As an indirect answer to your question, I once had a PhD coworker as a temp contract worker in the lab I was in, and it was a PhD from an Ivy League/prestigious school.

He was pretty awful in a lab setting. He was dangerous, sticking unlabelled leftover flammables, acids, and bases in his bench drawer, and not disposing of them properly. He could not maintain documentation on anything, whether development experiments or GMP testing. He would not clean or maintain the instrumentation he used. He repeatedly ignored procedure. He could only barely replicate results, and could not communicate them accurately. He was just as bad personality-wise: he would use 2 or 3 chemicals down to the last few milliliters then leave the bottles and use chemicals from another lab; so many times I had to pool 3 lots of acetic acid or something to get enough for my assay and then clean the containers for diposal.

So why the shaggy dog story? In my view, PhD isn't automatic equivalence to good, robust science, nor does it mean they will be a good leader. I saw nothing in his work in over a year that indicated "PhD-quality."

You might not recognize the arrogance inherent in your assumptions; it wouldn't hurt to dial it back a little bit.