Comments on: Rewarding Behaviors, Not Merely “Victories”

By: Dennis Snow

Dennis Snow — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:08:41 +0000

Alan,

Your comments are right on. I worked for Disney for 20-years and I knew we could always teach the skills of operating the rides, checking guests into hotels, or driving a monorail. What we couldn’t teach was passion, approachability, and care. We had to hire for those talents and then train for the skills. We certainly didn’t get it right one hundred percent of the time, but we were much more successful than if we hired strictly for technical skills and then tried to “train in” the people skills.

Dennis

By: Alan Weiss

Alan Weiss — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:14:37 +0000

Respectfully, I don’t think there is any validation to your statement, quoting Emerson or not. For every quote, there is an equal and opposite impressive quote, so please don’t do that. You comment about great people has zero to do with interviewing people for jobs every day, which is my point, and I’m unaware the EQ has a scientifically validated or proved basis whatsoever.

By: robert john ed

robert john ed — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:52:28 +0000

Few thoughts: great people aren’t always understood well initially. Jobs came to mind because his personality has been lamented as overtly aggressive and uncompromising. “To be great is to be misunderstood” (–Emerson). And greatness knows many parameters and areas, those that possess it one area will not always correctly assess it in others; a great writer may not realize a great mathematician, a great adman may not realize a great manager.

EQ has become a buzz term, which is unfortunate. The science behind EQ is incredibly important; the development of those principals important to it are still in a stage of infancy, 13 years after initialization of the practice. Although I’m going to school in August and as a precursor they are asking me to take a EQ managerial test, a step forward.

Take care.

By: Alan Weiss

Alan Weiss — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:34:07 +0000

Your comments are well-taken and thoughtful. Personally, just my experience, I’ve seen people who interview well and don’t do a good job, but not the reverse: poor interviewees who do a great job. If you can’t sell yourself, you can’t sell me anything else. I think in an interview that Jobs would knock my socks off. But then again, I use behavioral interviewing.

And at the risk of invoking the cyberspace demons again, I find that emotional intelligence is way overdone, barely understood, and doesn’t add much at all that we didn’t already know and value.

By: robert john ed

robert john ed — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:38:10 +0000

Recently went through a similar situation in interviewing for my replacement. I agree with the sentiment that showing something “right here, right now” is valuable, but also recognize that the potential of a marketing candidate is not solely dependent on their ability to “sell” themselves. Many great marketers are not necessarily engrossing personalities (Jobs comes to mind) on a one to one level. Great people come from all walks of life with all different kinds of personalities; deciphering their talent and EQ is tough within smaller time frames such as interviews. Additionally, many people are incredible at selling themselves but aren’t ideal in backing up that sale with actual work.

Conversely, a marketer’s ability to work within, sell to and motivate those around them based on their knowledge and strategic ideology is an inescapable necessity. The company thrives on the buy in of all applicable sectors, and the marketer must sell the value of an initiative to allow inter-office synergy. EQ is just as important as their technical prowess in larger companies.

I completely agree that reinforcing the behaviors of a sales team (or any other person at a target touch point) through reward should be done even without an immediate success.