Introduction
Hire for Attitude

If your organization is going to excel, it needs the right people. But virtually every one of the standard approaches to selecting those right people is dead wrong. And here’s why: whenever managers talk about hiring the right people, they usually mean “highly skilled people.” For lots of executives, the war for talent is a war for the most technically competent people. But that’s really the wrong war to be fighting.

Most new hires do not fail on the job due to a lack of skill. My company, Leadership IQ, tracked 20,000 new hires over a three-year period. Within their first 18 months, 46 percent of them failed (got fired, received poor performance reviews, or were written up). And as bad as that sounds, it’s pretty consistent with other studies over the years and thus not too shocking.

What is shocking, though, is why those people failed. We categorized and distilled the top five reasons why new hires failed and found these results:

1. Coachability (26%): The ability to accept and implement feedback from bosses, colleagues, customers, and others.

2. Emotional Intelligence (23%): The ability to understand and manage one’s own emotions and accurately assess others’ emotions.

3. Motivation (17%): Sufficient drive to achieve one’s full potential and excel in the job.

4. Temperament (15%): Attitude and personality suited to the particular job and work environment.

5. Technical Competence (11%): Functional or technical skills required to do the job.

You’ll notice that a lack of skills or technical competence only accounted for 11 percent of new-hire failures. When a new hire was wrong for a company it was due to attitude, not a lack of skills.

ATTITUDE IS A BIGGER ISSUE THAN SKILLS

Our study showed that somebody was a bad hire for attitudinal reasons 89 percent of the time. In some cases, these new hires just weren’t coachable, or they didn’t have sufficient emotional intelligence or motivation, or they just didn’t sync with the organization. But whatever the particulars, having the wrong attitude is what defined the wrong person in the majority of cases.

If you want more proof, do this little exercise. Make a quick list of the characteristics that define the low performers who work for you. These are the people that you regret hiring, the ones who cost you time, energy, and emotional pain—the kind of people who make you happy to hit some morning rush hour traffic because it’s a welcome respite from them. Don’t think about it too hard; you’re going to be doing plenty of that in later chapters. Just jot down the first four, five, or six things that come into your mind when you think about what makes these folks low performers.

I happen to have just conducted this exercise with a client who was happy to have me share his results. Here’s the list of the low performer characteristics this CEO came up with:

Top Characteristics of Low Performers

Are negative

Blame others

Feel entitled

Don’t take initiative

Procrastinate

Resist change

Create drama for attention

I’ve done this exercise with countless clients, and while the low performer characteristics I hear tend to vary widely, one factor remains consistent: I rarely hear anything skill related. Overwhelmingly, the characteristics that define mishires (low performers) are attitudinal. In fact, whenever I’ve probed for more feedback, I’ve generally been told that a good number of those negative, entitled, blaming, change-resistant low performers have really good skills. That, of course, only makes the whole low performer situation even more painful. (Parenthetically, most companies are currently paying people they regret hiring because it’s usually harder to fire someone than it was to hire them, especially if they have decent skills but a lousy attitude. This is all the more reason to learn how to Hire for Attitude.)

The same exercise can be done with your high performers. And again, you’ll likely find that what makes these folks so great is all about their attitudes and not their skills. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that skills don’t matter—they do. But I’m also saying that the biggest challenge in hiring is not determining skill but rather determining whether or not someone has the right attitude to be a good fit in your organization. Besides, figuring out if someone has the right skills, or enough raw IQ points, is actually pretty easy. Virtually every profession has some kind of a test to assess skill. If you want to be a board-certified neurosurgeon, you have to pass a test. If you want to be a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (considered perhaps the toughest networking certification), you have to pass a written and a lab test. If you want to be a nurse, pharmacist, engineer, nuclear physicist, car mechanic, or whatever, there’s a test to assess if you have the skills and horsepower to do so.

And even though I personally lack the skills to pass the tests for any of those jobs, I could easily proctor the exam. And if I buy the scoring key, guess what? I could grade those tests as well. And so could you. If you’re looking for a Java programmer, give her a page of code with bugs and have her debug and rewrite the code. Google holds a Code Jam that they describe as “a programming competition in which professional and student programmers are asked to solve increasingly complex algorithmic challenges in a limited amount of time.” Some hospitals hold competency fairs to test clinical knowledge. (“You say you know about infection control, chest tubes, and insulin protocols, so show me.”) There’s really no excuse for hiring somebody who lacks the skills to do the job, which no doubt is a contributing factor to why only 11 percent of new hires fail because of skill.

So when you see your colleagues get fixated on hiring people who can “do the job” and who have the “right skills” and enough “talent,” you’ll want to explain to them that attitude, not skill, is the top predictor of a new hire’s success or failure. Because even the best skills don’t really matter if an employee isn’t open to improving or consistently alienates coworkers, lacks drive, or simply lacks the right personality to succeed in that culture. Skills still count, but the data overwhelmingly tell us that attitude is the hiring issue that should demand the most focus.

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT ATTITUDE

This book will teach you how to select the high performers that will fit with and excel in your unique culture. It’s a big departure from the traditional, and generally failed, approaches to hiring. So every step of the way, I’ll share with you the science, data, and evidence to reinforce and substantiate the changes (both mental and actionable) I’m going to ask you to make.

