Clive Beddoe, former CEO of WestJet Airlines (a company I not only admire but frequent as often as I can) was asked a question in a television interview, "How is it possible that every single Westjet employee I meet has a smile on their face?"
Beddoe replied, "I learned long ago that you can't teach people how to have a personality. So we just hire people with great personalities and then train them to do the job."
With that being said, understand that Beddoe was asked the question before huge expansion of his airline and long before the western Canada labour pool became depleted. That answer, although it may still apply in other places, doesn't work anymore. Is Westjet's service as good as it once was? No it's not. I'm a customer. I've noticed the difference. Huge expansion and a tight labour market mean you're not always going to get the cream of the crop.
In many parts of North America, and particularly in Western Canada, we are dipping so far down into the gene pool to find warm bodies to fill positions in a tight labour market that people, who wouldn't have even gotten an interview a few years ago, are being hired on the spot. Now this has presented a challenge to employers and employees. Many new employees would not have been "first choice" employees a few years ago because many of them lack the basic social skills and internal motivation to take charge on the job.
Years ago we would have taken the employees with personality and trained them in sales, time management, goal-setting and other developmental courses. However, today, and this is VERY important, many of the new hires lack self-discipline, self-esteem and self-confidence. So attempting to train them in the old ways (time management, sales, goal setting, etc) is an absolute waste of a company's time and money. A person lacking in self-discipline will go right back to their old ways within seven days of a time-managment course: showing up late, missing deadlines, scrambling at the last minute. The same with sales, goals and even safety. These people require soft-skills training first and THEN the standard training after.
Personal development should be the order of the day for most organizations. Improve your people and the organization will improve. Improve the PEOPLE, not the people's ability to do the job. Do you get the difference? Help them learn and understand simple things like values, ethics, accountability and personal responsibility. Make them get that part first and then you can teach them the other stuff.
Get this point: it's a different labour market so stop thinking they can be trained the same way you would have trained baby-boomers. It doesn't work. So stop it. The only reason company executives are complaining about tight labour markets is because those same executives refuse to change their minds about how they train their people and then complain about the poor quality in the labour pool. Maybe it's easier to whine than to be accountable and act.
I had a manager once who had a desktop statue of a pig. Below it was the following inscription: Never try to teach a pig to sing - it's a waste of your time and it annoys the pig."
Get that message. People don't leave your organization because you don't offer enough time-management courses. They leave because they want to feel proud about their work. Pride comes from within. Motivation comes from within. Accountability comes from within. Responsibility comes from within. So stop appealing to your people externally and start changing them internally. You will be more likely to keep them for a longer period of time doing a better job.
The old ways don't work anymore. When any organization embraces this new reality, they're going to begin to kick the butts of their competitors. Mark my words.
And if you're an employee, it's up to you to do this for yourself or you'll find yourself drifting from job to job in the hopes that one day, the Job-Satisfaction Fairy will wave her magic wand and you'll start loving your job. Sorry Bucky, it doesn't work that way. The job gets better when you get better. Improve yourself and you increase your value ... and ultimately your paycheck.
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