Workplace failure is rarely due to laziness, stupidity, or character flaws
Jeff Hunter · #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion · Jan 21, 2020 · at 7:55
Former Bridgewater executive Jeff Hunter explains why typical management diagnoses for employee failure misinterpret the root causes of underperformance.
0:00 / 0:43exact quote · 43.1s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“When we see somebody else fail, you know, fail to achieve a goal, et cetera, we tend to describe that failure to ourselves in terms of failures of intelligence or character or motivation. But from my perspective and spending decades, you know, working with other individuals in commercial environments and enterprises and trying to build big things and bring big things to market that's not actually what happens. People aren't lazy, they aren't stupid, and they aren't bad. I mean, some human beings are, of course, but for the most part, that is an inaccurate description or diagnosis of when people are failing.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Jeff Hunter
Human job assessment is worse than random in many cases
“We're actually very bad at assessing human beings for jobs. Actually worse than random in many cases”
Most companies treat culture statements as recruiting marketing, not management tools
“Most organizations put up these culture statements that are like, I think they're marketing statements in effect, like they care more about how it works in recruiting than they actually are using it as a way of managing the company.”
Managers use generational stereotypes as lazy excuses for poor management
“I think most managers really struggle to be good at their jobs. To be a good clarity manager, really hard especially in the midst of a lot of unpredictable change. And so, when stuff starts going squirrelly on you, you're gonna reach for any convenient narrati…”
Most job candidates do not actually know what they are good at
“Most human beings when they're applying for jobs actually don't know what they're good at. They know what skills they have, or at least people have told them they have. They know what jobs they've held, but they actually don't know what they're good at.”
Only two interventions substantially increase confidence and success in hiring
“The only two things I've ever seen that really substantially increase your confidence in hiring are two things. One is taking the extra time to, with the manager to actually understand the specification as we talked about. Huge amount of, it really is worth th…”
First-time hiring managers for a specific role lack valid intuition
“If you're a hiring manager and you've never hired anybody before, you've never hired anybody of that particular responsibility or role type, you're not going to do it well. You're not. You're going to be blind to all sorts of things. You don't have any sort of…”