A quick exercise for founders and leadership teams. Fourteen situations, no right answers, and a short snapshot at the end to mull over.
In my experience, most senior hires don't come unstuck because of skills. The CV was accurate, the interview went well, the person could genuinely do the job - and yet eighteen months on it hasn't worked, and nobody can quite put their finger on why. Usually it's because they were working to a different set of rules to the ones the business actually runs on.
And I don't mean the values on the website; I mean the warts & all ones that play out behind closed doors. What happens at 4pm on a Friday when something breaks, who gets protected when it does, and the thing you'd quietly refuse to budge on even if it cost you a quarter. They're rarely as glamorous as the ones that end up on an About Us page, but they're the ones that tend to decide whether somebody sticks.
This only works if you're honest with it. Every question forces a choice between four options that are all defensible; there's no scoring key where one answer is better than another, and I'm not trying to catch you out. It's asking what you'd actually do, not what would read well.
If you catch yourself picking the answer you'd be comfortable reading back to your team, pick the other one. A value that's never cost you anything isn't really a value yet.