Focus On Attitude Over Skills

There are only three things in which to look for the people you're trying to draw on your team and the things that you want to go to work on in developing in yourself. And those three things are either knowledge, skills, or attitude.

The impact of a single employee in your organization with a poor attitude is a disease that can divide and multiply uncontrollably and destroy your entire team's mood, attitude, emotions, belief, and overall dispositions, which will have a direct impact on job performance, decision-making, creativity, teamwork, and leadership.  

Rooting out these bad attitude contagions is even more critical in the 21st century than ever before. We now work in networks rather than rigidly defined hierarchies. We now have to actively collaborate rather than working in isolated silos. All this makes the exposure to these shared social influences more widespread, the viral velocity far more accelerated, and the mortality rate even higher for your team.  

Leaders have been trained to hire and build teams with the right knowledge and skills, posting requirements for degrees and certifications, and years of experience, etc. While some of that is important, the much more significant factor comes down to attitude.  

You have to build, perpetually fortify and protect the attitude culture of your team. You can teach aptitude, but you cannot really teach attitude. Or let's just say you don't have the time and budget to do the psychotherapy, rehabilitation needed to fix what their parents, their priest, or their past has done to screw them up.  

In an interview, chairman of Marriot was asked, “How do you train your staff to be friendly”, to that he replied, “We don't train our staff to be friendly, we just hire friendly people.” 

You can not train people to be positive.  

You cannot help them have a positive attitude. Instead, just hire people who already have a positive attitude and remove those who do not. 

What does “hire for attitude and train for skill” really mean?

According to Mark Murphy, a thought leader in the field, 46% of new hires fail in their jobs within the first 18 months. Of these, 89% was due to reasons associated with the new hires’ attitudes. These included a lack of coachability, low levels of emotional intelligence, motivation, and temperament. What this implies is that by hiring people with the right attitude, an employer would already be able to reduce its new hire turnover rate. 

Putting attitude first doesn’t mean technical and soft skills are less important. Skills are still important prerequisite for a new hire to do his job well and cope with the demands of the job; however, skills can easily be assessed through technical tests or simply viewing a candidate’s portfolio. Moreover, a candidate lacking certain non-critical skills can acquire those skills after joining the company as long as he has the right attitude.

What the Numbers Show

Some other attitudinal reasons why new hires fail is:

• 26% are incapable of accepting feedback and constructive criticism

• 23% lack the intelligence to understand and manage emotions

• 17% lack the motivation to excel

• 15% have a mismatch attitude and personality for the job

The statistics have proven true across all industries, particularly in positions that require interaction with other people regularly.

Attitudes and Behavior

An attitude can be thought of as composed of three highly interrelated components:

(1) A cognitive component, dealing with the beliefs and ideas a person has about a person or object.

(2) An affective component (affect), dealing with a person’s feelings toward the person or object; and

(3) An intentional component, dealing with the behavioral intentions a person has with respect to the person or object.

Attitudes lead to behavioral intentions, which, in turn, lead to actual behavior. Following behavior, we can often identify efforts by the individual to justify his behavior.

How are Attitudes are formed in workplace?

There are three theories concerning the way attitudes are formed.

Dispositional Approach

One view offered by psychologist Barry Staw and others is the dispositional approach which argues that attitudes represent relatively stable predispositions to respond to people or situations around them. That is, attitudes are viewed almost as personality traits. Thus, some people would have a tendency—a predisposition—to be happy on the job, almost regardless of the nature of the work itself. Others may have an internal tendency to be unhappy, again almost regardless of the actual nature of the work. Evidence in support of this approach can be found in a series of studies that found that attitudes change very little among people before and after they make a job change.

Situational Approach

A second approach to attitude formation is called the situational approach. This approach argues that attitudes emerge as a result of the uniqueness of a given situation. They are situationally determined and can vary in response to changing work conditions. Thus, as a result of experiences at work (a boring or unrewarding job, a bad supervisor, etc.), people react by developing appropriate attitudes. Several variations on this approach can be identified. Some researchers suggest that attitudes result largely from the nature of the job experience itself. 

