Читать книгу Predicting Success - Lahey David - Страница 10

From the anxious marketing manager with a taste for attacking challenges aggressively to the retiring executive assistant who would sooner ask questions than provide answers, every workplace is awash in unique personalities. Assuming a personnel assemblage is made up of only like-minded characters, each with essentially the same needs, predispositions, and outlooks, is not only a lazy approach to human resource management, it's an erroneous one. Every last one of us travels with baggage; it's the clever business leader who can sort through the collection and make the smartest choices for how to best manage it.

And if you're still skeptical about the importance of marrying individual behaviors with both the task at hand and those that characterize the other players in an office environment, just ask a kindergarten teacher. She'll tell you it's a constant trick, finding the balance between one person's preferred ways and means and another's. My wife, Patty, has taught younger learners for years. She is a great teacher, in part because she realizes that her approach to each learner needs to be unique, and that there's less “drama” when the preferred ways are understood. Patty knows that in any of her classes she will have three camps: a group of “learners” who are sponges for knowledge, a group of “vacationers” who are in class because it consumes time between meals and parents, and a group of “prisoners” who hate school, hate process, and will always lead troubled lives. Patty has been able to pretty well predict, from among the tiny members of her kindergarten class, who will go on to post-secondary education with this “rule-of-three” process.

At the end of the day, by not persistently measuring every tool a prospective new hire brings to the table, and by not matching his skills, qualifications, interests, and personality traits with the work in question, an employer does himself a costly disservice. Every soul walks the planet in the company of his own particular set of gifts, after all. If his very specific properties are not aligned with the very specific efforts required of him in a job, then nobody wins.