Top 3 Reasons Why Attitude Is Better Than Aptitude For Business Success.

Conceptually, Attitude refers to a complex mental state involving beliefs, feelings, values and dispositions to act in certain ways WHILE Aptitude simply define is an inherent ability, capability, capacity to do something

Hire for attitude, train for skills is a hot catchphrase in Human Resource Management because we want to hire people with both the right attitude and the right aptitude. However, if choice is to be made of the two,  right attitude should scale higher than the right aptitude

This approach is backed up by studies which have shown that 80 percent of our success is based on our Attitude(EQ), compared to 20 percent for our Aptitude(IQ). This means that aptitude only accounts for a mere 20 percent of our success. 

Here are three reasons why it's better to recruit for attitude, than just aptitude.

1. It's easier to train aptitude than attitude. 

When people have the right attitude they are both motivated and adaptable which makes them more open to learning new skills. With the right attitude and enough effort most new skills can be mastered quickly. Whereas improving attitude is often about changing behaviors which is always much more difficult to do, as people need to want to change and without the right attitude this is unlikely to happen. 

2. Attitude can impact overall performance.

When people have the wrong attitude, getting them to fit into the organization can be like trying to bang a square peg through a round hole. They can just clash with the culture of the organization, disrupt teamwork, causing unrest and impacting overall performance.  

We often see this in sports where highly skilled players just don't fit in with their teammates, causing issues and discontent. Consequently, they are let go and then almost immediately team performance improves. There's even a term for this, "addition by subtraction."

As leaders, we should be looking to create teams where the sum of the whole exceeds the sum parts (Synergy) and it's a good attitude that makes this possible.

3. The right attitude can overcome obstacles.

We've all heard the saying "when the going gets tough, the tough get going." Well if it were about having the right aptitude then saying would be 'when the going gets tough, the smart get going'. But it's not.

We're always going to face challenges, difficult times, and it's in these moments that things like determination, tenacity and resilience come to the fore. Having the right skills but lacking the will to use them isn't going to help us overcome the challenges and achieve success. 

When hiring, we need to focus on attitude just as much as on the technical skills sets. However, most interview questions are focused on aptitude, and we need to make sure that we ask the right questions to uncover their attitude, such as their honesty, initiative,  determination, tenacity, and resilience, etc.

We need to ask them about challenges they have overcome, how they dealt with failure or how they dealt with situations which were beyond their current capability.

People can fake attitude in an interview, and we need to make sure that we probe these areas, and listen to the language used, to try and understand their true attitude. Do they answer in the past tense, do they have specific examples and can go into details. If they can't then they probably don't have the attitude we're looking for.

We also need to understand the attitude of our organization and look to hire people that are a good fit. We need to create a template for the attitude that we are looking for. To do this, we should look at our top performers and see what are the attitudes that they possess. What are the soft skills that make them successful

Finally, Hire staff with both the right attitude and right aptitude, but if faced with a matter of choice, the right attitude should be preferred every single time.                                -(Credit: Entrepreneur)