Hire for Traits, Not Skills

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Today we're going to take a look at how critical thinking, once nurtured, can help change in a very positive way the way you hire and or get hired.

The change we're talking about is from skills to traits. And the premise is that we could all develop skills, excel, presentation, etc.

But it's the people who have the commanding traits, which we're going to go through, who are going to be in the driver's seat in the rest of the 21st century.

And if the first 25 years of this century are any indication of what the rest of it will be like, then the most fundamental change you'll have to make to your business will not be technology, products, markets, or supply chains. It will not even be about whom you hire, but the way you hire and the type of people you hire or who type of people you are as candidates.

Think about the nature, pace, and scope of 21st century change. The superstar you hire today could become CEO of your firm by 2050 and in turn hire the future CEO who will lead your company in 2099 and beyond, putting you only two steps away in your company's history from the 22nd century.

Chilling thought, isn't it? Suddenly, we're face-to-face with the end of a century that just began. In 2005, the New Jersey Association of the Colleges and Employers, asked me to speak at their conference and address the issue, what skills must we develop in our students to prepare them for their first jobs?

That's spurred me on to do extensive surveys of leaders in business, the sciences, government, and law, arts and entertainment, sports, religion, education, nonprofit, and NGOs. CEOs.

Collectively, the independent responses sparked a revelation.

More than the beginnings of their careers, the greater responsibility for us was to think about what their entire careers would look like and about what skill sets would most likely help them navigate for the next 45 years. The expected length of careers at that time was 45 years. It's longer now.

The results of those surveys, the presentation that I developed and gave all over the place was called The World in 2050.

And I delivered them at NJACE's 2005 conference for the first time. moving that forward out of the world of academia into the world of practitioners in 2010 working closely with the worldwide hr team of a global manufacturer the question was asked was elevated is it just skills or is it skill sets or is it something else something more fundamental like traits it's pretty evident where i'm going with this pop quiz is.

What's the largest population in the world?

If you said China, you're wrong. If you said India, you're wrong.

It's Facebook.

One important qualification.

Facebook's 3.1 billion daily users bear one important qualification.

Meta no longer regularly publishes Facebook-only user accounts.

Its current official metric combines Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.

And that number is 3.6 billion daily active people.

Who, Mark Zuckerberg included, would have predicted that?

And that's the point of this discussion. Certainly, Facebook hired the smartest people they could find, but surely Mr. Zuckerberg would like to be spending more time in the boardroom than in Congress testifying about the legal ethics and privacy issue.

By the nature of these issues, we understand that all the skills mastery in the world is no longer enough.

We currently hire mostly left-brain thinkers, and this is another distinction, but we must shift the hiring emphasis from skills to traits, critical traits for this century, as they will demand, and the prominence of the right brain will rise rapidly. Daniel H. Pink in his book A Whole New Mind Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future tells us that the keys to the kingdom have changed hands change can't be measured like all other things namely length, width, and height change also has three dimensions but they're intangible nature, pace, and scope I'll go into that and have done so already ready on a later podcast, but think about nature, who creates change, pace, how fast it happens, and scope, how far it reaches.

Not only is it increasing, but it is accelerating at a more rapid rate than ever before.

Nature, pace, and scope. With that, we get to the question, what traits will be needed to succeed in the 21st century?

We're going to talk about now what those traits are that will supplant skills and expertise, more important than skills and expertise.

Initially, 20 were identified with one added three years later. The original list was grouped into four categories, and that's how I'd like to present them to you today. I'll expand on that in future episodes.

Category number one, dimension. I mention successful candidates and employees in the 21st century and moving forward through it will need to be multi-talented, broadly educated, and keenly aware.

Skillset or traits, rather, number two.

These will be people with strong resolve.

They are determined, persistent, stubborn, committed, purpose-driven, decisive, planned and prepared, accountable to oneself first and to others second. It doesn't work the other way around. And they are autonomous and independent.

Category number three is made up of the following traits. optimistic, empathetic, democratic in character structure, team leadership with potential for more, wildly optimistic, problem-centered outside of self, and a clear, efficient perception of reality. This one is becoming incredibly important on an exponential basis, because that reality, you have to have a clear perception of changes every Monday morning. If you aren't coming into your office on Monday morning and saying, what business am I in now? You are going to miss the boat. Quote, in category number four, creative dissatisfaction.

Notice the terminology, creative dissatisfaction. Those people who are just negatively dissatisfied, they'll complain all day long and finish the day having achieved nothing. but a creative dissatisfaction makes one curious, creative, willing to think, comfortable with ambiguity, equally comfortable with uncertainty and change, and people with a non-hostile sense of humor.

Those are the 20 traits that we determined when I interviewed all those people we went along our merry way with that for a year or two and then realized that the addition of the 21st trait inductive thinking came ever so naturally when the challenge of morphing from one hiring model to another made it obvious that the ability to figure things out as they happen will surpass in importance the capacity to know stuff.

