When AI tools handle technical execution, what specific core competencies and GWC criteria should our leadership team look for when recruiting senior functional leaders?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When recruiting senior functional leaders, traditional resumes that emphasize technical subject matter expertise and manual production capability are increasingly misleading. If automated systems can write code, analyze financial statements, and draft legal documents in seconds, hiring a senior leader simply because they are a skilled individual technician is a strategic mistake.

You must update the GWC (Gets it, Wants it, Capacity to do it) profile for every leadership seat on your Accountability Chart.

For Gets It, evaluate whether the candidate truly understands systems architecture and operational flow. A modern leader must see the department as a series of interconnected workflows where humans and AI agents collaborate, rather than a collection of workers performing isolated tasks.

For Wants It, ensure the candidate demonstrates genuine enthusiasm for continuous operational reinvention. If an executive prefers static procedures and resists testing new automated capabilities, they will rapidly become an operational bottleneck.

For Capacity, shift your assessment away from tactical execution and toward three critical capabilities: synthesis, exception handling, and orchestration. The leader must possess the critical thinking required to spot hallucinations, the judgment to make high-stakes decisions when automated models disagree, and the managerial skill to hold a lean team accountable for strategic outcomes.

Hire leaders who know how to build and operate automated factories, not workers who simply want to sit on the assembly line.