If you missed or, would like to review, the first four articles of this series that cover Emotional Energy (18), Stress (19), Self-Esteem (20), Optimism (21), Work (22), Detail (23), Change (24).

Courage— Harry Houdini was renowned for doing crazy things, such as hanging upside down 75 feet above the ground by a rope that was on fire while trying to free himself from a straightjacket. Or, being shackled, put into a trunk that was locked, roped, weighted, and then thrown over the side of a boat. Just proves he was crazy, right?

No, Eric Weisz (his real name) was probably not crazy. Instead, although I never saw his character survey, Mr. Houdini probably just had very high courage that was counterbalanced by good attention to detail. (Or, if he didn’t have good attention to detail, he was smart enough to surround himself with assistants who did!!) And, this character make-up is what allowed him to be a successful risk-taker. He was able to assess risks to eliminate or, at least, decrease the chances for failure. Unfortunately, while Mr. Houdini never suffered any harm from his risky performances, he died from complications from an unexpected blow to the stomach, for which he was not prepared.

Having confidence is a wonderful thing. Courage is one of the primary characteristics needed to be a good leader. Successful independent business people have the confidence to accept a certain level of risk and they focus on doing something new or different rather than being content with the status quo. The confident person usually has ambition and puts their efforts into activities that further their goals. They are good at analyzing things to minimize their failures but can also learn from what they do wrong. As Edison once said and I paraphrase, “I have not failed 5,000 times. Instead, I learned 5,000 ways that do not work”. That is good self-confidence. Most of us would have quit after a few attempts at inventing the light bulb.

You have probably heard the jingle, “the hip bone is connected to the knee bone and the knee bone is connected to the ankle bone”. This means that what affects one part of our body affects all the other parts of our body. And, it is no different when considering our character—you cannot isolate one character tendency and then use that one trait to determine how a person is going to behave because that one character trait is affected by all of a person’s other character traits.

Unfortunately, some people have very high courage in combination with low detail and very high self-esteem. These people are thrill seekers who attempt to show others ‘how good they are’ and constantly put themselves in harms way just to feel the excitement. This may work for a while but, over time, they must do increasingly risky things to get the same level of excitement. This person eventually crosses an imaginary line and they start to ‘crash and burn’. In Houdini’s situation, he offered a challenge that no one could ‘land a blow’ to his midsection that he could not take. But, unfortunately, someone took the challenge without allowing Houdini to prepare for it and the unexpected blow killed him.

So, what about people who have lower courage? Does that mean they cannot be successful—of course not! Some of the best workers in this country have lower courage. They work hard to help companies rise to the top. But, there are people who have such low courage that they are almost paralyzed by their self-induced fears. They may not do much with their lives because they live in constant fear of doing or saying the wrong thing. Add a pessimistic character trait to the equation and you end up with someone who goes through life ‘waiting for the other shoe to drop’.

What happens if an employee with low courage gets promoted into a management position because they have been such a good worker? This can lead to disastrous results because, unfortunately, being a good worker does not necessarily equate to being a good leader. This person may be able to identify problems that they need to address as a leader but, instead, ‘bury their head in the sand’ for as long as possible because they do not have the character make-up that enables them to handle difficult or uncomfortable situations. They tend to quickly give up on anything that makes them feel uncomfortable or they miss goals because they fear taking the initiative necessary to succeed.

Having an appropriate level of courage helps us to lead successful lives–if we have too much we may make poor decisions but, if we don’t have enough, we may miss many good opportunities.
Consider the character make-up of this person:

A senior partner in a large law firm died and arrived at the Pearly Gates in a really bad mood. He demanded a face-to-face meeting with St. Peter.

“I shouldn’t be here!” he shouted repeatedly. “No one in my family has ever died before reaching 80 years of age. I’m only 65. I demand to be sent back!”

St. Peter listened thoughtfully and pulled down a large volume with the lawyer’s name from the bookshelf. He slowly reviewed each page and made some notes on a desk pad.
The impatient lawyer finally blurted out, “Well, you can no doubt see that I am right. I insist on going back.”

