See if you recognise this.

It’s a made up advert, but we’ve all seen them. 

“The ideal person for this position will be young, ambitious, multi-talented, and articulate, and possess an MBA. Minimum 25 years’ experience in [name your niche]. Two languages besides English desirable.”

We laugh.

There isn’t anyone who can fulfill those criteria. And yet, it’s the mould that many companies try to force their own employees into. It’s their attempt to make people nothing short of brilliant in everything. And the truth is that there isn’t anyone in your company who is that talented. Not even you. Even if you’re a sole trader, you draw, at least periodically, on the expertise of others. The key, therefore, is to work and to train for your strengths, and for those who work for you.

Think about the 80/20 rule.

If you’re not familiar with it, then here’s a good summary. 80% of your input will give you 20% of your output. Conversely, 20% of your input will give you 80% of your output. Often, the contrast between these percentages is more extreme than this. You know that this rule is true of your own business. 20% of your customers give you 80% of your income. 20% of your customers also give you 80% of your grief! But this rule can also be applied to training your staff as well; to the way in which you try to enrich them. 80% of your employees are using only 20% of their strengths.

That doesn’t mean that you concentrate on shoring up their weaknesses. Instead it means that you focus on helping them to get better at what they’re really good at. In other words, you make it easier for those who are square pegs to go into square holes, and those for whom round holes are a better fit, to get into them more easily. The problem comes from trying to force people into holes or roles for which they were not designed.

This type of mismatch happens as much at the recruitment stage as at the training and development stage.

Let’s say that you’re a track and field coach. And your responsibility is to help specific athletes excel at the 100m race. What would you think if the pole vault coach came to you and said, “We’re a bit short staffed. Could you spare us a couple of your best runners to help us out? We’d only need them a few days per week.” What would you think? You’d think the pole-vault coach was nuts.

And you’d be right.

When most people recruit they create a job role and then try and find someone to fit. Usually the person who is the best apparent fit gets the job. Of course the fit is not perfect so they need development… If recruiting sprinters and training them for pole-vaulting is a daft idea - why do you think it would be any more effective to try to develop square-pegged people in such a way that they could also fit into round holes, too? That’s equally crazy as I’m sure you will agree.

Success in a job and job enrichment is only effective for square pegs if the added responsibilities are for square-pegged people. The same thing is true of round-pegged employees. If you try to force both into the holes of the other, then not only will you waste your precious resources on the wrong problems, you’ll also risk losing the people you have.

If you want to know more about competency based recruitment, job enrichment and developing strengths not weakness – please contact me here