By Michelle Stanton, Co-Founder and CEO, Zone Culture
In a tight labour market, we are all competing for the best talent. When highly skilled people are hard to find, we may compromise and employ someone with skills but a less-than-stellar attitude.
The current belief in business circles is that you can teach someone with a great attitude all the skills they need to learn, but you cannot teach someone with good skills how to change their poor attitude. This is because so many so-called ‘soft’ skills courses have failed to produce the desired results.
An attitude is just a habit of thinking. And thinking is influenced by how you feel. If you feel frustrated and angry, you are filled with thoughts of blame and punishment. You cannot think better than you feel. So, if you have a bad attitude, you have developed a habit of feeling bad, which fills your mind with negative thoughts.
To address this problem, you need to learn how to manage your feelings and gain mastery over your emotions. Fortunately, emotion management is a skill that anyone can be taught. But we, as a society, have not done that at school, tertiary institutions, or work.
Emotional accountability, which underpins attitudes, behaviour and outcomes, is not a KPI in most companies. This is because our erroneous belief is that your external circumstances and what other people say and do, control your emotions. Therefore, you cannot be held accountable for something you can’t control.
Fortunately, the truth is that you can control how you feel regardless of external conditions, but you need emotion management tools and skills to do that.
Imagine what it would be like if everyone in your company were emotionally empowered and accountable. All your board members, your CEO and executive team, your managers, your frontline team leaders, and all employees. What would your culture be like? What outcomes could you achieve? How would you feel going to work every day?
You will be surprised at how quickly attitudes can change, and emotional skills develop. For a minimal investment, you can optimise your company culture and readily realise your moonshots in your business.
