimes we do miss the details. Right. And so we have to be able to understand that in certain aspects. You know, it’s funny, my wife and I are both low on discernment and we run our company, but our coo Jenny is, she’s high on discernment. So that, that means whenever contracts come through, my wife and I don’t even look at them, we just send them to Jenny because we know we’re going to miss stuff, but Jenny’s going to see it, you know, because she’s high on discernment. So, so we can sometimes, you know, buttress some of our lower or higher ones with teammates so that we’re just effectively meshing like zippers and we’re actually hitting these things that we all hitting all the attributes we need to hit because it’s impossible for us to, to be high on all of them. And that would be actually detrimental.
Matt Alder [00:17:44]:
Absolutely. And there are, there are some here which I would have thought that some of them were the same thing. So for example, there was tenacity, perseverance and resilience, and I was kind of higher on tenacity. And lower on perseverance. And I, you know, I was kind of like, are they the same thing? Are they parts of the same thing? How, how do those sort of, those ones that are closely related, how do they split down?
Rich Diviney [00:18:07]:
Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up because I was really very careful and I wanted to be as precise as possible with the, the entomology of every word and definition. And so when you dig into the, to the words themselves and the definitions, you start to realize that they are actually, they are actually in fact different. So let’s just take perseverance and resilience because those two get conflated quite, quite a bit. Perseverance is this idea that I’m going to get. As I’m going. I get knocked down seven times, I get, I get up eight times, right? Every time I get knocked down, I get up and I just keep on going. It’s just kind of this gutting it out thing. No matter how many, this is a rocky Balboa. No matter how many times I get hit, I’ll just get up and keep going. Resilience, on the other hand, is when I get knocked down or knocked off baseline with something good or bad, how quickly and effectively can I get back to baseline, how, how fast can I get back to, how fast can I recover, right? So resilience, you should think about that rubber band. You stretch that rubber band and then you let it go and it goes back to its original shape. That’s resilience. And so, and so someone, and the other way we can think about this is these can live independently of each other, right? So in other words, someone can be very high on perseverance but low on resilience. And what that means is that person’s just going to go, go, but they’re likely going to burn out pretty fast. Someone else who’s, who is both high on perseverance and high end resilience, they’re going to go, go, go, and they’re going to recover as they’re going, which means they can play the long game very easily. So, so that’s how those kind of differentiate. And then when we talk about tenacity, the one that the, the two actually that get conflated a lot are tenacity and persistence. Persistence and tenacity are, two are kind of separate, they’re almost opposite. Persistence is this kind of firm obstinance that, that you are going to stick to the, stick to the course. Because, you know, if you stick to the course, it’ll just happen, right? So I usually, I usually relate that to the stone cutter approach. That stone cutter is going to tap that stone in the same place over and over again and maybe not see anything for the first hundred taps. But that stone cutter knows on the 101st or the 102nd tap that stone is going to crack, right? That’s persistence. Whereas tenacity is, I’m going to try something and if it’s not working, I’m going to shift approaches. So I, I often say that’s the car mechanic, right? I’m going to look at the belts. If it’s not the belts, I’ll try the carburetor. It’s not the carburetor. I’ll try something else. Each of them can live independently, and you don’t necessarily want one or the other. You don’t want the tenacious stone cutter, okay? Because that stone will never get carved. And you don’t want the persistent car mechanic because that guy will just check the belts and then check the belts, and then check the belts again. So, so they, they are a little bit opposite. And, and you can kind of sometimes see how they map into our behavior.
Matt Alder [00:20:49]:
Now that makes sense because I think persistence was my lowest and tenacity was one of my highest. So that explains why they were kind of split like that. I suppose the question from all of this, obviously this is about looking at these things in context. And as you say, scoring low on something can be a strength. That said, how. And we also sort of discussed that these are kind of innate to people as humans. Can you kind of improve them? Can you be better at some of these things than you otherwise would?
