Aptitude or Attitude? Choose?

Aptitude or Attitude? Choose?

Answer honestly:

1. What do you base your hiring decisions on – ability or behaviour?
2. And why do you fire – ability or behaviour?

Chances are, if you are like most leaders, you hire on ability and fire on behaviour, according to Mark Murphy – read his interview with Forbes here: click to view article

It is so easy to hire and so hard to fire. Getting the wrong person in the job has HUGE implications for your organization, so think about your hiring practices:

1. Source of applicants: Where do you get your applicants? An advertisement? Job sites? The best way to find applicants that have the right attitudes for your company is from current employees. OF course – makes sense, doesn’t it? These are the people who know what’s important and valued, and know someone who they believe meets those criteria.
2. Filtering applicants: The starting point for the applicant is the resume, which is typically heavily focused on skills and experience. That is the first door through which applicants pass. But more and more, with the preponderance of online submission of applications, people are figuring out how to write their resumes so that they pass the first hurdle. The question therefore is, how do you assess those initial applications without filtering out the people with the right attitude but who may not have all the technical skills and experience you ask for? Perhaps it may be worth it to spend some resources on a human actually reviewing the applications rather than an algorithm.
3. The interview(s): Then there is the interview, or series of interviews (hopefully, you do more than one interview). Again the focus is on skills and experience. But what about the applicant’s attitude? How do you grill for that? How do you determine if your potential hire is a good fit with your culture? By asking the right questions. I use this exercise as an icebreaker in my Core Values Articulation workshops – “What were you told as a child that has stood you in good stead throughout your lifetime”? This one question gets to the heart of what people were brought up with, since attitudes and values are ingrained very early in one’s life, in the family. Then you can ask further “Can you share an experience where you actually used this to make a decision”?
4. Verification: how rigorous are your background checks? When speaking with previous employers, do you ask about attitude as well as aptitude?
5. The decision: yes, you want someone who can do the work right away …. But that is so unrealistic as to be laughable. Even if the person has ALL the skills and experience necessary, there will still be a learning curve in terms of your company’s processes, procedures and most importantly, values. It is those values that will determine how quickly and effectively your new hires perform to your expectations.

Always remember that you can improve skills through training, but you can’t change attitude. So think carefully about who and how you hire.

THE BALANCED SCORECARD

The Balanced Scorecard can help you to hire people with the right skill sets AND attitude. One of the emerging innovations is the concept of the Strategic Job Family. A Strategy Job Family carefully identifies those jobs that are CRITICAL to the strategy and defines the Competency Profile in 3 parts:

1. Knowledge – what do they need to know?
2. Skills – what critical skills must they have?
3. Attitudes – how must they behave? Of course, the starting point for their “behaviour” is the organisation’s Core Values, but it goes further to define behaviours necessary for the job function.

With this template, leaders are now able to assess gaps in their current team members and develop programs to fill them. It is also a template with which to define the hiring process.

The Strategic Job Family exercise has brought numerous insights and breakthroughs with my clients. I have seen HUGE shifts in how they think about their people and greater focus and wisdom in programs that get their people ready to deliver the strategy.

This article by Kaplan and Norton explains the concept: click to view article

TAKE ONE ACTION

TODAY: Review your job interview guide, and make sure that you have questions that relate to attitude and values, to make sure that you surface the right fit with your organization’s values.

INTERESTING LINKS

Bill and Melinda Gates, through their foundation, are tackling BIG problems – and succeeding. Now Bill Gates reveals what he plans to focus on for the rest of his life. It’s an idea well worth emulating – click to view article

One of the best corporate leaders I know just happens to be my brother, Douglas Orane. From a base in Jamaica, he built a multinational conglomerate that operates in over 60 counties. On December 31, 2013 he retired from Grace Kennedy, the company he has worked at since 1981. In these interviews, he shares his insights about business and leadership: