Intention vs Skill

I have been sitting with this question for a while now. It started when I was in the middle of hiring for my team – going through CVs, sitting across from people in interviews, trying to figure out who to bring in. And somewhere between the second and third round, it hit me: I was not just looking at what people could do. I was trying to figure out who they were. That is a very different thing.

As a Swar Fellow, I have spent a lot of time in communities where formal education did not always show up the way it was supposed to. Kids who were sharp, curious, full of fire , but no one had ever given them the right tools. Adults who could run circles around you in problem-solving but had never been handed a chance to prove it on paper. Working in those spaces changes how you see people. It made me deeply uncomfortable with the idea that a skill gap is the same as a capability gap. It is not. A skill gap is often just a resource gap in disguise.

So when I sit in a hiring room, I am watching for something harder to measure. Does this person actually care? Are they here because they want to build something, or because it fits neatly on a career path? I know that sounds a little idealistic. But I have seen what happens when you bring someone in with real intention – someone who stays late not because you asked, who asks questions because they genuinely want to understand, who owns a mistake without waiting to be called out. That person, even if they are slower to start, becomes the backbone of a team. Skills can be taught. That kind of ownership is much harder to install.

But I will be honest , it is not always that clean. I have also seen the other side. Highly skilled people who are just going through the motions. Doing the work, hitting the numbers, but completely switched off from why any of it matters. And here is what I have learnt: trying to spark intention in someone who has none is one of the most exhausting things you can attempt as a manager. You can set the environment, you can connect the work to something bigger, you can try to make it personal. Sometimes it works. Often it does not. That gap -between doing a job and caring about it , is a gap that is very hard to close from the outside.

What the fellowship taught me

Fellowship put me in rooms with people from all kinds of backgrounds – government officials, grassroots workers, community members, young people who had barely left their villages. And what I noticed again and again was that the people who moved things were not always the most polished or the most trained. They were the ones who felt the problem personally. Who had skin in the game. That is intention at its most raw form – not motivation from a TED talk, but something that comes from lived experience. Something that does not need a pep talk to show up every morning.

That experience has made me rethink how I build teams. I no longer start with the job description and work backwards to the person. I start by asking – what does this work actually need, and who is the kind of person who would give a damn about it? From there, I figure out what skills are non-negotiable on day one and what can be built over time. Not every skill can wait. But more of them can than we assume. What cannot wait is the foundation of trust and genuine care – because without that, even the most skilled person becomes a liability over time.

I am still working this out. I do not think there is a clean answer. Every hire is a bet, and every person is a context. But I have started being more deliberate about creating space for intention to grow – through honest conversations, through connecting people’s personal goals with what the organisation is trying to do, through giving ownership early and trusting people to rise into it. It does not always work. But when it does, it is the kind of work that actually means something.

If you are navigating this in your own team – hiring for will, building for skill, or trying to light a fire in someone who has gone a little dark – I would genuinely love to hear how you are doing it. Because I do not think any of us have fully figured it out. And maybe that is okay.

Still learning, still building.