Speaking of science and data, here are some of the big points our research has uncovered about Hiring for Attitude. I’ll enumerate the points here in the same order they appear in this book. You can then use this list as a chapter summary to start getting acquainted with the materials you’re going to be working with.

The Attitudes That Work for Your Organization Are Unique (Chapter 1)

Your organization’s culture, and the attitudes required to succeed in that culture, are unique. This means that the right attitudes that define a high performer will vary from culture to culture. For instance, the person who becomes a high performer at Southwest Airlines is a totally different personality from someone who becomes a high performer at The Four Seasons. Both organizations are fantastic, and they are both famous for their customer service, but they have very different environments. Southwest sings the seat belt instructions to you while The Four Seasons serves you afternoon tea. And this fact doesn’t change even within the same industry. For example, Google and Apple are both great companies that are very different with respect to culture. And the same occurs at Wal-Mart and Target.

So the first thing you’ll learn is how to discover your organization’s unique attitudes. And I bet you’re going to be surprised by some of the approaches you take to gathering this information, as well as by what you learn along the way. The discoveries you make in Chapter 1 about the attitudinal factors critical to your culture will drive your selection protocols, interviews, and recruiting—giving you a talent pool full of highly skilled people with the right attitude for your organization.

Standard Interview Questions Don’t Assess Attitude (Chapter 2)

Most interview questions are useless for assessing attitude, and some can even put your company at legal risk. Commonly used questions such as “Tell me about yourself” and “What are your strengths/weaknesses?” provide nothing more than canned answers. Even questions that have some potential, like behavioral questions, are often made utterly ineffective by the common practice of tacking leading words onto the end of them.

Then there are the popularly used hypothetical questions such as “What would you do if you had to make a big decision?” All these questions inspire are hypothetical responses that tell you nothing about how a person would really act when working in your organization. And finally, there is the biggest bad question category of them all, the undifferentiating questions. You’re not going to believe some of these oddball pseudo-psychological questions when you hear them, unless of course you’re one of the many organizations asking them.

The big problem with all these questions is that they provide zero information (or even worse, misleading information) about whether someone is going to be a future high or low performer. In Chapter 2, you’ll learn about four types of common interview questions that undermine your ability to assess attitude.

A Few Simple Questions Will Reveal if Someone’s Attitude Is Right for You (Chapter 3)

The only interview questions that reveal whether or not a candidate is a match for your organization are questions that target the attitudes that matter most to your organization. Chapter 3 shows you how to create these questions via a four-step strategy. You’ll learn how to match your core attitudes with situations that have a proven history of revealing high and low performance. Then you’ll see how to properly phrase those questions so your candidates remain unguarded and truthful in what they share about their innermost attitudes. And, notwithstanding the uniqueness of your culture, you’ll also learn one universal hiring question that should be used by every organization to determine just how coachable (the number one reason new hires fail) a candidate is.

There’s an Answer Key That Will Grade a Candidate’s Attitude (Chapter 4)

What’s the point of asking a question if you have no idea how to grade the answer? An interview is basically a test of how a candidate will perform in your organization, and yet, when was the last time you used an answer key to rate a candidate? Chapter 4 will show you how to survey your current employees to create an Answer Guideline that gives you the Warning Signs (poor fit with your culture) and the Positive Signals (good fit with your culture) you need to make informed hiring decisions. Once you have your Answer Guidelines, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without them.

The Grammar That People Use Predicts Whether They’re a Good or Bad Fit (Chapter 5)

Leadership IQ has conducted some cutting-edge textual analysis that reveals how the grammar choices people make in a job interview can reveal a wealth of knowledge about their attitude. Chapter 5 will show you how to assess points such as pronouns, tense, voice, emotions, and qualifiers to help determine a person’s performance potential.

The Way Most Companies Recruit Chases Away the Best People (Chapter 6)

The talent pipelines at most organizations are filled with everyone but the right people for that organization. Chapter 6 introduces the kind of competitive thinking it takes to recruit for the right attitude, and it’s more than just writing a great job post (though I’ll cover that too). You need to understand the demotivators that can inspire the right people to leave where they are to come work for you instead. And you’ll learn how to recruit with a level of honesty that attracts the right people while repelling the wrong.

Hiring for Attitude Will Make Your Current Employees Even Better (Chapter 7)

You want to hire for attitude, but the quest for high performance shouldn’t stop there. You also want to develop more high performers from the folks you already have working in your company. This final chapter teaches a technique called Word Pictures that can be used to turn what you learned in Hiring for Attitude into a method for teaching attitude in orientations and onboarding and as the foundation of your performance appraisals, coaching discussions, and so much more. You’ll learn the science behind what makes Word Pictures so effective and how a few really smart companies have discovered that there is a way to teach attitude.

Whether you’re hiring your next hourly employee, your next CEO, or someone in between, attitude will likely be the issue that determines that new hire’s success or failure. So let’s get started discovering how to attract and select all those amazing people who have the right attitude to fit perfectly in your organization.

For free downloadable resources including the latest research, discussion guides, and forms please visit www.leadershipiq.com/hiring.