When appointing someone to a leadership role, organisations often assess some version of the four Cs: character, competence, chemistry and capacity.
Character speaks to integrity, judgement and the extent to which a person’s behaviour is consistent with their stated values. Competence concerns the knowledge, skills and experience required to perform the role. Chemistry reflects the person’s ability to work constructively within the team and contribute to its culture. Capacity refers to their potential and willingness to learn, adapt and grow as the organisation evolves.
Most leaders would agree that character should come first. A highly capable person who cannot be trusted can cause significant damage—to relationships, decision-making, organisational culture and, ultimately, performance.
The more difficult question is what should come second: competence or chemistry?
At first glance, competence may appear to be the obvious answer. Organisations appoint people to deliver results, solve problems and exercise sound professional judgement. A candidate with a strong track record can seem less risky than someone who still has technical or functional gaps.
Yet experience has taught me that, once an appropriate threshold of competence has been established, chemistry may deserve greater weight.
This is not because competence is unimportant. It is because competence gaps and chemistry gaps affect teams differently.
A person joining a capable team can benefit from its collective competence. They can learn from colleagues, receive coaching, build contextual understanding and strengthen their technical contribution over time. Well-led teams transfer knowledge. They challenge one another’s thinking, share experience and help individuals develop capabilities they may not yet possess.
This is one of the advantages of working in a strong team: the collective can increase the capability of the individual.
Chemistry does not work in quite the same way.
A person who does not genuinely support the team’s purpose, values or ways of working is not automatically brought into alignment by being surrounded by people who do. In fact, the opposite may occur. Persistent cynicism, defensiveness, self-interest or resistance to shared accountability can gradually weaken the wider team.
One individual can affect the quality of dialogue, reduce psychological safety and make collaboration more difficult. Meetings become more guarded. Decisions are revisited outside the room. Information is withheld. Colleagues begin managing around the person rather than working openly with them.
Over time, the team spends more energy managing internal friction than addressing organisational priorities.
This is why chemistry should not be confused with simply liking someone. Nor should it mean appointing people who think, speak or behave in the same way.
Healthy chemistry is not sameness.
From a Human Capital perspective, using chemistry as a euphemism for “people like us” can reinforce unconscious bias and reduce diversity. A team may feel comfortable while becoming increasingly narrow in its thinking. Leaders should therefore be careful not to mistake familiarity, personality similarity or social ease for genuine alignment.
The chemistry that matters is a person’s ability to work productively across difference. It includes commitment to the organisation’s purpose, respect for others, openness to challenge, willingness to share accountability and the maturity to disagree without becoming destructive.
A person may have a very different background, communication style or perspective and still strengthen the team’s chemistry. Indeed, the right kind of difference often improves the team by expanding its thinking and disrupting unhelpful consensus.
In my executive and group-coaching work, I have seen that leadership teams rarely struggle because every member lacks expertise. More often, their difficulty lies in converting individual expertise into collective performance.
The team may contain highly accomplished executives, yet still experience fragmented decision-making, territorial behaviour, inconsistent follow-through or an inability to surface difficult issues. Individual competence is present, but the relational conditions required to integrate that competence are weak.
This is where chemistry becomes a performance issue rather than merely a cultural preference.
A team’s effectiveness depends not only on what each individual knows, but also on what happens between them: whether they trust one another, exchange information honestly, challenge assumptions constructively and remain aligned once a decision has been made.
There is, however, an important qualification. Chemistry should never be used to compensate for a fundamental inability to perform the role. Certain positions require a clear professional, technical or regulatory threshold. Good relationships cannot replace essential expertise, particularly where poor judgement could place people, clients or the organisation at risk.
The decision is therefore not between competence and chemistry in absolute terms.
The better question is: once the candidate has demonstrated sufficient competence to perform and develop in the role, which person is most likely to strengthen the team’s collective effectiveness?
In many situations, I would choose the person with sound character, strong values alignment and the capacity to learn—even where another candidate has a more impressive technical history.
Skills can often be strengthened through experience, mentoring and deliberate development. A lack of integrity, humility or commitment to collective success is much harder to address.
The appointment decision should therefore consider four questions:
Does this person have the character to be trusted with responsibility?
Do they have the baseline competence required to contribute credibly?
Will their presence strengthen the way the team works across differences?
Do they have the capacity and willingness to keep growing?
A strong appointment is not simply the most accomplished person available. It is the person whose character, contribution and way of working will help the whole team become more effective.
Character must come first. But once competence has crossed the necessary threshold, chemistry may be the quality that determines whether individual talent becomes collective performance.
Written by Nkulu
