Part 1 of 4: Beyond the Résumé: Why Behavioral Skills Are the Real X-Factor in Executive Roles

Most business owners and CEOs know how to evaluate technical skills. You look at the résumé. You verify past results. You ask about experience in your industry or operating environment.

But the truth is:

Technical skills create potential. Behavioral skills determine outcomes.

The former gets someone in the door. The latter decides whether they succeed—or quietly stall the business.

At Turret Advisory, we work with business owners navigating leadership transitions, company sales, and executive performance concerns. Across these situations, one thing becomes clear: when a senior hire doesn’t work out, it’s almost never because of a technical shortfall.

It’s how they show up under pressure. How they make decisions. How they lead others and manage themselves.

The Two Halves of Executive Capability

Let’s define both sides of the equation:

• Technical skills are the hard, definable capabilities that someone brings to a role. Think: designing a circuit, running a forecast model, managing vendor contracts, or leading a construction site.
• Behavioral skills, in contrast, are about how someone applies their technical knowledge in the real world—how they think, execute, collaborate, and adapt when conditions change.

And unlike technical skills, which are relatively easy to verify, behavioral skills are harder to define—and far more variable in terms of fit.

The Four Core Categories of Behavioral Skills

To bring clarity, Turret groups behavioral capabilities into four core categories. These are the domains where success is determined—and where most performance risk hides.

1. How You Solve Problems
   Your ability to assess situations, make decisions, and chart a path forward—especially when the terrain is complex or unfamiliar.
2. How You Get Things Done
   Your follow-through, accountability, and ability to create progress—through your own actions and by driving the actions of others.
3. How You Interact with Others
   Your impact on the people around you—how well you build trust, align a team, and handle conflict or feedback.
4. How You Manage Yourself
   Your internal operating system—emotional regulation, self-awareness, and the resilience to lead consistently over time.

Every leadership role involves some degree of all four. But in almost every executive seat, one of these becomes the deciding factor—the behavioral X-factor that will define success or failure over the next 6 to 18 months.

Going Deep: How You Solve Problems

Of the four categories, this is often the most decisive—and the most misunderstood.

“Problem-solving” gets thrown around as a generic strength. But in practice, there are very different types of problem-solving required in senior roles. And most leaders are truly strong in one or two of them—not all.

The key is this:

You must match the role’s problem-solving demands to the person’s actual behavioral instincts.

Ask: What kind of problems will this leader face?

• Will they need to apply known methods to complex but familiar issues?
• Will they face asymmetric, high-stakes decisions with competing priorities and no obvious right answer?
• Will they be required to invent a new approach, because no existing process or precedent exists?

These are not interchangeable. And getting it wrong means you’ll either:

• Hire someone who’s too rigid for an undefined landscape
• Or promote someone who’s too improvisational for a tightly engineered environment

If you’re preparing a business for sale, pivoting to a new strategy, or recovering from a failed executive hire—this is often where the mismatch lives.

Why This Matters for Business Owners

Many business owners build their leadership teams around technical know-how and long-standing trust. That makes sense—especially in founder-led or tightly held companies.

But here’s the reality:

What your business needs from a leader today may not be what it needs 9 months from now.

Roles evolve. Markets shift. Teams grow or restructure. And as that happens, the behavioral demands of key roles shift, too.

By identifying the behavioral X-factor in each executive role, you can:

• Clarify what success actually looks like in the context of your business’s next chapter
• Design sharper accountability plans, tailored to the hardest part of the role—not just generic KPIs
• Avoid costly mismatches, where the leader’s instincts don’t align with the organization’s current or future needs

This isn’t just about hiring smarter. It’s about keeping leaders aligned with what the business needs most—and making decisions early when that alignment fades.

Final Thought: The Real Question

When evaluating a key executive—or preparing to bring one in—it’s easy to default to technical qualifications.

But the more important question is:

“What behavioral skill will be the difference between success and failure over the next 9 months?”

Get that right, and everything else becomes easier—team performance, strategic progress, even deal value.

Get it wrong, and you may find yourself cleaning up quiet damage long before it’s obvious on paper.