There’s one thing the best hiring managers assess that most others miss: Operating modality.
Most hiring processes go like this:
- 80% assess “Can this person do the job?”
Validated through past roles, general questions, and light referencing. - 50% dig deeper on culture fit and values alignment, but often confuse that with matching personalities or communication styles.
- 20% go deeper with structured assessments, formal + informal referencing.
But the top 1%—the ones who consistently hire people who outperform expectations—go one level deeper.
They rigorously evaluate a candidate’s operating modality AKA how they actually work.
What does that mean?
It means pressure testing how someone navigates the job in motion:
- How quickly do they respond to internal communications?
- What tools and channels do they default to (Slack, email, Zoom)?
- How do they manage their work/life boundary on nights, weekends, holidays?
- What’s their team management cadence? 1:1s, team meetings, skip-levels?
- What’s their preferred communication style? Slides, memos, rough bullets?
- How do they learn? Through listening, reading, doing, or asking questions?
Most teams confuse a misalignment in operating modality with a misalignment in values.
They’re related. But they’re not the same.
So how do you assess someone's operating modality?
Use this Operating Modality Scorecard to evaluate candidates in a structured way:
Score each 1–5 based on fit with your team’s style.
And here’s the important part:
You can’t assess someone’s modality until you’ve mapped your own.
If your org hasn’t defined how it actually works—its rhythms, decisions, communications, pressure points—then you’re hiring in the dark.
Hiring failures often don’t come from a lack of skill or even culture misalignment.
They come from bringing in someone who just works differently.
It’s the exec who needs time to reflect, in a company that moves in real-time.
It’s the IC who prefers long-form writing, in a team that thinks out loud in Slack.
But when should you break your own operating modality?
When the mission demands it.
Sometimes, bringing in a different operating style is exactly what the business needs:
- A detail-oriented operator inside a vision-first, speed-at-all-costs culture.
- A high-context communicator inside a team that’s grown too transactional.
- A consensus-builder brought into a founder-led environment that’s overly top-down.
When you break modality on purpose, it should be clear:
- What the trade-offs are.
- What support or scaffolding that person will need.
- What success looks like if they’re intentionally different from the norm.
Otherwise, you’re not evolving your culture. You’re just injecting friction.
The Navy SEALs spend over 75% of their time training, not fighting.
Because in high-stakes situations, success ultimately comes from deeply-ingrained, deeply-deliberate ways of operating.
As they say:
“You don’t rise to the occasion. You fall to the level of your training.”
The same holds true in high-performing companies, scale-ups, and elite teams.
So if you want to hire better:
- Map your own operating modality.
- Score candidates against it.
- Break your model intentionally, not by accident.
That’s where the real signal is.
