Humilities!
Try some humble pie.
“Entitlement’s not the cause, it's the effect.”
Ah there I go quoting myself again. Nothing says you’ve got street cred to write about the topic of humility quite like the arrogance of hanging on your own spoken word. But you don’t come here for logic now, do ya? You do?! Well…. ****.
A while back, a leader of mine asked me my ‘take’ on the entitled attitudes spreading like wildfire at an organization I worked at, at the time. Y’see, there was a real next level misunderstanding of the employer-employee relationship. We owed these people everything, and then some. Oh, and then some, and some more after that. Funniest part: they thought this was the norm outside their four walls. Why weren’t they getting these things too? Bob at X Company was!
Except I told these things they were asking for and expecting to Bob from X Company and, he did a spit-take into his coffee.
“We have such an entitlement problem”. Yes, we did. But I unpeeled the onion a bit further for them. Entitlement isn’t a cause, it’s an effect of the disease. The disease being lack of humility and some might even just say, self deprecation. “I’m the Director of Blah Blah” - yeah, okay. And I’m the Manager of Talent Operations…. some days.
“Some days” is the optimal response to title-throwing. Serious people are important, we need them to offset the jokesters. But if the serious people don’t have an ounce of humility in them to see a place for what it really is, or to take the piss outta themselves every once and a while, you’ll get entitlement faster than you can say, “What do you mean I lost to the Liberals?!”
Hiring Leaders who lack humility breed entitlement. They select more folks that think like them, through their own unconscious biases. Arrogance begets arrogance. There’s no nuance to this, it’s simply a truth I’ve observed coming up on 15 years of being the workin’ man that I am.
So that thing I told my boss, well I shared it with a colleague or two too. And one of them really got me thinking hard about the subject - “All well and good Woods but, how do you hire for humility?”
Though I didn’t have an outright answer for them at the time, it’s becoming increasingly evident to me what Recruiters need to do about it to foster this mindset amongst their TA teams - tailor the recruitment process to coax self-deprecation out of a candidate.
We sorta already have questions like this right? Thinking of the classic, “Tell me about a time you received constructive criticism and what you did about it.” We ask it, sure. But do we take a hard look at the answers given? Hiring Leaders, take heed. This, THIS may be one of the (if not THE) most important question you ask to gage humility.
It’s not about the answer they give. It’s about how they give it.
Did they laugh at themselves? Did they recognize that, yes, they’re like this sometimes and it’s a personal flaw worthy of being roasted by others? Did they show genuine remorse for their actions and how it was affecting people - or were they a robotic corporate citizen sticking to how they ‘adapted’ to a ‘different workstyle’?
Pay close attention.
-Matt