People Can Seem To Be So Darn Nice

I have come to the conclusion that I am a lousy interviewer. I have hired some real turkeys. I remember thinking what nice people they seemed to be. In future blog entries I’ll tell you about some of the worst but the person that I am thinking about now is a drama queen named “Gloria.” Of course, at the time, I didn’t know that she was a drama queen. After all, she made it obvious that she thought that I was clever and intelligent and that counts for a lot.

Later, I developed the Workplace Attitudes Test (WAT) and she agreed to take the test. The results showed that she is - well, a drama queen. She tested very high on entitled, undisciplined and insubordinate but what did I know? Now I consider the WAT the best darn bad-attitude screening device available today and Gloria deserves some of the credit for inspiring me to develop it.

Gloria did some part-time work for my company and then moved on when she found a full-time job. Gloria makes a good first impression because she has seemingly good social skills which are important in an interview. On the job, she is a disaster. She cannot focus because she prefers to socialize, and she quickly ignores the chain of command. She often fails to do her job or finish a project and always blames someone else. In other words, her survival skills are highly developed and she has a tendency to scapegoat people.

Supervising Gloria became a Herculean task for her new boss. Picture this, she was on several committees, interacted with almost everybody, especially the higher-ups and to her, work was party time. Several of her colleagues and her immediate boss became fed up with her but by then she had friends in all the right places.

It took over a year but after countless intrigue, much of it orchestrated by Gloria herself, she was finally encouraged to move on. And if you don’t want to fire someone like Gloria, you give her a good recommendation to make sure that she moves on. Did I mention that one of the people that Gloria befriended was the organization’s legal counsel? He thought a good recommendation might be wise. Of course, one can’t outright lie but everyone agreed that Gloria has great people skills. Take a look at www.workplaceattitudes.com and see what Gloria helped inspire.