Strategy #11: Hire for attitude, train for attitude, and evaluate for attitude

“Hire for attitude, train for skill” is the recruiting mantra of Southwest Airlines. Because they have been so successful, many other organizations are now emulating that philosophy.

You can go Southwest Airlines one better, and in the process cultivate a more positive and productive workplace environment - and incidentally, do a better job of keeping your best workers. Don’t just hire for attitude; also train for attitude and evaluate for attitude. You’ve probably heard the saying, “Attitude Is Everything.” You might even have read one or more books of that title (including those by Jeff Keller and Keith Harrell). While every manager’s dream is to be blessed with people who have uniformly and consistently positive attitudes, the reality is that most of us must continuously work on being positive.

An important part of your responsibility as a manager (and one that is often neglected by managers) is to create expectations regarding people’s attitude (for their work, toward customers, and toward coworkers). You can do this with greater affect and credibility if you also provide people with training, tools, and techniques that can help them cultivate a more positive attitude in themselves, and a more positive workplace environment in which to work (The Pickle Pledge in the next strategy, is one such technique).

One of my client organizations incorporated The Twelve Core Action Values into every job description to reinforce the message that these are expectations, and that the associated attitudes and behaviors would be subject to the performance appraisal process.

Side bar: When you become a manager, you give up certain freedoms.  You give up the freedom to second-guess leadership – it is wrong for a manager to approach change by saying something like this: “Well, I think it’s stupid, but ‘the suits’ are making us do this.” And you give up the freedom to moan and complain – about anything. Because when you do that, you are contributing to toxic emotional negativity in the workplace environment. And that would be management malpractice (see the next idea).

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