Hire for Get-Along Ability – Barry Moline on Teamwork, Responsibility and AI

🎧 Listen: Castos  |  📺 Watch: full episode on YouTube

Barry Moline hired for skills through most of his 29 years as a CEO, until one bad hire made him switch to hiring for get-along ability first. He says it turned his organization around. Barry is president of BJM Solutions, a speaker and trainer on leadership, teamwork and influence, and the author of Connect! How to Quickly Collaborate for Success in Business and Life. On this episode of the Unscripted Small Business Podcast, he and host Jeremy Rivera talked about hiring, why the best team leader acts like a host instead of a hero, the one trait every leader shares, and a simple exercise for deciding which parts of each job AI should take.

Everyone you work with has a full to-do list and a story

Ask Barry who he is and he’ll tell you the answer depends on the room. “I think the answer is contextual.” At a business meeting he’s a CEO and speaker. At home he’s a father and husband. On the ice, “when I’m out playing hockey, I think of myself as an enforcer.” Under all of that, he describes himself as “someone who likes to bring people together and be generous with what I’ve learned in life and share that.”

Jeremy asked about the most important business lesson of his last five years. Barry’s answer was that everyone he works with is a person first. “People have their own story. Everybody has something going on in their lives.” His own to-do list has a front page, sticky notes, and a back page for the things he can’t get to. Yours probably does too. So he shares a little about himself and learns about the people across the table, for one reason:

“When we know more about each other, we work better together.”

Jeremy told a story about a museum visit with his wife, where they sat on opposite sides of a Doric column and each drew it. She turned her pencil sideways and drew the shadows. He drew the lines and the light. Same column, opposite approaches, one complete picture. Barry ran with it. A team works the same way once people know what each person is good at and can call on it.

He has his own version at home. “My wife and I have had this conversation,” he said. “She connects better to people. And I see facts.” At times that difference created friction. Once they named it, they started using it. When a situation needs more emotional intelligence, he turns to her and asks, “what are you feeling here?”

Barry stopped hiring the most skilled person and his results got better

Barry has thought a lot about hiring. “I’ve hired a lot of people in my life. So I was a CEO for 29 years.” For most of that time, his hiring team chased the best skills for each role. If it was a PR job, they wanted the strongest public relations skills. Then he noticed a pattern:

“What I found was that the most skilled people were not always the best teammates.”

The hire that broke the pattern was a communications director. Barry is careful to call her “a lovely, lovely person,” outgoing and friendly. The problem was that “she was a great team player if we were doing what she wanted.” When she didn’t get her way, she wouldn’t take direction from anyone but Barry, and even then she stayed unhappy about it. She lasted about a year and a half. After she left, Barry changed the rule:

“We’re no longer hiring for skills, we’re hiring number one for get-along ability.”

They tested for it through interviews, background checks, compatibility and references. His reasoning: “it’s not difficult to figure out if somebody has the basic skills for the job, but more important was that ability to work on a team.”

Train the skills, hire the teammate

The tradeoff was real. “Our results were better, even though we had to train our people more,” Barry said, because new hires didn’t always arrive with every skill. But “they were open to being trained.” His summary: “We became a learning organization.” The hiring team still pushed back sometimes with a line you may have said yourself: “Well, this person’s the most skilled, but I’m not sure about that teamwork thing.”

Barry admits it wasn’t easy, because “sometimes it feels like you’re moving past the best player.” His baseball answer: you don’t need a lineup of home run hitters. “Sometimes you need singles and doubles to keep the game flowing as well.” If you’re hiring from inside your own network, the free Insider Hire SOP pairs well with this.

Be the host, not the hero, if you want a team that works without you

Barry’s one-sentence offer, which he keeps written down so he gets it right: “I broaden people’s knowledge in leadership, teamwork, and influence to accelerate their leadership journey.”

Writing his 2019 book changed how he thinks about teams. Before it, “I literally thought teamwork is my superpower.” He was the outgoing facilitator who tells the big talkers to hold off so the quiet note-taker can speak. His research for Connect! told him that facilitator-as-hero model is the wrong one. “Better to be more like a host.”

A host introduces people and helps them get to know each other. Then you hand them a task and they do it on their own. A hero-centered team stalls the moment the hero walks out. “When the hero leaves the room, the facilitator leaves the room, people are like, well, that’s what he wanted us to do.” The groups Barry interviewed for the book got through hard situations by bringing people together first, and his takeaway is hopeful: “No matter where people are, it’s easy to make great teams.” If your business still runs through you, Gil Vaisman on making himself useless in his own business is a good next listen.

Responsibility is the leadership trait that shows up in every book

Barry also trains up-and-coming leaders, because he remembers what it felt like to want to move up with no one to ask. He compares it to “being blindfolded in a fun house.” When he built his training, he found there’s “probably about 50 different leadership skills,” and he says Amazon carries “something like 53,000 leadership books.” Across all of them, he found one common thread:

“There’s one characteristic that is common to all 53,000, and that is responsibility.”

