Skills matter. They definitely matter. They just don’t matter as much as people seem to think. That’s because many important and valuable abilities are not a function of knowledge. They’re a function of attitude.

We’ve all been in useless meetings. What does it take to run an effective meeting? You don’t need advanced graduate work. You don’t need decades of experience. What you need is a clear purpose and agenda and the discipline to stick to them. Easier said than done? Sure. But the part that’s hard isn’t knowledge. It’s attitude.

What about listening? Being a good listener is a valuable ability. Exactly how much is involved in doing that? Look at the person who is talking. Hear what they’re saying. Think about what they’re saying. Don’t talk. You don’t need an executive MBA for this. You don’t have to be in the fast track high potential development program to get access to a rare opportunity to grow. You just need to control yourself and pay attention.

Then there’s being accountable to stakeholders. That’s simple also. You remember what you told them. You look at what you did and didn’t do, then write an email and click Send. And you do that every week or every month or whatever the right cadence is. You don’t need an executive coach. You don’t need a license from the state. You just need to value it, make time for it, and do it.

What about producing high quality code? Surely that requires otherworldly talent, a mastery of complex algorithms, and the ability to read binary faster than most people read prose. Except… it’s not. I’ve known plenty of incredibly smart people who wrote bad code. I’ve known numerous medium capable programmers, including myself, who produced high quality code. Most of the difference between producing poor code and producing excellent code is not whether you started programming at age 7 on your mom’s computer or whether you got a computer science degree at MIT. It turns out most of the difference is the same as the difference between poor work and excellent work anywhere: improving your work until it is excellent instead of letting it be anything less. Perhaps you have to gain some knowledge and experience to understand what makes code good and bad, but mostly this is not a skill. This is an attitude.

Skills are important. They are. But what skills do is mostly establish what the potential is. They’re like a driving test to get a license. They show that you can drive well. But will you drive well when you have your license and don’t have a test proctor in the passenger seat? You can tell just by watching the roads for five minutes how weak of a guarantee that is. The skills are required. They’re not sufficient. And it turns out for a lot of things, the skills are really, really easy. When someone still doesn’t do what’s needed as well as it’s needed? The answer is attitude. They just don’t want to.