By David Brewster February 2006
She darts about the place like a butterfly flitting from flower to flower. Always on the go. Always looking to be busy. Her eyes are alive; they absorb every detail. She anticipates peoples’ needs almost before they recognise them. She is, in short, every manager’s dream.
You know this person. She’s the young assistant at that terrific local café. She’s the waitress at the great new bistro down the street. She might even be a he: perhaps the veteran waiter at your favourite Italian restaurant. Whoever she is, she has the magic ingredient that makes her indispensable: attitude.
Attitude? Isn’t that the thing tweenagers and teenagers share? That rolled eyes, what-would-you-know-you’re-an-adult thing? No – that’s ATTITUDE. There’s a difference.
If you employ people, you’ll already know what I mean. People generally work with attitude, ATTITUDE or a third option which we might call brain-absence.
People with attitude can be trusted to get on with the job and work assiduously. They combine a willingness to work with initiative, alertness and a generally unflustered air. You can also rely on them to admit a mistake. If they accidentally sprayed one of your supporters with gunshot, they would tell you.
People with ATTITUDE need constant management. If initiative means creatively finding scope for improvement, they have initiative by the bucketful. Trouble is, they expect you to do the improving. If you disagree, well, you know where you can go. And if it turns out there weren’t any weapons after all, you can keep the blame to yourself.
People with neither attitude nor ATTITUDE - those with brain-absence - impose themselves on their hapless managers more surreptitiously. The staff at our local supermarket fall into this category. I’d swear they store their grey matter in the cool-room when they clock on. I can only imagine how much energy is needed to wind them up every day.
In short, attitude is that magic ingredient in an employee which makes your management life easier. ATTITUDE and brain-absence both impose on your time and make your life more difficult than it needs to be.The problem we have is this: we tend, as the adage goes, to hire for skill and fire for attitude. Not, as we should, the other way around. Check through the job ads and you’ll see shopping list after shopping list of required skills. Why? Because it’s a lot easier to shop for skills than for attitude.
So once again we come across the simplicity dilemma: if you want simplicity, you need to be willing to invest extra time and effort, up front, to get it. If you can’t find attitude, you need to keep looking. If you take the easy way out and compromise with ATTITUDE or, perhaps worse, brain-absence, chances are you’ll pay the price down the track.
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©February 2006 Business Simplification