Rich Diviney [00:21:16]:
Yes, you absolutely can. You can develop attributes that you’re low on. And there’s a couple of ways we can look at this. You can develop them, in other words, you can practice and overall increase your, your levels of a specific attribute, or you can just dial up an attribute or dial down an attribute depending on, on what you want to do or depending on your needs or the context of the moment. But let’s just talk about developing first. To develop an attribute takes three things. First of all, it takes an understanding or a knowledge that you need to develop it. So you need to know you’re low on it. The second one it takes is a motivation, need, or desire to develop it. What do I mean by that? I mean that just like I’ve said, just because you’re low on an attribute doesn’t necessarily mean you need to develop it. In fact, developing that particular attribute may be detrimental to what you’re trying to accomplish. I always kind of joke that the standup comic with too much empathy is going to be a lousy standup comic. All right? So you have to know you’re low on it. You have to have a need, desire, or motivation or reason to develop it. And the third one is the most important. You have to go seek out, find environments inside of which you can develop and tease that attribute. Okay? So if you want to develop your patients, for example, you have to go find environments that test and tease your patients, whatever that might look like for you. It could be, I’m going to deliberately drive in traffic, or I’m going to pick the longest line in the grocery store to stand in. I always say having kids, having kids will develop patients. But whatever that environment is, you can kind of throw yourself into those environments. It’s going to be difficult. It’s going to feel uncomfortable, and it’s going to be. It’s going to be hard. But that’s the whole point. And so the more you do that in a deliberate basis, the more you will develop overall. Develop an attribute. And then I have to say, we may not need to develop an attribute. We may need to just be aware that in certain circumstances, in certain environments, we need to either dial up an attribute or dial down an attribute. Both may be required. Right. You know, again, we’ll just use patience because it’s an easy one. You know, someone who’s naturally impatient may say, you know what? I need to dial up my patience with my children. And they’re. They deliberately work on doing that. Okay. And they’re dialing it up in that moment or whatever moment they need to. That’s a deliberate. That’s a conscious effort. We have to understand that these attributes that we’re high and low on, that happens without us thinking about it. It just. It’s just the way we are. When we need to dial up or dial down one, that’s when we actually have to put conscious thought. It can happen. With one of our high ones, I had a friend of mine who was. His number one attribute was humor. And the guy is a. He’s hilarious. He’s a hilarious guy. But he knows that in certain environments he needs to dial down his humor, because in certain environments, it’s not gonna. It’s not gonna fly. Right? So. So I think. I think the power of this stuff is that you begin to understand yourself at very deep, elemental levels, and you begin to take. Or you begin to have the ability to take control of your behavior in specific environments. And know exactly what you’re doing and why.
Matt Alder [00:24:02]:
Translating this across to the world of work, in particular hiring. There’s a huge amount of talk at the moment about skills based hiring and competencies and attributes and traits. And words kind of get thrown around in a way that I’m not sure we always know what we mean or what we’re, what we’re talking about. What are you seeing companies getting wrong when it comes to hiring and skills at the moment? And what should they be doing better?
Rich Diviney [00:24:26]:
Yeah, I think, I think the biggest mistake is people they hire or they build teams based upon skills, certainly predominantly skills. And the problem with that is you create what I kind of define in the book as the dream team paradox. In other words, you build a team, you put together team based on the best people. And that team, typically, whatever that is, best marketer, best graphics designer, best lawyer, whatever, all those bests. And then oftentimes what happens is that team actually performs very well when things are going well. But as soon as things go sideways or the plan doesn’t go as predicted, the team often turns toxic. And there’s a reason for that. And, and one of the reasons is, you know, I was, I’ll just, just kind of give you a, an aside here. I was, I was studying this stuff years ago and I found. I came across this guy named Russell A. Cough. Russell Cough was a, was a. He had an interesting title or several titles. He was a behavioral expert, a man, a behavioral scientist. He was a leadership and management expert. And, and he was also a systems theorist. He had all these titles. And he used to relate systems theory to leadership and management in a very interesting way. And he, one of the things he used to say is he used to be in front of a crowd and he said, if I took the best parts of every best automobile out there. So say one automobile has the best carburetor. Another automobile has the best engine. Another automobile has the best suspension. Took all the best parts of every best vehicle and put them in the center of the room. Would I have the best vehicle on the planet? And the answer is no, because the parts wouldn’t even fit together. You wouldn’t have a vehicle. And he used to say that a system is never just the sum of its parts. It’s a product of their interaction. And the same goes with a team. A team is never just the sum of its parts. It’s a product of how they interact. And, and if we build a team and we haven’t focused on these attributes which really drive a lot of Our interactions, especially during stress and challenge and uncertainty, then we’re going to set ourselves up for failure. And so I think businesses and organizations need to understand that if they want to hire people and hire the right person the first time, we need to start. They need to start understanding what attributes they’re looking for. Now, skills, Skills do matter. And there are certain. I will certainly concede that there are some roles, that there are certain skills that are prerequisites, of course, but you don’t need to necessarily focus on the best skills person. If you have someone who’s pretty good and has all the attributes you need, you can basically say, just like that SEAL kid, that SEAL trainee, hey, you can. You, you’ll pick it up, you’ll learn it, and you’ll, you’ll probably, your, your performance will probably skyrocket when you do.
Matt Alder [00:26:52]:
No, absolutely. And I think that there is a kind of focus on skills at the moment, and there’s a lot of talk about soft skills, so, you know, not kind of like hard skills where, you know, you’re learning a coding language or, you know, something, something very, very specific. And I’m thinking that there’s probably a crossover between what people are calling soft skills and what are really attributes.