Social-information-processing approach

This view, developed by Pfeffer and Salancik, asserts that attitudes result from “socially constructed realities” as perceived by the individual. That is, the social context in which the individual is placed shapes his perceptions of the situation and hence his attitudes.

Suppose a new employee joins a work group consisting of people who have worked together for some time. The existing group already has opinions and feelings about the fairness of the supervisor, the quality of the workplace, the adequacy of the compensation, and so forth. Upon arriving, the new worker is fed socially acceptable cues from co-workers about acceptable attitudes toward various aspects of the work and company. Thus, due in part to social forces, the new employee begins to form attitudes based on externally provided bits of information from the group instead of objective attributes of the workplace.

Cognitive consistency is a tendency to think and act in a predictable manner. Cognitive dissonance occurs when our actions and our attitudes are in conflict. This dissonance will motivate us to attempt to return to a state of cognitive consistency, where attitudes and behaviors are congruent. 

Hiring for Attitude/Character

Organisations that hire new employees based on their character do so because of the idea that it’s easier to train someone’s skills than to change their character.

While the experienced and the talented with a bad attitude are likely to fail at their jobs, the less experienced with great attitude have higher chances to succeed long term. Someone may have all the necessary skills for the position, but if their personality doesn’t fit the company culture, they are likely not the best person to hire.

Hiring for Skills

In the other scenario, you hire someone qualified but with a poor attitude. While it’s not impossible to improve their attitude, it can be a much longer and riskier path to take as doing so takes a personal decision, willingness and determination to change. It’s something that others can’t be convinced about unless they’re open to it. 

Keep in mind that although technical skills and industry expertise are hard skills that make a CV stand out, they only form a part of the equation. 

Another thing to consider is the fact that industries are getting disrupted, and technologies are evolving at an unprecedented pace. Ultimately, the willingness to learn new skills will be an important determinant of the new hire’s success than his skills.

A recent study from research and advisory firm Gartner identified three trends that are rendering traditional recruitment tactics obsolete. (Harvard Business Review)

First, the skills needed in many roles have an increasingly short shelf life, owing in part to more frequent and disruptive technological breakthroughs. A 2019 survey of 3,500 managers found that only 29% of new hires have all the skills required for their current roles, let alone for future ones. The research finds that in key functions such as finance, IT, and sales, positions filled today will require up to 10 new skills within 18 months. It also documents rising uncertainty about what skills will be needed in current and future jobs as the surge in remote work sparks the redesign or automation of many tasks.

Second, the talent pools recruiters have routinely tapped are becoming outmoded. Highly gifted candidates can now be found outside traditional talent clusters, such as leading universities and technical colleges. More and more people are acquiring critical skills informally on the job—or even in their own basements. “Work lulls and layoffs have driven a boom in virtual learning, giving workers new autonomy in developing skills outside their day jobs,” the researchers write.

Finally, candidates are increasingly selective about whom they work for, so firms need a compelling “employment value proposition,” which might involve anything from competitive compensation and benefits to career-development opportunities and a reputation for stellar management. Talented candidates, particularly at high levels, are weighing opportunities differently. Factors such as meaningful work and proximity to family have taken on added importance during the pandemic. The freedom (often the imperative) to work remotely and to manage one’s own schedule has increased employees’ expectations that they can exert considerable control over the design of their jobs.

Attributes to Look for in Candidates

If hiring based on attitude is so valuable, what specific attributes should businesses be looking for? Besides the critical skills and educational requirements for the position, also look out for the following attributes in the candidates:

Love for mission/vision of the company: Apart of being smart, hire who are in love with your mission. Especially for senior positions. Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater capital, the most successful hedge fund in history explains it this way. He said, “I believe all organizations have basically two types of people, those who work to be part of a mission, and those who work for a paycheck, we were successful, because I only wanted to surround myself with people who care about what we care about.” Achieving great goals and audacious mission is a struggle, and you need to find people who will embrace the struggle for the love of the game, for the love of the mission.

