Skill matters. But reliability is the multiplier.
A moderately skilled, highly reliable person will outperform a highly skilled, inconsistent person over time. Every time.
Why unreliability is expensive
Unreliable people create management drag:
- Schedules break.
- Customers get surprised.
- Teammates cover gaps and build resentment.
- Leaders spend time chasing, re-explaining, and redoing.
Reliable people create operating leverage:
- You can plan.
- You can delegate.
- You can standardize.
- You can scale.
What to change in hiring
The hiring mistake I see is over-indexing on experience and under-indexing on behavior.
A better approach:
- Define the reliability behaviors you require (on-time, communicates early, follows process, clean handoffs).
- Interview for those behaviors with specific examples.
- Reference check for those behaviors, not just “were they good?”
Then train for skill. Skill is teachable. Reliability is a pattern.
What to do this week
- Add three reliability questions to every interview and score them.
- Create a 30-day reliability scoreboard for new hires.
- Promote and reward reliability explicitly, not just production.