St. Peter nodded and then, with puzzlement, said, “We seem to have a problem. According to your billing records you are 105.”

Do you think that this person might have had very high courage, very high self-esteem, and very low tolerance?

“One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. Which road do I take? she asked. Where do you want to go? was his response. I don’t know, Alice answered. Then, said the cat, it doesn’t matter.” Lewis Carroll.

If you missed or, would like to review, the first six articles of this series please click on the newsletter of your choice. These newsletters cover Emotional Energy (18), Stress (19), Self-Esteem (20), Optimism (21), Work (22), Detail (23) .

Change — During our early years of marriage, when we had more energy than money, my wife and I decided we wanted to restore an old home. We found a real fixer-upper in a beautiful and peaceful rural area north of Charlotte, NC. ‘The house’ (or the remnants of a house) set in the middle of a pasture field in a grove of cedar trees. You could stand on one side of the house and see daylight through the other side. The roof of the front porch was precariously supported by two boards wedged between the ground and the underside of the roof. Most of the few remaining shutters were dangling by one corner and cows were using the ‘the house’ to provide shade from the afternoon sun.

Word quickly spread through the community that someone had actually bought ‘the house’ and was going to fix it up. (I am sure this provided a lot of chuckles around many dinner tables for quite a while.) It was not long before the locals began dropping by to get a glimpse of the people who were going to fix up ‘the house’. One of these locals was a man we soon started calling Uncle Walter. Uncle Walter lived across the road on the farm where he was born and, other than serving his country during World War II, he had never been out of Rowan County. Uncle Walter had driven the same car since the 60’s (it still had fairly low mileage at the time of his death) and he always took the same route to the same barbershop, the same restaurant, the same grocery store, and the same church his entire life. He got up in the morning, ate the same breakfast and then drove to the local cotton mill where he stood in front of a piece of machinery that turned cotton into thread, repetitively doing the same thing for eight hours a day, five days a week for over 30 years.

Many of you reading about this man may feel that you would rather ‘put a gun to your head’ than lead that kind of life. But, for Uncle Walter, that was the kind of life that suited him. He never took the Simmons Survey but, if he had, I am sure that his desire for change would have been low. He did not have a need for much variety in his life and he was not a very flexible person. In fact, if his routine was interrupted or changed much, it was very stressful for him. The status quo was his comfort zone.
Perhaps it is difficult for some of you to understand why change is one of the 13 character tendencies discussed in our hiring reports. But, when you think of change as being a person’s ability to deal with variety or to adapt to varying demands of their time and effort, then it is easier to understand why this is a key trait in matching the right person to the right job.

We seldom see a potential candidate whose change score is not well above the midrange. That is probably because the majority of people we survey are people who are attracted to jobs that include a good deal of variety. However, if we were doing surveys on people being considered for repetitive work like Uncle Walter did for many years, we may see more candidates with a lower change score.

I think that you would agree that having a high IQ does not guarantee success. In fact, there are probably many people with very high intelligence who are living a dysfunctional life in poverty. But, instead, it is one’s character make-up that is the foundation for determining success in both our professional and personal lives. And, that character make-up is determined by a combination of genetics and our environment. And, that leads me to my next point.

I am not sure that it will be easy to find workers to fill factory jobs in the future because this generation is growing up in a very different environment from previous generations. It is hard to find a young person today who is not under almost constant stimulation from a variety of technology or that does not have the ability to be mobile and go just about anywhere they desire at any time. They are always looking for some new way to entertain themselves or to see something that they have not seen before. Their environment growing up is very different from the environment of previous generations.

Although it is usually beneficial for people to be more flexible than Uncle Walter was in order to meet the demands of a job in today’s world, it is also possible to be so change oriented that a person cannot to the same thing, the same way twice. People with high change continually modify what they do and, if they tend to be impulsive (low detail), they may make unnecessary changes that lead to confusion in the workplace. In other words, they cannot ‘leave well enough alone’. Factor in someone who has very high emotional energy and you can have someone who behaves like a ‘bull in a china shop’ and achieves little other than creating a chaotic work environment.