Growth: Find someone who loves, embraces, and exemplifies the continual learning and growth journey on each day. It is a personal philosophy and attitude. A growth mindset person knows that they can learn anything with enough attention, time, and focus on it. This single mindset difference will have a massive impact on performance for the individual and for the influence that they will have on the rest of your team or organisation.

Positivity: Having a positive attitude in the workplace won't necessarily make you better at your job, but it will improve the way people view you as a person, so they may be more inclined to help you succeed and cheer you on. It is important for many reasons, but one of the main reasons for having a positive attitude in the workplace is because it can rub off on everyone else. Exuding positivity can be infectious and, over time, can influence your co-workers.

Humility: Humility is often misunderstood as meekness, timidity, insecurity, or self deprecation, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Humility is the ultimate strength. It is having a strong sense of self, a quiet, grounded confidence, being completely comfortable in your own skin and your own abilities and who you really are. The humble person no longer needs to prove themselves at every turn, they no longer have to have the constant need to be right or to attempt to control or to dominate every situation. Those are proclivities of the projected but false confident, arrogant, and insecure.

Persistent/Relentless: It is a deep-down drive and desire to be better every day. This is what propels people to great achievement, to persist despite the odds, difficulties, and setbacks. It is what you do when things become tough when you hit that wall when you are exhausted.

Emotional Intelligence: It is the ability to understand, use, and manage your own emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges, and defuse conflict. According to Daniel Goleman, an American psychologist, there are five key elements to it: Self-awareness, Self-regulation, Motivation, Empathy, and Social skills.

Taking Ownership: Taking 100% responsibility for the result and life through one of three factors. 1) What you did: Taking responsibility for what you did. 2) What you didn’t do: You knew what to do, but just didn't do it. 3) Response to circumstance: Many of the situations are not in our control, but the response towards those is totally in our control. We are responsible now for how we respond to what happens to us. No matter what's happened. you take complete responsibility for your response to it, good or bad, victory or defeat. Own it and move on from there.

Speed: Most people just put their work into their backpack, thinking they will think about or work on it later. Then they continue to try to climb their mountain with this pack getting perpetually heavier and heavier. Eventually, they can't move at all or only very slowly. Instead, do it now or delegate it or eliminate it. This way we could accomplish more in less time rather than working long hours.

Adaptable: In a world that is going to continue to throw new and novel situations to navigate, the need for adaptability in the workplace – to learn and unlearn – is critical to future success. Ability to rapidly learn new skills and behaviours in response to changing circumstances. Someone demonstrating adaptability in the workplace is flexible and has the ability to respond effectively to their working conditions – even if things don’t go as planned. They usually work well on their own and with team members.

Reliable: Being reliable as being someone others can trust on always, when you say you're going to do something, it will be done. Period. No excuses, no story, no justification, after the fact it's as good as done. When the baton is passed to them, you can let go all the way and trust that they'll bring it over the finish line.

Resourceful: This is a critical attribute in this fast-changing world. Everything is new to everyone all the time. With all this rapid change. No one is an expert anymore, that college diploma, master's degree or PhD degree was rendered obsolete. Being resourceful means knowing how to get the information and results you want.

Resources

Based on G. W. Allport, “Attitudes,” in C. Murchison, ed., Handbook of Social Psychology (Worcester: Clark University Press, 1935).

B. M. Staw and J. Ross, “Stability in the Midst of Change: A Dispositional Approach to Job Attitudes,” Journal of Applied Psychology, 1985, 70, pp. 469–480.

G. Salancik and J. Pfeffer, “A Social Information Processing Approach to Job Attitudes and Task Design,” Administrative Science Quarterly, 1978, 23, pp. 224–253.

L. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1957).

Arjun Vijeth  

Peak Performance and Life Coach  

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