In his recent post Nobody is Perfect, Nikos Moraitakis argued that employers would benefit much more from focusing on cultivating employee strengths, rather than trying to build the “perfect” employee by changing or improving on employee weaknesses. Of course, Nikos doesn’t forget to make an exception for the “amelioration of shortcomings that are inhibitory to basic performance”.
In other words, try to change or remove serious performance blockers, accept and spend little time on all other weaknesses and focus on leveraging the strengths.
Although I agree with the proposed approach, there is one nagging issue: the majority of serious performance blockers are very hard to change or remove, since they are most often linked to innate personality traits or long-established behaviors and habits. Thus, changing or removing these blockers requires a significant amount of effort and energy, leaving little of either for focusing on one’s strengths. Furthermore, quite often the results are mediocre, if not disappointing.
Simply put, you should be prepared for performance blockers not going away, no matter how much time and effort goes into it.
The best way I have found to address the above issue is to follow the advice that any doctor would give you: prevention is better than cure.
- Identify true performance blockers that you can’t live with. Some of them will be universal; others will be related to a particular job description or the dynamics of your organization.
- Single out those behaviors and personality characteristics that are most likely to lead to the undesired performance blockers.
- When interviewing a candidate, invest a lot of time in trying to discover whether he/she exhibits these undesired characteristics and behaviors. If he/she does, don’t go any further, no matter how strong the candidate may be in other areas. The strengths will probably never make up for the weaknesses.
Don’t get me wrong: I am definitely not suggesting hiring everyone that passes the above test. What I am saying is that it is risky to hire anyone who fails it.
Prevention is always better than the cure – and it certainly helps to know exactly what you’re trying to prevent.
Unfortunately, individuals are so incredibly complex that we can only assess a narrow slice of their whole before they’re part of a team, and if one adds to that the complications within organizations, prevention becomes a necessary but best-effort activity.
Once the individual is part of the team, the challenge changes. As Nikos mentioned in his post, one can always push this person to become even better in what they’re already good at. Other qualities which fall in the gray area can be developed with some coaching or careful exposure to new experiences, for instance.
My favorite bit, however, are those shortcomings that (a) cannot be improved in any realistic fashion and (b) could hurt both this colleague and the company as a whole. The approach that has worked best in my experience is to make these shortcomings… irrelevant.
To do that, first you need to identify them, but you also must share your findings with the particular colleague. Get them to acknowledge that they, too, are imperfect [sharing a shortcoming or ten of your own always helps]. Then you need to craft a way to work around this big elephant in the room: rearrange the projects or assignments; reshuffle the clients; change working groups; etc.
Easier said than done – especially in closely knit teams – but worth the effort.
The best part? The… imperfect colleague will always be thankful.