Plenty of people step back and call leadership above their pay grade. Barry’s point is that “to be a leader, you have to step forward consistently and regularly.” Then he added the part people miss: “Take the reins. And that doesn’t mean do it yourself.” You bring people together, set the agenda and split up the work. “So responsibility, I found, is number one.”

Jeremy pushed on the other side of that coin: owning it when a call doesn’t work, and how many leaders can’t bear criticism. Barry tied accountability to a growth mindset, which he defines as “being open to the idea that you don’t know everything.” Barry recalls Steve Jobs telling his leadership team, “I don’t know what you do. That’s why I hired you.” The leader’s job is to keep “everybody’s rowing in the same direction” and let each team do its work. Barry says he sees “something new in AI at least once a week,” which is a good reminder that a degree is only “the springboard to continuing to learn more going forward.”

Run a twice-a-month AI show-and-tell across departments

Jeremy brought up his conversation with Daniel Hebert of Oleno, which builds shared marketing context for AI tools. Jeremy’s point was that everyone on a team uses AI differently. Each person’s Claude or ChatGPT builds its own layers of personalization, so getting a whole team working the same way takes shared skills, SOPs and a deliberate plan.

Barry speaks on AI and leadership, including “how leaders stay in charge of AI.” His most practical advice is to “get cross-departmental teams together, anybody who wants to, twice a month, and share how people are using AI.” Someone puts their screen up and says “here’s my computer, let me project it on the screen, here’s what I’m using it for.” Research, coding, graphics, photography, video: “No one has a full grasp of everything. It’s an elephant.”

Learning from peers changes the mood in the room. With no test and no deadline, “the stress level is lowered significantly and our minds are open to learning from each other.” Barry contrasted that with “an outside consultant that we’re spending five thousand dollars a day for.” He does the same thing with a small group of friends who dabble in AI: “the anxiety level is low. Our learning levels are high.” For the employees who are still nervous about AI, the free AI Adoption SOP covers how to win them over.

Feed each job description to AI and ask what should stay human

Jeremy asked how a CEO can bring AI in without building resistance. Barry’s exercise starts with something most businesses neglect. Sit down with each employee and update their job description so it’s accurate. Then “enter that job description into your favorite AI and say, what tasks can AI help with? And what tasks should remain human?” In his words, “It’ll give you a great list.”

He recently ran it with a group of companies that operate industrial laundries, covering five categories of workers, from maintenance techs and safety technicians to supervisors, floor workers and drivers. Some work stays human no matter what: “Somebody’s got to turn the screwdriver. Somebody’s got to replace the belt.” But two ideas surprised the room:

• Safety training in each worker’s stronger language. Upload the operations and safety manuals, have AI build a safety course with test questions, then translate it for bilingual employees who are stronger in Spanish. “You really want people to understand it at their core in their native language.” The team still talks about it together in English.
• Machine manuals on the phone at the machine. A maintenance tech can search every operating manual from the floor instead of paging through binders, so AI can “move you faster through the technical materials and then allow you more time to fix the machine.”

Barry said “their mouths were dropping open, like, I never thought about that.”

Want the step-by-step version? Use the free AI Job Description SOP built from this episode – eight steps and a printable worksheet.

Jeremy added a marketing version. Jeremy Moser of uSERP, a GEO agency, told him on his Unscripted episode that AI output gets much better when you feed it recorded sales calls and interview your own experts instead of using a cold prompt. Jeremy did that with the installer at Permacast, which builds Florida precast concrete walls, who said the one thing he wants every customer to do is “measure it three times because it’s concrete and it’s not changing dimensions.” That answer went on the website, and the next install went smoother because customers had already read it. Jeremy’s takeaway: “AI can help human expertise surface in appropriate context more easily.” If you want a process for writing down what your experts know, start with the Simple Systems SOP.

Persist past the no’s and the not today’s

Jeremy asked for two sentences listeners should remember. Barry skipped responsibility, since they’d covered it, and went with persistence. “You’re gonna have a lot of speed bumps in your way.” Some people will be naysayers about you or your ideas, and “it’s really important to persist.” The best leaders “are ones that recognize good ideas and then persist to get over the roadblocks and speed bumps and the no’s and the not today’s.” Then he gave the line he wanted you to keep:

“You have to persist in everything that you do. And when you do, that’s how you become successful.”

Two more takes on this conversation: what marketers should learn from feeding every job description to AI on SEO Arcade, and Jeremy’s own reflection on being the host, not the hero.

Connect with Barry Moline

• Website and speaker reel: barrymoline.com
• Free downloads on teams and influence: barrymoline.com/resources
• Blog: Barry Moline’s blog
• Book: Connect! How to Quickly Collaborate for Success in Business and Life
• LinkedIn: Barry Moline
• YouTube: Barry Moline on YouTube

🎧 Listen: Castos  |  📺 Watch: full episode on YouTube

Sponsor disclosure: uSERP, Oleno and ClearLead Digital are paid sponsors of the Unscripted podcast network. Links to them are marked as sponsored.

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