Every job has an appropriate level of change needed by a person to do that job successfully. But, if an organization allows employees to do their jobs as they wish, it is beneficial for the person to have a little higher change so they can experiment with various methods of doing the job to figure out what works best for them. However, if the job has rather tightly controlled procedures that people are required to follow, then having a little less change is beneficial.

Each of us has the potential to do great things and some will make the required changes necessary to meet the demands of their personal life and their job, while others will spend their lives blaming others for changes they could have made, but didn’t (excessive self-esteem).

“When you are through changing, you are through.” ~Bruce Barton

If you’ve ever worked for a boss that reacts before getting the facts and thinking things through, you will love this!

The new CEO of Arcelor-Mittal Steel, feeling that it was time for a shakeup, was determined to rid the company of all slackers. On a tour of the facilities, the CEO noticed a guy leaning against a wall. The room was full of workers and he wanted to let them know that he meant business.

He walked up to the guy leaning against the wall and asked, “How much money do you make a week?” A little surprised, the young man looked at him and replied, “I make $400 a week. Why?”
The CEO then handed the guy $1,600 in cash and screamed, “Here’s four weeks pay, now GET OUT and don’t come back!” Feeling pretty good about himself, the CEO looked around the room and asked, “Does anyone want to tell me what that goof-ball did here?”

From across the room came a voice, “Pizza delivery guy from Domino’s.”

Perhaps, if the boss had spent a little more time asking questions to learn the details, he might not have looked so foolish. As the old saying goes, “the devil is in the details” and every job requires an appropriate level of detail orientation. We often refer to a person’s work ethic in our reports which is their desire to work combined with their detail orientation. For most roles, we generally prefer to see the detail score a little higher than work, but not by much. This permits the person to work hard and to provide quality work in a timely manner.

As someone who flies commercially quite often, I want to travel on planes flown by pilots who have good attention to detail. One of the primary causes of private plane crashes is lack of fuel. The pilot forgot to check that one little detail–the gas gauge. So, I guess you could say that pilot had low detail. Of course, if a pilot is obsessed about details, he/she may never get the plane off the ground.

My attention to detail and work score are on the low end of the scale so, unless I find a particular task enjoyable or challenging, I don’t give it too much emphasis. But, I am willing to put a great deal of time and effort into something that I find challenging, such as writing our hiring and coaching reports. But, when it comes to doing accounting work, my eyes quickly glaze over. With my low detail orientation and high challenge orientation, I guess it is a good thing that I did not become a pilot.

However, I probably would have made a fairly good salesperson. Good salespeople like to move quickly through tasks that don’t require much of their attention and are motivated by the challenge of making a sale. So, successful salespeople need to be supported by people who do have high attention to detail and can take care of all the paperwork associated with making a sale.

On the other hand, there are people who are driven by perfection and obsess over the smallest detail of everything they do. They tend to focus so intently on one thing that they have difficulty seeing the ‘bigger picture’ and they usually don’t like to be interrupted while working. However, their work is usually error free and they leave no ‘loose ends to tie up’. A person with this character make-up would be successful in engineering or accounting because they are comfortable handling the responsibilities and demands of this type of work.

Maybe it is a sign of the times, but we often see people who have a need to socialize and to be around others. An ability to interact with others is definitely a good trait for most jobs but, when a person’s work ethic is lower and their sociability score is higher, then you can have an employee who spends more time visiting with people than working. This may be acceptable for sales or customer service but, if the person is supposed to enter data into the computer or look after the bookkeeping, it probably would not be beneficial.

Every job has certain requirements—some require high attention to detail, while others require a person who can move quickly from one task to another without spending too much time worrying about whether every ‘t’ is crossed and every ‘i’ is dotted. Of course, that is why the Simmons Personal Survey is such a powerful tool. It allows us to match the requirements of the job to the job candidate’s character make-up. Your good interviewing and background research in combination with our character assessment is the partnership that provides the best opportunity to place the right person in the right job.