Rich Diviney [00:27:14]:
Yeah, absolutely. So I, that’s, I often say, when people say soft skills or character traits or these types of qualities, I believe they’re talking about attributes. I think attributes are actually what we’re looking for. My, my goal in all of this was to, was to generate or I guess highlight, because I didn’t, I didn’t make this stuff up. Right. But highlight a language of performance that otherwise hadn’t been been spoken. Because what was happening is people were kind of dancing around these terms and not really able to define it. And so I think attributes, in my mind, helps define this stuff rather precisely and universally what. What we found is. And, and I kind of joke. I, you know, I’ve taken almost every personality test out there. I love, I love all of them or most of them. I love, I think, I think there’s some phenomenal ones out there. My, my one complaint about most, several of the personality tests is that when you take them, once you get your results, you’re given a couple colors or a couple numbers or even a few letters that define who you, you are. And the problem with that is that if you’re not talking to someone else who knows what those letters, colors, or numbers means, they don’t know what you’re talking about. Right. So, but what I like about the attributes is that is that the language is plain. Everybody knows what adaptability is. Everybody knows what patience is. Everybody knows what, you know, you know, perseverance is. Obviously, there’s a couple distinctions in the definitions, but. But this is human, everyday language. And so you can have these discussions around performance and attributes with anybody at any time. You don’t have to be indoctrinated into the attributes content because it’s all very plain English. And I do like the simplicity of that.
Matt Alder [00:28:52]:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s. It’s very understandable. And also I think the ability to see how people might behave in different contexts is. Is a very valuable part of this as well.
Rich Diviney [00:29:04]:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I would say, you know, the other thing I’ve been fascinated with, Matt, is that, is that, you know, ever since I went to SEAL training, it was an abc, I’ve just always been fascinated with who are we at our most raw? Because it’s, you know, it’s those times of stress, challenge, and uncertainty that are most raw shows up and personality often goes out the window, and all this other stuff goes out the window, and we’re just operating at our very raw selves, and these attributes start to help us understand who that person is. I feel like I was given a gift going through SEAL training and then, of course, spending a career on the teams of understanding myself at my most raw and understanding my teammates at their most raw, which really makes very, very effective teaming, especially when times of stress, challenge, and uncertainty arise.
Matt Alder [00:29:46]:
What are the sort of the top attributes that you were looking for when you were doing that SEAL selection?
Rich Diviney [00:29:52]:
Well, yeah, that’s a great question. And I would say depending on even the seal, even the SEAL environment has kind of is going to have a little bit of a different list depending on what you’re looking on, looking for, you know, our command there at Seal Team 6, one of our primary missions was, you know, kind of hostage rescue style, you know, operations which is going to really kind of focus on one’s ability to be situation aware, to compartmentalize, to task, switch very rapidly in rapid environments. And so the mental acuity attributes, which are situational awareness, compartmentalization, task switching, learnability, and discernment, those are, in fact, probably the most important ones we were looking for, but we were looking for them at a very, very high level. So in other words, I think most Navy SEALs have them at a nice high level, or at least certainly a moderately high level. At our particular command, we were looking for it at an extremely high level. And. And I think some of the folks who couldn’t, couldn’t make it through weren’t showing us the ability to kind of process what we needed them to process in the kind of the extreme dynamic and rapid environment that we’re asking them to. So, but we have to understand when we talk about whether seals, whether it’s teachers, whether it’s sales, salesperson people, every, every team, every organization, every niche is going to have a unique and specific set of attributes that’s, that’s required to make someone successful in that, in that niche. And that’s part of the process. And some of, some of the things we help businesses and teams do is figure out what that list looks like.
Matt Alder [00:31:29]:
And it’s a very disruptive time at the moment in terms of how people are thinking about hiring. You know, we’ve got the skills conversation, we’ve got AI, we’ve got all kinds of things going on, I suppose making us much more analyze hiring in a way that we probably haven’t for a very, very, very long time. With that in mind, what do you think the future looks like? How is AI going to impact, how do you employers might be managing their talent in five years time?
Rich Diviney [00:31:56]:
Yeah, well, you know, it’s funny, I think when we look at the world today and we actually look at some of our systems, some of our systems are unfortunately outdated. And just look at our education system for example. Right now we’re in a position where we’re taking a kid through 20 years of education to prepare them for a job. The problem is we don’t know what jobs are going to look like even five years from now. And so, and so I think one of the things we have to consider is the fact that in today’s world, especially with AI, we are going to find that a lot of our skills based things are going to be, are going to be able to be done by AI. They’re going to be taken over by AI. Which means my thought is we need to focus on attributes even more deliberately because if we want to be the humans that are running the AI, we need to have the qualities to adapt, to persevere, to shift, to move, to make things happen and it’s not necessary or to rapidly learn new skills. And it’s not necessarily going to be centered around a particular skill. And so I think now more than ever we need to start focusing on these qualities because we’re in an environment where we just don’t know what it’s going to look like two, three, four, five years from now. So best we begin to deliberately work on those qualities that allow us to actually operate in uncertainty, challenge and stress and change. Because I think that’s probably going to be the buzzword for the next certainly at least 50 years.
Matt Alder [00:33:26]:
Rich, thank you very much for talking to me.
Rich Diviney [00:33:29]:
Well, thank you, Matt. It was a pleasure to be here, and I appreciate the opportunity.
Matt Alder [00:33:33]:
My thanks to Rich. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time, and I hope you’ll join me.
