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Global Chief Executive of one of the leading global management consulting firms, McKinsey & Company, Dominic Barton, was recently reported to have said that “Today, successful companies recruit or hire for attitude and not just skills and the paper qualification”. Having considered all factors, on balance, I could not agree less with Mr. Barton.
You may possibly have heard these said about a colleague at work, or elsewhere: “The Manager is brilliant, but his work attitude stinks”. “My team lead is a bundle of skills, but his work ethic is appalling”. “Only if the supervisor had complemented his huge skills with good attitude, we would have achieved a lot more”.
In advising organizations to place a premium on attitude and skills, it may be helpful to briefly discuss the real meaning of attitude in this context- it is simply bad attitude! Such kinds of attitude may appear in the form of persistent lateness to work and/or absenteeism, spreading of rumors and gossips, unbridled criticism of colleagues geared toward humiliating rather than correcting, instituting a winner-takes-all approach (taking personal glory for all that is good and blaming others for collective mistakes), undermining the leadership, deliberately flouting rules, procedures, and established norms; refusing to accept criticism, deliberately denigrating the organization among external audiences, exhibiting distrust and disrespect, abject lack of commitment and professionalism, spreading of negativity among employees, etc.
According to Leadership IQ, a tracking of 20,000 new hires over a three-year period showed that, within the first eighteen months, someone was a bad hire for attitudinal reasons 89% of the time. Broken down into the five top groups, 26% failed due to coachability (ability to accept and implement feedback from bosses, colleagues, customers, etc), 23% failure was due to emotional intelligence (ability to understand and manage one’s emotions and accurately access others’ emotions), 17% was for motivation (sufficient drive to achieve one’s full potential and excel in the job), temperament (attitude and personality suited to the particular job and work environment) accounted for 15%, and technical competence, which is essentially functional or technical skills required to do the job, accounted for the lowest score- 11%. From the foregoing, it was overwhelmingly shown that attitudinal issues accounted for mis-hires (poor hires, low performers) across organizations.
Agreeing with Mark Murphy, it is evident that skills matter but the best skills never matter if an employee is not open to improving or consistently alienates coworkers, and lacks drive. In fact, it was established that bad attitudes such as being negative, blaming others, feeling entitled, not taking initiative, procrastinating, creating drama for attention, and resisting change were the top characteristics of low performers in the 20,000 sample size.
As expected in management theory and practice, there appears not to be unanimity regarding the plain choice between talent and attitude. For instance, Bill Fischer, co-author of The Idea Hunter, together with Andy Boynton and Bill Bole, preferred that, in cases where real change (otherwise called “innovation” by the authors) is needed, attitude was not likely to be enough to get the organization to its destination, rather; they claimed many skills are more important.
Bill Fischer further harped on his conviction regarding a preference for skills over attitude in his co-authored book, Virtuoso Teams, with Andy Boynton, insisting that “the best environment for innovation occurred when the team felt it had absolute freedom to contribute their ideas, while at the same moment top management believed that it was in complete control! They also posited that “for everyday work, hire for attitude, train for skills; but when big change, such as innovation, is envisioned, then hire for skills and figure how to deal with the attitudes”.
The intellectual detour taken by these respected authors notwithstanding, my experience in advisory roles and supervisory/executive management across diverse sectors clearly support my agreement with Mark Murhpy, CEO of Leadership IQ, and many other thinkers and writers, that: all things considered, on balance, attitude trumps skills.
This discourse is not an affront on skills, in fact having employees with both requisite skills and positive attitude is heavenly; it is every organization’s El Dorado. However, a brilliant employee or leader with excellent skills but with a terribly bad work attitude is a potent weapon for the destruction of an organization. When such persons, especially those in leadership positions, build their own clones among employees; the organization may have inadvertently bred a bad-work-attitude-replicating viral machine that may signal the death knell of such organizations. Such organizations can never attain their true potentials!
In my view, organizations should take the middle ground between skills and attitude. They could blend the “Bless Their Hearts”, so called by Mark Murphy as employees who try hard and genuinely want to please and do a good job but who repeatedly fail to get the job done right- they are low performers and no amazing amount of attitude is going to make up for it; and “Talented Terrors”, who being the antithesisof ‘Bless Their Hearts’, have great skills but lousy attitudes.
They could train an employee with a great attitude to develop requisite skills and also tame the “talented terror” to give his best to the organization by coaching him to attain a change of attitude from ‘poor’ to ‘right’ or ‘good’. However, organizations are advised to get rid of employees who are irredeemably twined with the two extremes, i.e. dominant poor skills and compulsively bad attitude.
Tajudeen Ahmed