Each of us has the ability to make changes in our lives but there are some people who are more flexible and open to change than others. This is also something that the Simmons Personal Survey helps us to determine but we will talk more about change later so, until next time, let me tell you about my neighbor.
I live in a semi-rural area. We recently had a new neighbor call the local township administrative office to request the removal of the DEER CROSSING sign on our road. His reason: “Too many deer are being hit by cars out here! I don’t think this is a good place for them to be crossing anymore.”
Watch out! That guy may be looking for a job with you someday.

If you missed or, would like to review, the first four articles of this series that cover Emotional Energy (18), Stress (19), Self-Esteem (20), and Optimism (21).

Although all thirteen tendencies discussed are important, a person’s work ethic is one that employers probably tend to key in on immediately when reading our hiring reports. Of course, every employer wants to create a work force consisting of responsible workers who are willing to get things done— after all, a good work force is the basis for an organization’s success. But, as previously discussed, none of the behavior tendencies stand alone. In other words, when writing hiring reports, we are always looking at other tendencies and how they may impact a candidate’s work ethic as well as considering the environment for which the candidate is being considered.

Is it possible for someone to have too much of a work ethic? Believe it or not, it is. A person can be so responsible and so willing to take on work that it can actually be detrimental to their success. But, again, this is based on the position for which a person is being considered as well as their other behavioral tendencies.

People with a high desire to take on work and to be responsible can actually confuse being busy with being productive and may not use their time wisely. And, if this person is also a very people-oriented person who has a strong need to be helpful, you end up with a person who feels compelled to interject themselves into others’ work to satisfy their own needs rather than considering how effective they are truly performing. This person may be acceptable if working in a role in which they receive close supervision to keep them on task. But, if this person is in a management role, they will tend to get too caught up in helping subordinates with their work rather than holding them accountable for their responsibilities.

So, having a lower work ethic is not always an undesirable thing. A person who is responsible for overseeing others can actually be more effective if their work ethic is in the lower range. This enables him/her to maintain an overview of an organization’s goals while holding others responsible for doing what is necessary to achieve those goals. Of course, a very low work ethic usually negatively impacts a person’s success, regardless of the role.

A person with low energy and a lower commitment to work usually likes having a job that does not pressure them to get things done. For example, a person with this character make-up might make a good night watchman since they could read or, perhaps, watch television and be required to only occasionally stroll around the facility. If certain other tendencies, such as courage, are supportive enough they could handle an occasional emergency situation but they would need time to recuperate after one of these events.

In an office setting, this type of person meanders to the copy machine rather than quickly accomplishing what they need to do in order to get back to work. And, if this is a very social person, they may spend a good deal of their time talking with others in the office on their way to and from the copy machine. Lower energy people are very happy to work in a slow paced environment where they have plenty of time to get things done.

Higher energy people with a low work ethic may not put much effort into doing their tasks but are always looking for more interesting activities to become engaged in. However, if this is a challenge-oriented person, they can be more effective in the workplace if they are doing something they find challenging. We often use the term ‘bull in a china shop’ to describe the person who has a lower work ethic in combination with very high energy and an extremely high desire for challenge.

There is a work environment suitable for everyone and, when a person finds that right environment, they may spend many years happily working away. But, it only takes one character tendency that does not match the work environment to reduce the possibility of that person succeeding. Of course, the more the organization modifies itself to fit an employee’s character makeup, the longer they can do the job. But, the environment cannot change to suit everyone so a ‘workplace culture’ is developed in which some can be successful but others cannot.

On the lighter side:

A Careerbuilder Survey found that 33 percent of employees admit to calling work with a fake excuse to explain an absence at least once this year.

