People are hired based on their skills. That fact is true that you can’t seem to find someone more favored by a company than when they have an impressive resume. However, we still find some people who get thrown out regardless of their credentials because of their bad work ethic. That is why attitude is so important. Skills get you hired, but employee attitude keeps you in the job. Ken talks about the importance of seeing the potential invisible beyond the visible. Hiring people in your business should be about how they do the job well, not who they are for the job.
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The Potential Invisible
This one is interesting. One of our mentors, David Corbin, does a lot of teaching on the concept that we hire people based on skill, but we fire people and promote people based on attitude. The way he explains it is this. He says get out a piece of paper. Think of the greatest leader that you’ve ever followed, the person you respect the most. Picture them in your mind. Get out a piece of paper and write three attributes about them right now. We did this and some of the names or phrases or attributes that came up collectively out of a group of five were visionary, courageous, magnetic, empathetic and goal-oriented. He wrote them on a wax board. He said, “This leader, whoever you were following, they were hired on skill but when I asked for an attribute and adjective, anything that describes them, tell me, is the word visionary a skill or an attitude? It’s an attitude. Courageous. It’s an attitude. Magnetic. Is that a skill or an attitude? It’s an attitude. Empathetic. That’s an attitude. Goal-oriented. That’s an attitude.”
Think of all the people working for your company. They were all hired on skills, however, they’ve been promoted or fired based on attitude. Let’s take this into a different area of business. Revenue channels, products. Just like people hire skills and then fire and promote attitudes, I am here to tell you that when it comes to revenue channels, meaning certain products that are being sold in your company, you started them on potential. You picked them on potential. However, once started, you are currently evaluating them and altering them and even stopping some of these revenue channels based on performance metrics.
What you’re doing is you’re starting something on potential but you’re changing course and even stopping things based not potential. Like skill which gets pushed to the wayside, potential for a product line and a revenue channel goes out the window very quickly, once the product is launched. We’ve seen this for 25 years. When is the last time you took each of your revenue channels and did a real legitimate SWOT: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats?
When you’re inside the jar, you can’t read the label. Click To Tweet
When you do the SWOT on your product line, I want you to open up the two largest competitors you have. Look at their main products that are closest to yours and do a SWOT on their product lines. Here’s what you’re going to find. When you do a strength, weaknesses, opportunity, threats on a very similar product but by a different company, I promise you, you are going to see opportunity and potential in your product that you have never seen before. The reason is when you’re inside the jar, you can’t read the label.
When you’re solely reading daily metrics on your product, you are not focused on potential. To be a leader, to be an entrepreneur and an S-Curve manager, you’ve got to read the label from the outside and the only way to do that is to get yourself outside the jar. The best way to do that is to do a SWOT on a similar product by another company. For episode 274, what I’m saying is do not let potential slip away and become dormant and invisible like skills. I hope this helps. Take care.
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