Spotting the Right People

Who you bet on is the highest-leverage decision you make, and most people make it on the wrong signals. They’re impressed by polish, credentials, and a confident demo, and they miss the quiet person who owns problems, learns fast, and lifts the standard around them. Spotting is the skill of seeing potential, the traits that compound over years, underneath the surface that only tells you about today.

This is distinct from Hiring, which is about assessing candidates against a bar at the door. Spotting is what you do continuously, with the people already on your team: noticing who is worth a bigger bet, more scope, more investment, more room to grow, before it’s obvious to everyone.

Bet on Traits That Compound#

What’s expected: You evaluate people on the durable traits that grow over time, not the visible outputs that reflect only where they are now.

Skills can be taught; the traits underneath are what decide how far someone goes. Look for these, because they compound:

• Ownership. Do they treat a problem as theirs until it’s actually solved, or hand it back the moment it gets hard? Owners are rare and they carry teams.
• Curiosity and the “why.” Do they dig into why things are the way they are, the system, the user, the business, or just execute the ticket? Curiosity is the engine of everything else.
• Learning speed. Not what they know today, but how fast the gap closes. A fast learner with gaps often overtakes a slow expert, except where deep, hard-won depth is the whole point (security, payments, anything where being mostly right is failure). Weigh speed against how much the role rewards depth.
• Agency. Do they move without being told, make a call and own it, or wait for instructions? Agency is the difference between someone you can hand a problem and someone you have to hand a task.
• Raising the standard. Does the work around them get better because they’re there? The ones who lift others are your future leaders, whether or not they know it yet.

Don’t Be Fooled by Polish#

What’s expected: You’ve separated the signals that actually predict growth from the ones that just feel impressive.

The surface lies, in both directions. The most confident presenter isn’t the best thinker; the smoothest demo can hide the shallowest understanding; a great pedigree tells you where someone has been, not how far they’ll go. And the reverse: some of the highest-potential people are quiet, unpolished, still finding their footing, and easy to overlook if you’re grading on presentation.

The tell is to watch what someone does when no one is directing them, and whether the team is better for their presence. That predicts far more than any interview polish.

Spotting a Future Leader#

What’s expected: You can tell the difference between someone who will be a stronger individual contributor and someone who could lead.

Not everyone should be a leader, and a brilliant IC who never manages a soul is a treasure, don’t push them into management to “progress.” But some people show the leadership signal early, and it’s specific. They’re the ones who, without being asked, are already thinking one level up:

• They ask who and why, not just what and how. They’re curious about people and motivations, why the team behaves the way it does, what a stakeholder actually needs, not only about the mechanics of the task.
• They think in systems and teams, not just their own tasks. They notice when the process is broken, not just the bug, and they reach to fix the thing that helps everyone.
• They create leverage. Their instinct is to make a fix that lifts the whole team, write the doc, set the pattern, unblock the others, rather than just close their own item faster.

If someone is doing that on their own initiative while still an IC, you’ve found a future leader. The next move is deliberate: invest in them (double down on that spike) and, when they’re ready, run them through the specific transition in Growing a Future Leader. The most common mistake is leaving that person to keep doing great IC work until they’re bored and gone, instead of betting on the leader you already spotted.

Potential Is a Bet, So Place It#

What’s expected: You act on what you spot, concentrating investment in the highest-potential people rather than spreading it evenly.

Spotting is useless if it doesn’t change what you do. Attention and opportunity are finite, so you concentrate them: the person with the traits that compound gets the stretch assignment, the harder problem, the extra hour of your coaching. That’s not favoritism; it’s prioritization applied to people. Spread your investment evenly across everyone and you under-serve the ones most likely to return it. Place your bets where they’ll compound.

Next: Equipping People