DEFINING HUMANS FOR COMMERCIAL SUCCESS
OR PRACTICAL TRIPEDALITY.

By Ron Dards, MBIM, ASES

In my work as a management consultant, I am often asked to measure an executive's chances of success in some project or other or even in general.  One fact emerges in virtually every case of this type that projects, jobs, or ideas do not succeed any more than companies do.  Only people can succeed.  The greatest enterprise is so much dead dross until some person makes it come to life.  With this vital fact in the forefront of our minds, we may well benefit from a study of success potential as an aspect of the human dimension.

At Success Dynamics, we have been lucky enough to be exposed to some psychometric instruments that actually do measure some of the factors in a person's make up, which virtually always result in success in any enterprise, and those which ob­struct it.

We have long been able to measure personality, our own product Personality Survey and many other reputable management tools produce reliable descriptions of people’s personalities.  If personality is compared with the demands a job makes on the makeup of its incumbent, some very meaningful data is produced and some useful predictions of performance can be made.  Yet from time to time, we come across a maverick someone who seems to be made of the perfect material for a particular job yet fails in it.

Faced with this contradiction we set out to improve the overall predictive reliability of personal measurement and we came up with a theory, which we then set out to test.

Let me first expound a little on our theory.  We believe that in terms of success in any endeavour the human animal is not a biped but is, in fact, a tripod.  Human achievement actually stands on three legs.  No human will succeed at anything if any one of the three legs of success is weak or absent.

Human success stands equally and firmly on:

Basic or intrinsic make up.  If a job needs a hard driving aggressive, entrepreneurial, inventive and rapacious individual to drive it to completion, no moderate, gentle, cautious and generous person will succeed at it.  If a job requires meticulous attention to detail no impulsive gambler will maintain the standard necessary for success.

Life experience.  If a person has not had the experiences needed he or she will fail.  The best educated and qualified expert must gain experience before academic knowledge can be harnessed to real situations; hence the amount of post graduate work done by doctors and scientists before they begin to actually interact with real cases.

Attitude or desire.  Humans only do well at any endeavour when they have a strong desire to do so.  There is a direct relationship between the degree of desire or the strength of attitude and the degree of success.

So now we have our tripedal autochthon all set to stride out to success.  Can we measure and predict the performance of this most desirable of employees?  I believe we can.

We can measure the basic make up by means of a Psychometric Instrument; naturally, we would like to recommend Personality Survey because we developed it.  In fact, there are plenty of reliable systems around and all of them broadly measure the same dimensions of workers against the work they do.

We can measure experience by two means.  Firstly, that good old bastion of the fiction writer the C.V.  While I would be the first to regard the alleged cumulative parade of claimed past glories so often furnished somewhat askance, it is also a fact that there is always a nugget of actual fact in every C.V.  Judicious questioning, especially by telephone can often get a previous employer to reveal salient facts about a past employees actual performance.  Secondly, the situational interview can often help.

Mr Prospective New Employee, have you ever been faced with ........how did you cope with it?”  Situational interviewing is a very powerful tool to establish how your candidate responded to a past event in real life.  Hypothetical interviewing will tell you how the same person claims they would respond in a given situation.  "Ms Young Hopeful if.........  how would you deal with it?"

Which brings us to desire or attitude.  We well know that the old sales person’s maxim is true, "if you think you can you are right, if you think you can't you are right"!  "Positive thinking results in positive action", and so on.  In fact, the scientific work proves that the attitude factor is the single most important of all.  What the research indicates is simply this.  An aspiring athlete with short legs and small lungs actually can outrun a long legged bellows lunged Olympian, provided Shorty has an ambition which amounts to a magnificent obsession and Strider doesn't give a damn if he wins or loses.  What carries humans to greatness is less ability than desire.  We really can achieve whatever we desire if we want it badly enough and take an attitude of total commitment to it.

Now I well know that many of my readers will say that they knew this all along and so what is new and why have I gone to so much protracted prose to say something that is common knowledge and self-evident.  Bear with me.  The purpose of my diatribe is this:  Attitude can be measured!  Not the professed attitude, the real one!

So, if you have someone working for you and you know full well that they could do better yet they do not and they give you all the encouraging answers, "Yes, I will do that.  Rest assured I really care and I will strive to achieve" etc., etc., and then they do not, help is at hand.  You can put them through a simple questionnaire and find out exactly what their attitude really is and from the resulting report, you can decide on training and development programmes to gel your employee to actually do and act as they claim to but do not.

One system that can help is called ATH 1.  Attitudes to Honesty was tested over some years on prison populations.  While originally designed primarily to measure honesty it also gives a reliable view on Emotional Stability and Faking.  From these two measurements, the person’s attitude can often be extrapolated.  There are other instruments available and I always suggest that a suitable battery be employed to suit each particular case.  I said we are actually looking at a tripedal animal here so what of the other two legs?

Interestingly enough we have just completed a number of studies in real life situations in real companies.  While client confidentiality forbids me naming our clients let me assure you our projects were real and meaningful.

Case one.  Motor industry.  The question - What human type makes an ideal manager in the automotive after market and what human types should make up the staff of a retail outlet in such a field?  Further, what human type best controls a number of such outlets?

Case two.  Industrial safety sales.  The question - what type of person can best sell industrial safety equipment and which type will last best and longest in the job?

Case three.  Merchant banking.  The question - Given an existing establishment how will the present management team interact in particular circumstances, for example when under foreign threat or in the face of a contracting investment market and so on.  In each of these cases, we used biographical histories always verified by cross checking to measure the first leg, namely experience and actual knowledge.

We then used Job Scan to measure the personality demanded by each job and Personality Survey to measure the persons basic make up to establish if they had the type of personality called for by the job in question.

Finally, we asked each person in the study to complete certain other questionnaires to discover if despite apparent suitability and proven experience they also had the desire or attitude to conquer in their chosen careers.

The result in some cases was a report over fifty pages long but in summary in virtually every case where any person lacked basic knowledge, they could be trained.  Where they had the desire or attitude to succeed they eagerly requested training, attended courses, learned and applied new knowledge to their own improvement and improved their performance.

Where people were of an unsuit­able personality type for the task but had strongly evident desires to succeed and driving attitudes to success, they learned to modify their behaviour to such a degree that their apparent personalities changed at least in so far as they appeared in work and they became the required type for as long as they needed in order to control their level of achievement in their jobs.  Where the workers attitude was negative towards the job or the level of desire was indifferent, or where there was poor emotional stability, every single one eventually performed so poorly that some actually failed and in no case could any incentive or training cause them to improve.

What was most interesting in these examples was the simple fact that it proved possible in each case accurately to predict exactly which employee would rise to the heights of achievement in pretty well any task and which was destined for failure.

In one particular study, we were asked to examine a group of employees and make this type of prediction about them but we were not told which of them were regarded as "good" and which "bad".  We were not told their length of service or exact details of their jobs, only the broad category "sales" or "admin", yet in 70% of the cases we were told that we were 90% accurate in our assessment and in the remainder it sub­sequently turned out that our predictions were well within 80% of actuality.

In conclusion then let me make my point, if you have managed to wade through all these words you deserve a pay off, it is this.  There exist management tools, measurement systems that measure actually and reliably the three legs of successful commercial man.  You can use these systems yourself, they can be used by a layman and they will serve you well.  How many of your staff are limping on two legs or less and do you know who they are?

First published in “Analyst” Volume 1 No: 4.