Skilled Migrant Professionals October 2014 | Page 40

Motivation

The Importance of Attitude in
Driving Performance & Results

W

hat has the greatest impact on your
company’s performance, profitability,
and ability to adapt and survive? Is it
your people’s technical skills or their attitude towards their work? Is the key what they do? Or, how
they do it?

ter of aptitude, not attitude. In other words, you
cannot train your way out of an attitude problem.

Why is attitude so important
for performance?

Attitude does make a very real difference
A recent study by Leadership IQ, a global leadership training and research company, found that
nearly 50% of newly-hired employees failed within
18 months (i.e. they were terminated, left under
pressure, received disciplinary action, or had negative performance reviews) while less than one in
five new employees exceeded their performance
expectations.

Andrew Cooke executive
coach, Leadership
Development and
Facilitator at Growth
Profit Solutions

The reasons for this, in eight out of nine instances, were interpersonal reasons stemming from attitudes that resulted in low-performance behaviour; only one in nine failed for technical reasons.
These findings were compiled from studying 5,247 hiring managers from 312 public, private, business and healthcare organisations.
Collectively, these managers hired more than 20,000 employees
over the three-year study period.
While the failure rate for new hires is distressing, it should
not be surprising: 82% of managers reported that in hindsight,
their interviews with these employees revealed subtle clues that
they might be headed for trouble. However, during the interviews,
managers were either too focused on other issues, too pressed for
time, or lacked the confidence in their interviewing abilities to heed
the warning signs. In the same sample group 812 managers experienced significantly greater hiring success than their peers. What
differentiated their interviewing approach was their emphasis on interpersonal and motivational issues.
That being said, when companies recruit people and determine
whom to retain, it is rarely done using the key attitudes and behaviours required to drive and sustain high performance. When recruiting, managers often lack the skills to hire based on attitude
and are more subjective in their approach, often heavily influenced
by how well they ‘like’ a particular candidate when making their
decision, rather than on who will be