The way to hire quickly and be a fast judge of character is to have fidelity yourself and thus quickly identify whether other people live with fidelity or with conflicting values and morals. You cannot recognize fidelity in others unless you have it yourself. You cannot have fidelity yourself unless you treasure it in others.
People are made if the same stuff all the way through. If a person can live in conflict with his own values then he can also live in conflict with yours and your company’s. Morals are a fast way to where where someone stands. Where fidelity is concerned, there are two types of people: the deviant who maintains internal moral conflict and the immature who seeks to expunge as many internal moral conflicts as possible. No one is perfect, but some of us want to be.
If you want to be perfect then you will run well with those who also want to be. But, if your coworker, supervisor, or employee is hiding some secret, ongoing scandal—and thinks that scandal is not immoral—then you are bound to have “teamwork” and “compatibility” issues when you work together; and you might never figure out why.
Just because we travel in the same ramp lanes on an expressway cloverleaf doesn’t mean we share the same destination. One might be merging on and the other merging off. Know where you are going, be honest with yourself about where you are going, then you will easily recognize whether other people know where they are going and are honest with themselves about where they are going.
Someone who is actually going where he thinks he is going is a rare person indeed—rare enough that he just might be the kind if person someone like you can work with. Don’t be like Samson who kept flirting with Delilah as she tried again and again to make him weak, vexing his heart until he let her take away his power. Had he been honest about where his foolish heart was taking him, he would have saved himself years of pain and would likely have lengthened his life. Know where your path leads, then lead others.