“Most new hires do not fail on the job due to lack of
skill,” says Mark Murphy. Attitude is a bigger issue than skill.
Consequently,
most of our approaches to selecting the right people for the job are dead
wrong.
- Coachability (26%): The ability to accept and implement
feedback from bosses, colleagues, customers, and others.
- Emotional Intelligence (23%): The ability to understand and
manage one’s own emotions and accurately assess others' emotions.
- Motivation (17%): Sufficient drive to achieve one’s full
potential and excel on the job.
- Temperament (15%): Attitude and personality suited to the
particular job and work environment.
- Technical Competence (11%): Functional or technical skills
required to do the job.
Naturally, we should be concerned whether or not a candidate
can do the job, but it should not be the main focus. “Because even the best
skills don’t really matter if an employee isn’t open to improving or
consistently alienates co-workers, lacks drive, or simply lacks the right
personality to succeed in that culture.”
What attitudes work in one culture may not work in another.
Attitudes are culture specific. So you first need to discover your organisation’s
unique attitudes. Think about the “attitudes that separate your high performers
from your middle performers and your low performers from everybody else. You’re
not trying to create a laundry list of attitudes but just the—three to
seven—“important critical predictors of employee success or failure for your
organisation.”
Murphy talks about the kinds of common questions you should
never ask—the “tell me about yourself” questions, the behavioural “tell me
about a time when” questions, the hypothetical “what would you do if”
questions, and the oddball “if you could be any superhero” questions—and how to
create the questions and evaluate the answers that differentiate people by the
attitudes that are the most important to success in your organisation.
A benefit of determining the attitudes that work best in
your organisation is that you can begin to clearly communicate those attitudes
to your current employees and develop high performers throughout the whole
organisation.
Positive Leadership: Attitude Matters More Than Skill
