Imagine the following scenarios:
- Allison is practical but her job requires her to be creative.
- Allison is innovative but her job requires her to follow procedures.
- Allison must make logical decisions but she is intuitive and bases decisions on emotions and gut feelings.
- Allison is optimistic but her job requires her to be cautious .
- Allison's job requires her to be practical and grounded, but she is creative and absent - minded.
- Allison's job requires her to make intuitive qualitative decisions but she can only function with hard facts.
- Allison is conservative and sticks to tried and tested methods but her job requires her to be innovative.
- Allison is pessimistic and averse to taking risks but her job requires her to break into unchartered territory.
Let's look in a little bit more detail how a mismatch between personality and style of managing tasks can derail a person.
Shaheed is a financial controller for a manufacturing line in a large organisation. His key areas of responsibility are to identify cost - drivers, implement systems for tracking costs as well as monitor and implement financial controls. This requires him to be highly practical and grounded, conservative and procedure orientated, logical and fact orientated and risk averse. Over the last three consecutive quarters, this line has over - run its operating budget by 25% and also over - spent on its capital budget by 10%. At this rate it is no longer profitable and unless something drastic is done will have to be shut down. The manufacturing manager responsible for this line asks Shaheed to provide him with metrics to identify where things are going wrong. Shaheed can only provide vague, confused and unsatisfactory explanations. A decision is taken to do a psychometric assessment on Shaheed. The assessment reveals the following profile:
High Scores - Innovative
Extreme Scores - Intuitive, creative, optimistic
Expected Counterproductive Behaviors
Poor attention to detail. Emotional decision making. Poor focus on facts and figures. Absent - mindedness. Underestimation of tasks, problems and threats. Unrealistic appraisal of situations. Unsystematic approach to work.
This example clearly illustrates the financial cost associated when counterproductive behaviors derail people with respect to their key job functions.