But the real reasons for doing so included: 

• 30 percent needed to relax and recharge
• 27 percent had a doctor’s appointment
• 22 percent needed to catch up on sleep
• 14 percent had to run personal errands
• 11 percent needed to catch up on housework
• 11 percent wanted to spend time with family and friends
• 9 percent wanted to miss a meeting, buy some time to work on a project that was already due, or avoid the wrath of a boss or colleague

Many of these people likely have a lower work desire so they look for excuses to skip work. Or, some may be so responsible that they miss work to help out someone in their personal life.

“The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.” James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion, 1926

Most people have no difficulty understanding what it means when we refer to someone as being optimistic or pessimistic in our hiring reports. But, how does that optimism or pessimism impact the success of their job performance?

If you want to say we have a motto here at Staff Development Services, I guess it would be, “We match the right person to the right job.” Every role has differing requirements that a jobholder must be able to fulfill in order to be successful in that role. And, a person’s outlook on life is something that is actually very important when looking for the right person to hire for a particular position. Not only does a person’s level of optimism affect how successful they are going to be in a job but it is also an indicator of how they are going to fit into their work environment as well.

As in all of an individual’s character tendencies, a person can have too little, or too much, optimism. There are some people who have a balanced outlook on life—that is, they tend to have a realistic view of the world and can see both the negative and positive side of things. But, there are probably more of us who tend to see the positives easier than the negatives or vice-versa. While having a balanced outlook on life is certainly beneficial in all aspects of a person’s life, there are some roles that may actually require someone who tends to be more negative while others need people who are more positive.

Let’s consider the person with very low optimism. Think about your work environment— you can probably identify someone who has a very negative outlook. This person immediately finds something wrong with any changes made in the organization, is quick to point out others’ faults, worries that the ‘other shoe is going to drop’ at any time, etc. The root of this negativism usually extends back to their childhood and, unless they want to be different, it is very difficult for anyone to have much impact on this type of person.

Obviously there are certain jobs that require a good deal of wariness that comes naturally to the negative person, such as a police officer, auditor, or other roles that require a person to find and resolve problems. But, employers usually do not want overly negative people on staff in an office setting since they can create a very unpleasant work environment for everyone. And, if this highly pessimistic person also happens to be a very assertive person, they will undoubtedly complain about everything to everyone—this could be disastrous in some situations!

On the other end of that spectrum is the overly optimistic person who is carefree and oblivious to reality. They want to see a world that does not have any problems and to feel that things are always going to work out well for them—how unrealistic is that?! This type of person has problems but would rather not identify them and, if anyone else tries to point them out, they usually refuse to acknowledge them.
Employees with very high optimism are generally well liked by customers or clients and very pleasant to be around but can cause problems in the workplace due to their inability to identify issues or deal with them. And, consider an overly optimistic person who has a need to be liked by others (high sociability) being put into a manager’s role. This combination of character tendencies would prevent them from dealing with personnel issues and pretty much dooms their chance of success in the role.

A skillful interviewer can often detect ‘red flags’ during the interview stage of the hiring process. For example, the very pessimistic person might be consistently critical of others or previous employers. Or, they may talk about what they do not like and have problems identifying what they do like. However, as many of you who are involved in the hiring process know, people can often hide their less desirable traits long enough to get a job. But, once hired, those traits can quickly surface, often with disastrous results! That is the value of the Simmons Personal Survey—it identifies a person’s true character before they are hired.

On the lighter side:

A young monk joined an order that required total silence. At his discretion, the abbot could allow any monk to speak. It was nearly five years before the abbot approached the novice monk and said, “You may speak two words.”

Choosing his words carefully, the monk said, “Hard bed.” With genuine concern, the abbot said, “I’m sorry your bed isn’t comfortable. We’ll see if we can get you another one.”
Around his tenth year in the monastery, the abbot came to the young monk and said, “You may say two more words.”

“Cold food,” the monk said. “We’ll see what we can do,” the abbot said.
On the monk’s fifteenth anniversary, the abbot said again, “You may now speak two words.”
“I quit,” the monk said. “It’s probably for the best,” replied the abbot. “You’ve done nothing but gripe since you got here.”