Building a great organization is all about finding skills that complement each other. People tend to think everyone can do everything—especially at the leadership level. VP and above, the assumption is that for the amount they’re paid, leaders should be great strategically, operationally, technically, and every other way you can imagine.
This is almost never the case.
Almost every leader has at least one major weakness. The great strategist is weak operationally. The great technician is weak strategically. And so on.
The real damage happens when you stack weaknesses - when a leader is weak at something and their direct reports are weak at the same thing. This is a disaster, and it happens far more often than you’d think. Part of the reason for this is that leaders tend to hire people with the same skills they have. They’ll dress it up as hiring for “values” instead of “skills” so it doesn’t look like they’re cloning themselves - but people ultimately search for and evaluate the things they’re good at.
An even more challenging reason leaders do this is that they often don’t even know that they should try to hire for a skill - a true unknown unknown.
When you stack weaknesses, you warp reality. Put two operationally weak leaders in a row and the odds that the organization beneath them is operationally strong are zero. These leaders can’t run operations themselves, and they don’t even know how to hire or manage people who can. It’s like asking two monolingual English speakers to hire a great French translator. What the heck do they know about le chat noir?
Avoiding stacked weakness starts with admitting weakness, which is hard for a lot of leaders. The great ones know out of the gate what they’re good at and what they’re not, and they hire for the gaps. An org with no meaningful stacked weaknesses is robust to the changes and challenges that cause stacked-weakness orgs to collapse.
If you need a quick guide to covering your gaps - most roles have a component of the following skills: technical/domain knowledge, management, process/operational, strategy, presentation/speaking, raw aptitude. Rank yourself on those honestly and fill the gaps with strong hires. And the simplest way to not trick yourself about your abilities is to never say “I could do that if I wanted to” when evaluating that list.