Here is an excerpt from an article written by William C. Taylor for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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In the still-raging debate over my two posts about why “Great People Are Overrated,” the one (and perhaps only) question that went under-discussed might be the most important question of all: How do you know a great person when you see one?

Is “greatness” purely a matter of raw brainpower and technical virtuosity, or is it impossible to discuss individual talent without thinking about the team, the enterprise, and the very mission of the organization?

The front page of a recent issue of The New York Times offered an in-depth account of how innovators in one industry are wrestling with that very question. The piece reports on the radical new admissions policy at Virginia Tech Carilion, the country’s newest medical school. The process “has enormous consequences” not for just for aspiring doctors, the Times says, but “also for the entire health care system.”

Here’s what the fuss is about. Rather than evaluate candidates strictly on grades, scores on standardized tests, and how they present themselves in an interview, Virginia Tech Carilion now subjects candidates to nine brief interviews “that [assess] how well candidates think on their feet and how willing they are to work on teams.” The technical term for the process is the M.M.I., or the multiple mini-interview. The Times calls it “the admissions equivalent of speed-dating”: nine eight-minute conversations about an ethical dilemma, on-the-spot decisions, even health-care policy that aim to capture who candidates are, not just how smart they are.

“We are trying to weed out the students who look great on paper but haven’t developed the people or communications skills we think are important,” said Dr. Stephen Workman, the school’s associate dean for admissions and administration. “Our school intends to graduate physicians who can communicate with patients and work in teams,” added Dr. Cynda Ann Johnson, the school’s dean. “If people do poorly on the M.M.I., they will not be offered positions in our class.”

Finally, medical schools are catching up to what best companies have known (and practiced) for years: Being a star performer is about more than just individual star quality. Indeed, companies that are incredibly selective about whom they hire — companies that have their pick of the best talent in their field — have learned to make their selections based on character as much as credentials. For these companies, who you are as a person counts for as much as what you know at any point in time, and you capacity to work in a great team is as important as your drive to be an individual star.

[Taylor goes on to discuss in detail how Southwest Airlines selects people to fill positions. To read the complete article, please click here.]

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William C. Taylor is cofounder of Fast Company magazine and the author of Practically Radical: Not-So-Crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, and Challenge Yourself, published January 4, 2011. You can follow him at twitter.com/practicallyrad.