The Most Important Skill in Which to Hire

Personal Accountability Trumps Other Competencies

If you hire for one skill and one skill alone, please let it be this: personal accountability. Personal accountability is the most important talent someone can bring to the job.

To understand why this competency is so important, let’s examine the negative state first. People without personal accountability are most at risk to quickly and irreparably fall into a victim’s mindset.

Once stuck in that negative loop of self-pity thinking, it is very difficult for the mind to re-wire.

Someone without personal accountability will never be able to see anything that occurs as their fault. They may even become belligerent about things going wrong. They see errors and wrongdoings as the result of other people’s shortcomings or because the world is against them.

In a work environment, this lack of personal accountability can have a very harmful effect on the people around them, causing co-workers to become distracted, disengage from their work, or isolate themselves.

Now the positive example: The person who has highly developed personal accountability believes failures are a temporary state of being. They are adept at picking themselves back up after mistakes or downturns, reworking their thinking or behavior, and moving on in a positive direction.

People who have developed personal accountability will do what it takes to do the job.

Conducted over the last 30 years, my research of the skills people possess has included analysis of the skills most associated with jobs, as shown in job benchmarks TTI and its associates have created and provided to the Fortune 1000. 

Personal accountability should always be in the top 7 skills sought in jobs.

Bottom line: If you are hiring and you are not looking for personal accountability as a skill, you will run into problems — sooner or later.