WHY THE RIGHT ATTITUDE IS NEEDED

You put your garment of bad Attitude,
And you keep saying people should love you for who you are.

The Question Is, Can You Eat From The Food You're Feeding With?
Can You Take What You're Doing To Others?
A Question To Ask Yourself.

WHY YOU NEED THE RIGHT ATTITUDE:

1. It's easier to train aptitude than attitude 

When people have the right attitude they are both motivated and adaptable which makes them more open to learning new skills. With the right attitude and enough effort most new skills can be mastered quickly. Whereas improving attitude is often about changing behaviors which is always much more difficult to do, as people need to want to change and without the right attitude this is unlikely to happen. 

2. Attitude can impact overall performance.

When people have the wrong attitude, getting them to fit into the organization can be like trying to bang a square peg through a round hole. They can just clash with the culture of the organization, disrupt teamwork, causing unrest and impacting overall performance.  

According to Gallup surveys into employee engagement only around 30 percent of staff are engaged, with 50 percent disengaged and the remaining 20 percent are actively disengaged. These are usually the people with the worst attitude, not just content with being disengaged; they are looking to increase disengagement amongst the rest of the staff.

We often see this in sports where highly skilled players just don't fit in with their teammates, causing issues and discontent. Consequently, they are let go and then almost immediately team performance improves. There's even a term for this, "addition by subtraction."

3. The right attitude can overcome obstacles.

We've all heard the saying "when the going gets tough, the tough get going." Well if it were about having the right aptitude then saying would be 'when the going gets tough, the smart get going'. But it's not.

We're always going to face challenges, difficult times, and it's in these moments that things like determination, tenacity and resilience come to the fore. Having the right skills but lacking the will to use them isn't going to help us overcome the challenges and achieve success. 

When hiring, we need to focus on attitude just as much as on the technical skills sets. However, most interview questions are focused on aptitude, and we need to make sure that we ask the right questions to uncover their attitude, such as their honesty, initiative,  determination, tenacity, and resilience, etc.

We need to ask them about challenges they have overcome, how they dealt with failure or how they dealt with situations which were beyond their current capability.

People can fake attitude in an interview, and we need to make sure that we probe these areas, and listen to the language used, to try and understand their true attitude. Do they answer in the past tense, do they have specific examples and can go into details. If they can't then the probably don't have the attitude we're looking for.