Management Perspectives

MYTH 1: Behaviours and personalities are the same.

Behaviour is a range of actions and mannerisms made by individuals, organisms, systems, or artificial entities within particular environments. It is how we act or conduct ourselves toward others or in response to a situation or a stimulus. Behaviour can be modified, learned, and improved to meet the needs of specific tasks or responsibilities. The ability to perform skill sets is taught and, therefore, can be viewed as behaviours. Essentially, behaviours are what we do. Behaviours can be encouraged through rewards and positive recognition or discouraged through punishment.

It can be confusing to separate behaviours from personalities. By contrast, personality goes much deeper to the core of the individual; it is defined by most as the combination of the following attributes:

• values
• views
• set responses
• thought patterns

Collectively, personality is a relatively stable aspect of an individual. More importantly, personalities are inherent and take a long time to change, if at all. Research has shown that our personalities are part of our ancestral DNA, inherited from our parents and their ancestors similar to our skin tone, facial features, and body composition. There can be times of anomaly when these characteristics stray from the norm. This is usually during times of intense stress or upheaval. After the stressor or event has passed, the personality generally returns to its previous state. Personalities are who we are and why we act in a certain way while performing skills. Another way to look at personality is by observing our attitude while performing tasks. This is seen day in and day out in all professions.

Myth 2: People can change their personalities.

In the course of operating a national healthcare services company for over 20 years and being personally involved in the management team's training, as well as the experience of being a front-line supervisor, department manager, and consultant for over 40 years, I can attest that no amount of focus, training, and development provides sustainable change in individuals. Of course, as we can see from myth number one, we can modify the behaviour of individuals through training, development, and proper management styles that focus on providing positive feedback.

However, people cannot change their personalities such as increasing their empathy, becoming more open to other perspectives, embracing higher levels of modesty, or becoming more conscientious. Research has shown that our personalities are inherent and that it is highly improbable to change them. We can, for short periods of time, exhibit the traits that would indicate we have, for example, become more empathic; however, we will always resort to the outcome of our inherent personality. This by far is the most difficult thing for managers and leaders to accept.

MYTH 3: Everyone has good intentions at work.

Managers and leaders deeply desire that all of the individuals they hire will turn out to be star employees. Based on interviews and the concept of intuition, managers create a must-succeed mentality for all their hires. Therefore, they are committed to seeing all of their staff become successful no matter what the ongoing results actually produce. The reality is that not all of our hires have good intentions. The framework: Rower, Sitter, Drillersm helps managers and organisations understand the different personalities at work and in our lives. Rowers are highly motivated employees who take pride in getting the job done.

They row! While doing this, they also bring positive energy that translates into getting along with others and inspiring them. Sitters tend only to do what is minimally expected of them and can be swayed to adoptthe traits of rowers or drillers, whichever is more dominant. Drillers are negative-energy people who find faults in how things are done, managed, and processed. While they may have exceptional skills on paper, they don’t always employ them in their work, choosing instead to grumble and cause moderate to serious disruption in the workplace. While others are rowing, or at least not hindering progress, the drillers are in the back of the boat, drilling a hole in the bottom to sink it. Most organisations are fortunate if they have some rowers, yet the reality is they primarily employ sitters and sadly allow drillers to stay on their teams.

MYTH 4: If I focus my attention on the problem employee (driller) I can increase productivity and quality.

Why would any organisation allow someone as destructive as a driller to remain? And why would they tolerate the uninspired work of sitters? It is human nature to focus on what is wrong while ignoring what is right. This goes back to the beginning of humankind when the bulk of the day was spent trying to avoid death at the hands of a predator or the elements. Therefore, most of the time was spent maintaining shelter, staying warm, finding food, and resting. It might have been noticed if something was going right, but little time was spent practising gratitude. Survival, not revelling in good fortune, was the mission.

Typically, most managers and leaders— whether they are positive people or not— place 80 per cent of their focus on 20 per cent of their staff, bowing to the instinct of concentrating on what is wrong. It’s like seeing a fire and instinctively wanting to put it out. Unfortunately, this means they are focusing the overwhelming majority of their attention on the drillers in hopes of turning them into sitters or even rowers. Their objective is to improve the work of the drillers. But as we learned earlier, we cannot change personalities, and therefore we cannot change drillers. They will always complain, and their personality tendency is to be negative. They will always act selfishly and resist change not initiated by them. Moreover, they are perfectly comfortable being this way.

The mere act of focusing on the drillers does not translate to improving workplace quality or increasing production. Not only does it not change the drillers but sitters, through the concept of social learning, will most assuredly take on the actions of the drillers because the drillers are getting attention. This dynamic—called social learning—is explored in many studies. The most significant takeaway, however, is that focusing on the problem tends to compound it by encouraging others to talk about problems and issues rather than opportunities and possibilities. This management style decreases productivity by focusing on what cannot change and missing the opportunity to increase productivity. When you are focused on your productive team, rowers, who are shown gratitude, will row harder and inspire the sitters, increasing quality, and productivity.

MYTH 5: Intuition is an important part of the hiring process.

The hiring process is the most important part of building your team. Arriving at the decision based on the interviewers’ intuition is a failing process. Why? Intuition is based on the storage of information from past experiences in your brain. When we meet someone who may have similar looks, smells, or voice inflections to someone in our past, our brains are automatically triggered to either accept or reject the individual before we have formed an accurate analysis. The hiring process utilising interviews as the primary tool for arriving at a decision is a flawed process. Utilising assessments to determine personalities, behaviours and communication skills as well as multiple people in the interview process will help overcome bad decisions in the hiring process.