Attitude Matters

Have you ever known someone with just a really bad attitude? One of those people who just never could be happy, or see the good things in life over the bad. They can sometimes drain the life out of people who otherwise have a great attitude.

Now imagine this. You run a company and you’ve assembled a rock-star team. Everything is going great – morale is high, sales are climbing. Then you decide to hire a new staff member to help grow the company. On paper this new-hire checks all the boxes for education and has impressive experience. Once when they start working with your team though, it becomes obvious that this person simply has a bad attitude. Their attitude becomes toxic after a few weeks and you notice that your once stellar team starts to slip – morale is lukewarm, and sales sort of fall flat or worse start to drop. Your employees aren’t as cheerful as they once were, and they don’t seem to be taking as much pride in their work.

What you have on your hands is a case of one bad apple that spoils the bunch.

You can spot bad attitudes a mile away. When you’re interviewing a candidate, it often times helps to have a conversation with that person before looking at their resumé. It can help you determine whether this person is a cheerful person, or a downer. You might get blinded by their qualifications and miss the fact that they’ll bring the rest of your team down if you look at their resumé right away. Once you determine that they will be a good fit for your company’s culture, take a look at their experience. Is there anything they’re missing? Are those things teachable? If so, it’s a heck of a lot easier to educate your new-hire than it is to bring morale for your whole team back up out of the gutter.

What if you just hired this person? It might be worth talking to them about how their attitude is affecting the rest of the team. If they can’t seem to shake their attitude, you might consider letting them go. It seems a bit harsh, but you wouldn’t keep someone on your boat if they kept popping holes in the bottom would you? Of course not. If you did you’d all be in over your heads in no time. If they want to go for a swim, that’s where they belong.

Now, I’m not talking about the one-off bad days. Someone who gets in a car accident, or has a death in the family is going to have a bad day or two. Maybe more. Generally, if they were a cheerful person before, they’ll bounce back soon enough. Those aren’t the things that bring down the rest of your team, because they’re understandable. I can sympathize with someone who is upset that their car just got totaled. On the other hand, I probably wouldn’t sympathize with someone who was equally upset about getting pickles with their lunch order.

In the Army, we had this one soldier who always had a bad attitude. I mean every time you talk to him there was always something wrong. It was like that kid Pigpen from the Peanuts cartoons way back when we were kids. Like he was always followed by a cloud that like soiled everything that he touched. Whenever he came in with his bad attitude it would infect everyone. I mean even our most motivated soldiers, the people who had the best attitudes, the people who were always, you know, the go getters they always would end up having a bad attitude too, because of this other guy’s attitude who kind of brought everyone else down. Now this soldier had been around for a while. He was, as far as doing his job, he was technically capable. He was able to do everything that we asked him to do. He just had a bad attitude while he was doing it. On the other hand we also had highly motivated soldiers, very good attitudes. But they were brand new. They weren’t around long enough and they didn’t really know their job very well. The difference though is that they could learn their job. There was training and drills that we could do and it would get them all up to speed for whatever it was that they were supposed to be doing. I’d take a dozen people with less experience and a good attitude over one really experienced person with a crappy attitude. It’s the same thing in business really if you think about it. If you have a highly qualified candidate, on paper, come in and apply for a job, they may sound like the perfect fit for the job, but if they have a bad attitude, their experience isn’t quite so important anymore. I heard a great quote on the Business Unusual Podcast with Barbara Corcoran, she’s one of the ladies on Shark Tank, if you ever watch that show. She said something along the lines of, “If your parents couldn’t teach you to have a positive attitude, I sure as heck can’t do it either” right?” And that thought process applies when you’re hiring new employees and also making a decision on whether or not to retain an existing employee. The point is that if you have people with bad attitudes in your company or your organization, they’re going to bring down the attitudes of everyone around them, right? And is that really something that you want to have happen in your business? Running a business is stressful enough. So when you’re hiring people, look for the ones who already have that positive attitude when they come in for their interviews. You know there’s certain subtle indicators that you can kind of tell whether or not they’re going to have a good attitude when they come in for their interview. So you can use that to kind of weed out some of the ones with the bad attitudes before you even consider their experience.