By Kevin Roberts
One of the advantages of being both a technician and a business owner is that you get to know people who have a wide and varied background story. One of my long-time customers was a psychiatrist. His experience was with the military, private practice, and in the corrections industry. He was easily one of the most fascinating and broadminded individuals I have ever met. We spent many hours together discussing human nature and the nature of reality. One of our regular topics was the philosophy of good and evil. This led me to The Anatomy of Evil, a book by the renowned psychiatrist Michael H Stone. Unfortunately, I cannot give a blanket recommendation for this book. This is not due to flaws that I was able to find in the book but simply because the book describes, sometimes in wrenching detail, events that may cause nightmares to squeamish reader.
One of the most interesting chapters was the introduction, in which he offered somewhat of a disclaimer to his fellow psychiatrists regarding the word “evil” in the title. It seems that the medical profession has taken umbrage against the use of the term evil. But, in the practical world, denying the existence of moral deficiencies leads to negative outcomes that are best avoided by simply acknowledging the existence of moral deficiencies. Speaking of books, Karl Menninger wrote “Whatever Became of Sin” in 1973. A reviewer stated:
Menninger predicted the term sin would be replaced with words like illness, disorder, dysfunction, syndrome, etc. The human condition would be excused as a product of biochemistry, environment, experience, and trauma. He projected that even crime would go unpunished as criminal activity would be justified and minimized as the result of some medical abnormality for which one could not be held responsible. —Ab Abercrombie April 25, 2013
When I use the term “evil” I am referring to failing to follow a moral code at any level. I am not speaking of only the most egregious transgressions but also the most minor infractions that we are all inclined to. When our conscience leads us in one direction and we do the opposite, we have violated our moral character. Society has recently come up with an alternative to “moral character”; the phrase “emotional intelligence.” This was first coined around 1964 and is the title of a 1995 bestseller by Daniel Goleman. A commonly held component of emotional intelligence is empathy, the ability to be aware of and share in the feelings of those with whom you interact. Whether or not you care has traditionally been understood to be a moral attribute. It is unfortunate that our modern cultural divisions have necessitated this article’s introduction.
So, if you’re still with me, the moral character/emotional intelligence needed by the modern technician is more important than the technical skills needed to perform his duties.
If a fleet manager has the choice between a technically proficient prospect with moral deficiencies and a technically deficient prospect with impeccable moral character, the choice should be simple. High moral character will only lead to long-term improvement in technical skills. The moral character deficiencies on the other hand, will be a burden that the shop will bear for the indeterminate future. A further complication is that the choice is rarely binary but found on a continuum.
For the sake of discussion, let’s examine five distinct character traits: Honesty, humility, ambition, discipline, awareness.
For now, rather than precisely defining these, let’s look at the practical necessity of them and necessity of discerning their existence as early as possible.
When I was young, working on a construction crew in a medium-to-large city, I enjoyed a six-year learning experience that profoundly influenced the rest of my life. One occurrence was when the crew stayed significantly late to finish a project in order to prevent us from having to return and do so the next day. The instigator behind this was not the foreman, but one of the bricklayers that convinced the foreman that this was the right thing to do. When the owner heard of how the decision was made, he commented on “super-conscientiousness” of the instigator. It is this conscientiousness that may be seen as a heading for the above five traits. If there are any fleet managers reading this, I suspect that you would value having a similarly conscientious employee. Such workers, if they can lead from a moral and emotionally intelligent place, are an asset that many shops can only dream of.
Since such employees are so valuable, how can we use the interview process to recognize them?
Just the simple act of interviewing a prospective employee is a minefield. There are so many areas of a person’s life that are off limits in the interview process. Some of these prohibitions come from simple common sense: medical history, ethnic identity, sexual orientation. Other areas, however, may still fall under the broad heading of “discrimination”, in its cultural definition. Discrimination is a difficult word these days. Many decades ago, when my children were young, we visited family friends during a long trip. I spent one of the days at work with the dad at a federally inspected meat plant. At lunch break, the owner’s wife spoke of an interview she had with a prospective employee who had applied for a position. She was frank in her description of the questionable character of the interviewee. The federal inspector, who had to be there to monitor the processes in the plant, immediately objected to what he described as “discrimination”. One of the listeners asked the inspector, “Isn’t your role here to discriminate in order to prevent bad practices from occurring so that bad meat doesn’t get into the food chain?” The silence that followed was palpable.
As quoted by Charles Duhigg, in his book Supercommunicators, NASA has discovered that monitoring how candidates laugh in response to laughter by the interviewer shows their emotional intelligence and will predict their ability to get along with other astronauts on a long space voyage.
This is an example of how creativity can allow us to assemble and develop our team and thus work together to accomplish our responsibilities.
Starting with the next article we will cover one character trait at a time.