And we came to this realization that readiness is more important than knowledge.

And it demands a different way of hiring the 21st century is not that far away that's a good place to take a break and have you chew on that for a while i'll be back in a half a minute vantage point is brought to you by bergen volunteers since 1966 they have been quietly at work in Bergen County, neighbors helping neighbors across 70 towns. They mentor kids who need someone in their quarter, and they help seniors stay independent at home. And through Bergen Leads, they have trained hundreds of people to lead in their own communities.

Nobody there waits for the perfect plan. They see what a town needs, and they go and do it. That is critical thinking with the sleeves rolled up, as they call it, and that is exactly right. To everyone at Bergen Volunteers, thank you for supporting this show and thank you for the work you do you can learn more about them online that's bergenvolunteers.org hi i'm back ready to give you three aphorisms all totally unrelated to each other all equally and tantalizingly as true and as direct as possible Aphorism number one, never wrestle with a pig.

You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.

Aphorism number two, pay attention. This is going to go by fast. Price, quality, speed.

Select any two. You can never get all three.

And aphorism number three some things in life are no more complicated than this get up, dress up, show up in the great minds section of this podcast I step aside from my aphorisms which were all originally mine and rely on those great minds of the past who not only thought of things that mortals like me are not capable of thinking of, but say it so well. today, we go back to the great mind of Benjamin Franklin, who said, In wine, there is truth. In beer, there is freedom.

And in water, there's bacteria.

Now, that is typically cute, Benjamin Franklin. But there's a very startling truth in there And that's the second one In beer there is freedom, in water there is bacteria Modern science at that time In the middle of the 1700s Had just seen bacteria for the first time Van Leeuwenhoek's microscope And come up with a name for it Even though So, our ancestors of 11,000 to 12,000 years ago knew it.

You know, beer is the oldest beverage known to humankind.

And in a fabulous book called The World in Six Glasses Tom Standage goes through the history of impactful beverages what they did to move us forward and what they were connected with beer is the first beverage that humans brewed and they knew when someone was sick they were not to be given water because in water there's bacteria and they give them beer which was naturally brewed in amphoras and distributed as such and they avoided water because of the bacteria that was 11,000 years before we were able to see little things called bacteria through the microscope.

But it was only that period of time, 1740, 1750, that we understood what was going on.

It took Ben Franklin to do it. In wine there's truth, in beer there's freedom, In water, there is bacteria.

And while we're hanging around in that period of time, the mid-18th century, for our what-ifs today, let's project ourselves backwards to 1740, 1750, and then at an accelerated and more intense pace, 1760 and 1770.

I'd be afraid to ask a roomful of 100 people how many people know who Thomas Paine was because I don't think a majority of the hands would go up but if you were to write a list of the 10 most important people of the Revolutionary War period Thomas Paine's name would have to be there an immigrant from England in the 1740s, he immediately caught the attention of George Washington, who had just begun to garner the kind of power he needed to become an effective first president of the United States.

And he identified people who were going to help him do it. And he had a great collection of them to do it with Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Thomas Paine.

And Thomas Paine was an exceptional thinker and writer who wrote, I hope you've read it, The American Crisis or Common Sense, which starts off with one of the great opening lines of anything that's ever written.

And I go back to things like the book of Genesis in the beginning and the Declaration of Independence, when in the course of human events becomes necessary, etc.

Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, these are the times that try men's souls.

The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will in these times shrink from their duty and he goes on and on and wrote 13 pamphlets that's what he was he was a pamphleteer we don't have pamphleteers anymore we have podcasters it's pretty much the same thing It was so effective that the number of copies that were sold equaled half of the total number of American colonists.

Roughly 1.5 million copies sold in the 1740s, So you might still be sitting there saying, well, so what?

Somebody was going to do it now.

Stuff that good doesn't go to just somebody.

It naturally gravitates to someone like Thomas Paine.

As a matter of fact, he was so effective And one of the realizations that came out of the Revolutionary War and the beginning of our country was, without the pen of Thomas Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain.

And Washington was the first to tell you that. You know, it's estimated that he wrote 20,000 letters and other documents. During the time that he was leading the Revolutionary War, who has time for 20,000 letters? Well, the letters to his wife and his personal friends and his those nobody else could write, but much of what else he wrote was written by either overtly or in a ghost fashion. people like Alexander Hamilton Thomas Paine Thomas Jefferson and some of his higher ranking officers but one thing's for certain and I'll sum up with this that is one hell of a what if question thanks for joining us again for this episode So we'll be back in about three days with our next episode, and we'll be discussing things like artificial intelligence and the limits or not that are going to be placed on it.

A lot of news about artificial intelligence actually building its own next generation of itself.

It's a tantalizing question, which we're going to talk about.

That's it. Thanks. See you in a few days. Until then, keep questioning, keep learning, keep thinking critically.