Week 25 Day 7: Assignment: Create Your Tenacity Assessment Rubric

Create a one-page rubric with three categories: duration evidence, completion evidence, and recovery evidence. For each category, define what a strong signal looks like, what a moderate signal looks like, and what a weak signal looks like. Use this rubric in your next five interviews to assess candidates on tenacity alongside the behavioral questions from Weeks 22-24.

Here is the rubric framework. Category one -- Duration Evidence. Strong: sustained commitment to a field, company, or project for five or more years with progressive depth. Moderate: two to four years of sustained commitment with clear growth trajectory. Weak: frequent changes (less than two years in any position) with explanations that focus on external factors rather than internal growth. Category two -- Completion Evidence. Strong: multiple complex projects completed end-to-end, with the candidate able to describe the final phase in detail. Moderate: at least one significant project completed with specific details about the tedious final stages. Weak: projects described entirely in terms of their beginning and middle, with vague or absent descriptions of completion. Category three -- Recovery Evidence. Strong: clear example of significant professional setback followed by deliberate recovery and subsequent achievement. Moderate: example of adversity with evidence of learning, even if the recovery was partial. Weak: no adversity examples, or adversity examples where the candidate positions themselves entirely as a victim of circumstances. Scoring: rate each category 1-3 and sum for a total tenacity score of 3-9. A score of 7 or above indicates strong tenacity evidence. A score of 4-6 indicates moderate evidence that warrants further exploration. A score of 3 indicates insufficient tenacity evidence for a role that requires sustained execution. Add this rubric to your Leadership Operating Manual alongside your signature questions from Week 24 and your behavioral interview framework from Week 22.

The rubric development methodology applies principles from criterion-referenced assessment design (Popham, 1978), which establishes that evaluation instruments are most reliable when they include explicit performance level descriptors (strong, moderate, weak) anchored to observable behavioral indicators rather than subjective impressions. Research by Maurer (2002) on structured rating scales in interview contexts found that behaviorally anchored rating scales (BARS) reduced inter-rater disagreement by 35-45% compared to unanchored scales, because the behavioral descriptions constrain interpretation and reduce drift toward idiosyncratic criteria. The three-category structure (duration, completion, recovery) provides what Messick (1995) calls 'construct representation' -- coverage of the major facets of the trait being measured (tenacity) sufficient to support valid inferences. The 1-3 scoring system within each category reflects research by Miller (1956) on the 'magical number seven, plus or minus two' -- the finding that human judgment reliability decreases as the number of discrimination categories increases beyond five to seven, supporting the use of a small number of clearly differentiated levels. The cumulative scoring approach (sum across categories) implements what Sackett and Lievens (2008) call 'compensatory scoring' -- the principle that strengths in one area can offset weaknesses in another, which is appropriate for hiring decisions where no single factor is absolutely disqualifying but the overall pattern is diagnostic.